Why am i envious of other people

Click to opt-out of Google Analytics tracking. Though I run this site, it is not mine. It's ours. It's not about me. It's about us. Your stories and your wisdom are just as meaningful as mine. Click here to read more. Practice Gratitude One of the reasons we feel envy is that we often take the good things in our own lives for granted.

Every night before I go to sleep I ask myself the following questions: What do I take for granted in my life? Who are the important people or animals in my life? Who is in my corner? What freedoms do I enjoy? What advantages have I been given in life? Envy image via Shutterstock See more Posts. About Sonia Devine Sonia Devine is a qualified professional hypnotherapist who assists people to make positive changes in their lives.

Web More Posts. See a typo or inaccuracy? Please contact us so we can fix it! Did you enjoy this post? Please share the wisdom :. I have thought about why these memories still haunt me from time to time — why they have not been forgotten along with most other day-to-day interactions I have had on social media — and I think it is because, in my 32 years, those are the most powerful and painful moments of envy I have experienced.

I had not even entered that journalism competition, and I have never once been clubbing and enjoyed it, but as I read that tweet and as I scrolled through those photographs, I so desperately wanted what those people had that it left me as winded as if I had been punched in the stomach.

We live in the age of envy. Career envy, kitchen envy, children envy, food envy, upper arm envy, holiday envy. And it is not particularly pleasant. Our use of platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, she says, amplifies this deeply disturbing psychological discord.

Andrew has observed among her patients that knowing they are looking at an edited version of reality, the awareness that nofilter is a deceitful hashtag, is no defence against the emotional force of envy. Participants received texts five times a day for two weeks, asking about their passive Facebook use since the previous message, and how they were feeling in that moment. No age group or social class is immune from envy, according to Andrew.

In her consulting room she sees young women, self-conscious about how they look, who begin to follow certain accounts on Instagram to find hair inspiration or makeup techniques, and end up envying the women they follow and feeling even worse about themselves. But she also sees the same pattern among older businessmen and women who start out looking for strategies and tips on Twitter, and then struggle to accept what they find, which is that some people seem to be more successful than they are.

We gaze at our slimming, filtered OutfitOfTheDay, and we want that body — not the one that feels tired and achy on the morning commute. Jealousy is sparked by not feeling okay about some aspect of your self or your situation. Jealousy is a deeply ingrained emotion in humans. We want what others have because we need resources to survive and want comforts to thrive.

If we look back through history, jealousy has always been part of us. Hera, the wife of Zeus, jealously turned his mistress Lo into a heifer in Greek mythology. Themes and teachings in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism all speak to jealousy as a damaging emotion. It seems as long as humans have existed, so has jealousy. Growth mindset is a big buzz topic these days and for a good reason. How can I do that too? What would I need to do or learn to gain the same success?

Bob and I will see writers who create an instant best-seller, and although we may feel jealous for a moment, we shift it into a lesson. Kind of depressing, really. A series of psychological studies have shown that envy can actually be divided into two different emotions in humans, and lumping them all together might not be entirely accurate.

A Dutch researcher, inspired by the fact that there are actually different words for envy in the language, sought to define what the differences might be, and found two different strands: malicious envy and benign envy. His study asked huge cohorts of people to recall an instance in which they felt envy, to quantify their emotions surrounding it and the person they were envying, including their sensations of resentment.

Participants were then given a "schadenfreude test": they were asked to imagine that the subject of their envy had suffered a setback.

Benign envy, on the other hand, is more general : people who felt this generally thought that the person they envied deserved the achievement, didn't feel ill will towards them, and targeted their envy more generally towards the envied object itself, not the person who got it.

It's an interesting distinction that's apparently recognized in Brazilian, Russian, and Dutch, among other languages. It turns out that we're not imagining just how terrible envy feels; it can, indeed, make us physically ill or pained.

And we know this because of a fascinating study revealed in , in which scientists did brain scans of subjects as they were asked to imagine themselves in social situations in which they were confronted with people who were enviable wealthy or powerful friends, for instance. If you think of envy as an emotion that had a strong role in your teenage years and young adulthood, you're probably not wrong.

A study of people aged 18 to 80 by UC San Diego researchers published in found that the young are more likely to feel envy towards other people than the middle-aged or elderly, and are much more likely to envy their peers than those outside their age group. Roughly 80 percent of the interviewed group aged under 30 reported at least one strong feeling of envy in the past 12 months, but it declined to about 69 percent in the over crowd.

Time clearly doesn't cure envy, but it seems to blunt it a bit or your willingness to admit to the emotion, at least.