Timestamps
00:00 - Intro
01:00 - Topic overview
01:42 - Main topic starts (difference between jealousy and envy)
02:04 - Focusing on envy
03:13 - Focusing on jealousy
03:35 - Feeling jealous vs feeling envious
05:14 - How should we deal with jealousy?
05:52 - Two schools of thoughts on managing jealousy
07:05 - Mindfulness
07:47 - Journaling
09:08 - Practicing gratitude
11:13 - Knowing the root cause which makes us feel threatened and jealous?
12:42 - What are we longing for?
14:00 - Sharing my own experience and story
16:08 - Action step we could do
16:38 - Outro
Transcript
The transcript is auto generated. There may be errors in transcription.
Hi everyone. Welcome to How to Live, a podcast that explores ways to live a good life.
I'm your host, Sharad Lal.
This is episode 41.
Imagine scrolling through social media.
You see a post from a friend. He's just got promoted. He's beaming with pride, the loads of comments, people congratulating him, seeing how great he is.
As you read it, you feel a twinge of envy.
Sounds familiar. You're not alone. Jealousy is a very common and complex emotion. Everyone feels it. At some stage, it can show up in romantic relationships at work and in other areas of life.
It feels yucky and lingers on for ages, but the good news is by understanding it, we can learn to cope with it in healthy ways, and we can also find ways in which we can grow through this.
In today's episode, we'll dig into jealousy.
We'll talk about the difference between envy and jealousy, ways to manage this difficult emotion.
How do we grow through this?
And I'll also share a personal experience. But before getting to the episode, thank you very much for supporting the podcast. Please continue to send us comments and questions and even suggestions for future episodes.
We love to hear from you. You can hit us up on howtolive.life/contact
Do consider following us on Spotify, apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this. If you love the show, please do rate us. Thank you in advance. Now back to the episode.
But before we get to it, let's understand the difference between jealousy and envy
jealousy and envy are often used interchangeably, but they actually describe two distinct emotions. Envy is wanting something we don't have, but someone else has.
Jealousy is feeling threatened.
We might lose something that we have.
Let's talk about envy a little bit First. Envy has been written about by leaders for centuries nature called it a destructive force.
referred to it as a symptom of despair, and I found what Aristotle wrote about envy 2,500 years ago, very applicable to even today's world. He defined envy as an emotion that arises when people perceive others have something they lack.
He talked about two types of envy, malicious envy, where we think someone doesn't deserve the success or ative envy, where we feel someone deserves success and inspires us to emulate them.
Today's psychologists believe pretty much the same about envy
everyone agrees. At its core, it is social comparison. It gets triggered by a colleague's success, a friend's new car, but it can also get triggered by being envious of someone who can walk into a room and easily talk to anyone or someone who can play a sport naturally.
Well So at the core it's comparison about something we don't have, but long fall. Now jealousy is a little different. Jealousy involves losing something we have a partner seems attracted to someone else, Or when a friend gives attention, they once gave us to someone else, that's jealousy. Losing out on something we already had.
Envy is normally between two people, and jealousy involves at least three people.
So what do jealousy and envy feel like Both feel complex, but there's a slight difference. Jealousy makes us feel insecure. Envy makes us feel inferior. Jealousy leads to suspicion. Possessiveness envy leads to low self-esteem, emptiness.
Jealousy creates tightness in our chest and stomach envy. Tugs at the heart, envy burns, but
jealousy is a thicker feeling. While jealousy certainly is a lot more intense and negative, both are very difficult to deal with if they go unchecked. Both can lead to either aggression or depression and upset our mental health.
Now, why do we feel jealous or envy? Evolutionary psychologists have concluded that jealousy arose as a way to protect our relationships and ensure the survival of our genes. Envy Rose is a way to grow so that we can learn from each other however bad comparisons are.
But social comparison is how we as a species have grown to become who we are. So knowing the origins of these two emotions. Tell us that they are normal. They have a role to play in our life and development. sometimes when we get jealous, we might feel shameful or we've got something wrong in us.
I want you to remember that it is a normal emotion and even before we get down to dealing with it,
let's go with that mindset.
It's normal but difficult. Now for the rest of the episode, I'll talk about jealousy and envy in the same way, we don't want to get caught up in semantics. Let's just look at the essence of these two and life lessons we can get through them.
So how should we deal with jealousy? We have to remember it's an extremely strong emotion with the power to make the best of us do very foolish things. We know through throws of jealousy, there have been broken relationships, physical harm, cunning manipulation, and so many bad things.
So the first thing to do with jealousy is to work on reducing the intensity of this emotion, getting ourselves in control so we don't do anything that we regret later. Only when we've got this under control can we then access our intellect and get some learnings out of this.
As I researched jealousy, there were two schools of thoughts on managing this intense emotion. The mindfulness folks on one end feel that one should sit with the pain,
sit as long as it takes, and only by releasing the pain we will feel better.
The other school of thought are the guys who like looking at the positive part of things.
they feel that our attention naturally goes to things that don't work for us. So instead, if we look at things that are working for us, we can be grateful for them. And then jealousy does not come up. So who should we believe? What's the right approach? As you've guessed it, it's both.
If we only sit with our pain, then spending days and weeks processing our pain can be depressing. It affects our mental health. If we only focus on the positives on our life, we ignore the pain. The pain doesn't go away, it just gets covered up, and it might show up later on.
through a combination of pain and nourishment, we can work through these difficult emotions.
I call this mindset the model of pain and nourishment, sitting with the pain to release it.
So we reduce it and at the same time, adding nourishment to ourselves to feel good. Now let's talk about the pain part. How do we release it?
Mindfulness is of course, a great way. In simple words, mindfulness is acknowledging the feelings that are showing up. So saying that there is jealousy, there is anger. There is anxiety and then being curious about it. Anxiety is sitting in my stomach. It feels like dark smoke or any other way of describing it.
as we do this, we realize that the intensity keeps reducing. We also realize that the thoughts that we've had around jealousy, those ruminating thoughts, they go away and we are focused on the feeling and we reducing it. For more on this, you can refer to episode three, where we talk this in more detail.
Another way to reduce the intensity is journaling
. we can take a pen and a piece of paper and just write what's in our mind. The process of journaling is taking all the emotions in our head and putting it on a page. That way we feel lighter.
For more on journaling, you can refer to episode four. So sitting with the pain is being present with it and finding a way to take it out of our body and release it.
That's what makes us feel lighter and we breathe better. Doing this just once doesn't mean that we are done with jealousy. It gives us some relief, but jealousy can keep coming back.
It's a difficult emotion, so we might need to do it many, many, many times whenever it comes up to feel lighter. Now let's talk about the other side of the equation.
Nourishment. What's the good stuff we can give ourselves? There's of course serotonin, the feel good hormone, oxytocin, the hormone that gives us the warm, fuzzy feeling. Endorphins. The euphoric runner's high hormone. All these can be generated by a good lifestyle, good diet, sleep, exercise, and during difficult times, this nourishment
becomes even more important.
apart from having a good lifestyle, here are two specific activities we can do to build nourishment.
The first is practicing gratitude, changing the focus from what we don't have to what we have. So maybe it's every night just noting down what are the five things we are grateful for.
And as we do it over a period of time, the wiring of our brain starts looking for positives and our mental health becomes a lot better.
Practicing Gratitude is shown to release serotonin, the feelgood hormone as well. So that's one.
The second way is practicing self-compassion.
So a normal tendency is to judge ourselves and be difficult with ourselves when we are experiencing an emotion like jealousy. Instead of that, if we can give ourself a dose of self-compassion.
Understand that we are going through something difficult and have compassion for ourselves. Dr. Kristin Neff has written a whole book on self-compassion and we'll get into it in another episode, but here's one exercise you could try for self-compassion. It's very difficult for us to be compassionate towards ourself, but it's easier to be compassionate towards someone else.
We can imagine, there's a friend of ours who's going through something difficult like we are. So a friend of ours is getting left behind. Everyone's moving forward, and the compassion we would feel for someone we really care for who's feeling that, that's the compassion we can try to feel for ourselves.
So with a combination of pain and nourishment over weeks, months, years, , we can work towards reducing this heavy emotion.
And once it's controllable, we can then use our intellect to understand what is jealousy telling us? What can we learn about ourselves? So how can we learn from jealousy? I put them into four buckets. the first one is we can learn about our triggers, what triggers our jealousy.
And a good question to learn that is when someone appears to be more dash than me, I feel jealous. And Dash could be intelligent, accomplished, helpful, charming, good-looking, et cetera.
So what's that one area of trigger which makes us feel threatened and jealous? That's good information to have. Another way to look at triggers is who's doing the appreciating? Is it a wife appreciating someone else, husband, kid, parent, friend? Whose attention do we really crave when it's taken away? We get triggered with jealousy.
A third is what part of our world affects us most? Is it our business world with our business colleagues? Is it friends, is it family or is it some other world?
So these are ways in which we can figure our triggers.
second once this triggers us, what's the narrative in our mind? What story do we tell ourselves to make sense of it?
Do we lower our self worth and keep ruminating about not being good enough? Do we go into imposter syndrome and think we are a fraud, or do we belittle the accomplishment of the other person, say, Hey, it wasn't really well deserved, or it isn't really a big deal.
What's the story we tend to create and what does it do to us? The third area is to look at our patterns. So once we are jealous, What is our go-to pattern? Do we keep quiet, get angry in just fume internally? Do we go into a shell and cut off the world from us or do we go out lashing angry at everyone nasty, at various people shouting?
What do we do?
The fourth area is what are we longing for?
And that's where we can get our learning. Are we longing for more money? For a promotion for a happy marriage, this is not straightforward. It requires some amount of thinking because maybe in the other example that we shared where someone got promoted, it might seem to us that we are longing for a promotion, but when we think about it deeply, we realize, Hmm, even if we get promoted, I don't think it's gonna make us happy.
It's something else.
Or maybe it tells us that we do wanna move higher in our career, but we took a call a few months back to spend more time with our family and kids. Because of which now getting promoted gets difficult and it's weighing up these two longings. longing is not a very straightforward one.
We have to dig deeper and deeper to understand what really is the source of the longing. And I will share a personal example in longing later. So once we all this out, then we can move to action and the action could look like there's a new goal that's emerged for us. Maybe a personal goal, career goal, or maybe there's a change in focus There's a huge shift there. Or maybe it's just a conversation with our spouse where nothing can be done about it, but we've got a sense of our triggers and we can communicate it with our spouse.
Now let me share my experience with jealousy. As many of you who've been listening to the podcast know that some years back, I decided to shift from an achievement mindset to more purpose driven projects. meant
putting a pause button on my career growth and focusing on things that give fulfillment.
While I did that, when I would see other people achieve success and go higher, I would feel jealous. I used to be at the top of the game and now people are doing so much better than me, even though I've chosen a different path.
Even though I would rationalize that, hey, I've consciously chosen a different path, I cannot compete with this.
Is this a wrong expectation to have? That would not help. So I spent two years journaling, sitting with my feelings, getting some nourishment and dealing with it.
After doing this for these two years, One day a realization emerged. Just because I've shifted from this achievement path, that doesn't mean this achievement mindset deep within me, which I've followed for 40, 45 years has gone away.
It's still there, at the core of it, it's the need to shine. in the career part, shining meant doing well, getting promoted better. Net worth in the fulfillment part, there's a different metric. Shining could mean the kind of impact I'm having.
The depth of the impact, the changes I'm bringing about. The skills in the achievement mindset was business acumen. The skills here would be more on creativity, because now I'm writing and speaking, That really helps shift focus, and understand that, in this path as well, the fulfillment path, I can go ahead and shine.
That helped me launch the podcast, which is doing well. I've also gone out and started speaking in world class organizations on resilience, mental health, and there are many more plans in this space for me to shine as well as find fulfillment.
I hope that story was useful.
If this this resonated with you, here's an action step. All of us could do. At this point, what is one area of our life which is driving jealousy or envy? Let's look at the emotions that it brings about. Maybe we can try sitting with them in some way.
How can we nourish it? What's the way to reduce the intensity of the emotion?
And once we do that, what's the way in which we can learn something from it? Best of luck as you do this exercise. I hope you enjoyed this podcast
The next episode will drop two weeks from now.
Please do join us for that. Till next time, have a wonderful day ahead. Bye-bye.
The transcript is auto generated. There may be errors in transcription.
Hi everyone. Welcome to How to Live, a podcast that explores ways to live a good life.
I'm your host, Sharad Lal.
This is episode 41.
Imagine scrolling through social media.
You see a post from a friend. He's just got promoted. He's beaming with pride, the loads of comments, people congratulating him, seeing how great he is.
As you read it, you feel a twinge of envy.
Sounds familiar. You're not alone. Jealousy is a very common and complex emotion. Everyone feels it. At some stage, it can show up in romantic relationships at work and in other areas of life.
It feels yucky and lingers on for ages, but the good news is by understanding it, we can learn to cope with it in healthy ways, and we can also find ways in which we can grow through this.
In today's episode, we'll dig into jealousy.
We'll talk about the difference between envy and jealousy, ways to manage this difficult emotion.
How do we grow through this?
And I'll also share a personal experience. But before getting to the episode, thank you very much for supporting the podcast. Please continue to send us comments and questions and even suggestions for future episodes.
We love to hear from you. You can hit us up on howtolive.life/contact
Do consider following us on Spotify, apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this. If you love the show, please do rate us. Thank you in advance. Now back to the episode.
But before we get to it, let's understand the difference between jealousy and envy
jealousy and envy are often used interchangeably, but they actually describe two distinct emotions. Envy is wanting something we don't have, but someone else has.
Jealousy is feeling threatened.
We might lose something that we have.
Let's talk about envy a little bit First. Envy has been written about by leaders for centuries nature called it a destructive force.
referred to it as a symptom of despair, and I found what Aristotle wrote about envy 2,500 years ago, very applicable to even today's world. He defined envy as an emotion that arises when people perceive others have something they lack.
He talked about two types of envy, malicious envy, where we think someone doesn't deserve the success or ative envy, where we feel someone deserves success and inspires us to emulate them.
Today's psychologists believe pretty much the same about envy
everyone agrees. At its core, it is social comparison. It gets triggered by a colleague's success, a friend's new car, but it can also get triggered by being envious of someone who can walk into a room and easily talk to anyone or someone who can play a sport naturally.
Well So at the core it's comparison about something we don't have, but long fall. Now jealousy is a little different. Jealousy involves losing something we have a partner seems attracted to someone else, Or when a friend gives attention, they once gave us to someone else, that's jealousy. Losing out on something we already had.
Envy is normally between two people, and jealousy involves at least three people.
So what do jealousy and envy feel like Both feel complex, but there's a slight difference. Jealousy makes us feel insecure. Envy makes us feel inferior. Jealousy leads to suspicion. Possessiveness envy leads to low self-esteem, emptiness.
Jealousy creates tightness in our chest and stomach envy. Tugs at the heart, envy burns, but
jealousy is a thicker feeling. While jealousy certainly is a lot more intense and negative, both are very difficult to deal with if they go unchecked. Both can lead to either aggression or depression and upset our mental health.
Now, why do we feel jealous or envy? Evolutionary psychologists have concluded that jealousy arose as a way to protect our relationships and ensure the survival of our genes. Envy Rose is a way to grow so that we can learn from each other however bad comparisons are.
But social comparison is how we as a species have grown to become who we are. So knowing the origins of these two emotions. Tell us that they are normal. They have a role to play in our life and development. sometimes when we get jealous, we might feel shameful or we've got something wrong in us.
I want you to remember that it is a normal emotion and even before we get down to dealing with it,
let's go with that mindset.
It's normal but difficult. Now for the rest of the episode, I'll talk about jealousy and envy in the same way, we don't want to get caught up in semantics. Let's just look at the essence of these two and life lessons we can get through them.
So how should we deal with jealousy? We have to remember it's an extremely strong emotion with the power to make the best of us do very foolish things. We know through throws of jealousy, there have been broken relationships, physical harm, cunning manipulation, and so many bad things.
So the first thing to do with jealousy is to work on reducing the intensity of this emotion, getting ourselves in control so we don't do anything that we regret later. Only when we've got this under control can we then access our intellect and get some learnings out of this.
As I researched jealousy, there were two schools of thoughts on managing this intense emotion. The mindfulness folks on one end feel that one should sit with the pain,
sit as long as it takes, and only by releasing the pain we will feel better.
The other school of thought are the guys who like looking at the positive part of things.
they feel that our attention naturally goes to things that don't work for us. So instead, if we look at things that are working for us, we can be grateful for them. And then jealousy does not come up. So who should we believe? What's the right approach? As you've guessed it, it's both.
If we only sit with our pain, then spending days and weeks processing our pain can be depressing. It affects our mental health. If we only focus on the positives on our life, we ignore the pain. The pain doesn't go away, it just gets covered up, and it might show up later on.
through a combination of pain and nourishment, we can work through these difficult emotions.
I call this mindset the model of pain and nourishment, sitting with the pain to release it.
So we reduce it and at the same time, adding nourishment to ourselves to feel good. Now let's talk about the pain part. How do we release it?
Mindfulness is of course, a great way. In simple words, mindfulness is acknowledging the feelings that are showing up. So saying that there is jealousy, there is anger. There is anxiety and then being curious about it. Anxiety is sitting in my stomach. It feels like dark smoke or any other way of describing it.
as we do this, we realize that the intensity keeps reducing. We also realize that the thoughts that we've had around jealousy, those ruminating thoughts, they go away and we are focused on the feeling and we reducing it. For more on this, you can refer to episode three, where we talk this in more detail.
Another way to reduce the intensity is journaling
. we can take a pen and a piece of paper and just write what's in our mind. The process of journaling is taking all the emotions in our head and putting it on a page. That way we feel lighter.
For more on journaling, you can refer to episode four. So sitting with the pain is being present with it and finding a way to take it out of our body and release it.
That's what makes us feel lighter and we breathe better. Doing this just once doesn't mean that we are done with jealousy. It gives us some relief, but jealousy can keep coming back.
It's a difficult emotion, so we might need to do it many, many, many times whenever it comes up to feel lighter. Now let's talk about the other side of the equation.
Nourishment. What's the good stuff we can give ourselves? There's of course serotonin, the feel good hormone, oxytocin, the hormone that gives us the warm, fuzzy feeling. Endorphins. The euphoric runner's high hormone. All these can be generated by a good lifestyle, good diet, sleep, exercise, and during difficult times, this nourishment
becomes even more important.
apart from having a good lifestyle, here are two specific activities we can do to build nourishment.
The first is practicing gratitude, changing the focus from what we don't have to what we have. So maybe it's every night just noting down what are the five things we are grateful for.
And as we do it over a period of time, the wiring of our brain starts looking for positives and our mental health becomes a lot better.
Practicing Gratitude is shown to release serotonin, the feelgood hormone as well. So that's one.
The second way is practicing self-compassion.
So a normal tendency is to judge ourselves and be difficult with ourselves when we are experiencing an emotion like jealousy. Instead of that, if we can give ourself a dose of self-compassion.
Understand that we are going through something difficult and have compassion for ourselves. Dr. Kristin Neff has written a whole book on self-compassion and we'll get into it in another episode, but here's one exercise you could try for self-compassion. It's very difficult for us to be compassionate towards ourself, but it's easier to be compassionate towards someone else.
We can imagine, there's a friend of ours who's going through something difficult like we are. So a friend of ours is getting left behind. Everyone's moving forward, and the compassion we would feel for someone we really care for who's feeling that, that's the compassion we can try to feel for ourselves.
So with a combination of pain and nourishment over weeks, months, years, , we can work towards reducing this heavy emotion.
And once it's controllable, we can then use our intellect to understand what is jealousy telling us? What can we learn about ourselves? So how can we learn from jealousy? I put them into four buckets. the first one is we can learn about our triggers, what triggers our jealousy.
And a good question to learn that is when someone appears to be more dash than me, I feel jealous. And Dash could be intelligent, accomplished, helpful, charming, good-looking, et cetera.
So what's that one area of trigger which makes us feel threatened and jealous? That's good information to have. Another way to look at triggers is who's doing the appreciating? Is it a wife appreciating someone else, husband, kid, parent, friend? Whose attention do we really crave when it's taken away? We get triggered with jealousy.
A third is what part of our world affects us most? Is it our business world with our business colleagues? Is it friends, is it family or is it some other world?
So these are ways in which we can figure our triggers.
second once this triggers us, what's the narrative in our mind? What story do we tell ourselves to make sense of it?
Do we lower our self worth and keep ruminating about not being good enough? Do we go into imposter syndrome and think we are a fraud, or do we belittle the accomplishment of the other person, say, Hey, it wasn't really well deserved, or it isn't really a big deal.
What's the story we tend to create and what does it do to us? The third area is to look at our patterns. So once we are jealous, What is our go-to pattern? Do we keep quiet, get angry in just fume internally? Do we go into a shell and cut off the world from us or do we go out lashing angry at everyone nasty, at various people shouting?
What do we do?
The fourth area is what are we longing for?
And that's where we can get our learning. Are we longing for more money? For a promotion for a happy marriage, this is not straightforward. It requires some amount of thinking because maybe in the other example that we shared where someone got promoted, it might seem to us that we are longing for a promotion, but when we think about it deeply, we realize, Hmm, even if we get promoted, I don't think it's gonna make us happy.
It's something else.
Or maybe it tells us that we do wanna move higher in our career, but we took a call a few months back to spend more time with our family and kids. Because of which now getting promoted gets difficult and it's weighing up these two longings. longing is not a very straightforward one.
We have to dig deeper and deeper to understand what really is the source of the longing. And I will share a personal example in longing later. So once we all this out, then we can move to action and the action could look like there's a new goal that's emerged for us. Maybe a personal goal, career goal, or maybe there's a change in focus There's a huge shift there. Or maybe it's just a conversation with our spouse where nothing can be done about it, but we've got a sense of our triggers and we can communicate it with our spouse.
Now let me share my experience with jealousy. As many of you who've been listening to the podcast know that some years back, I decided to shift from an achievement mindset to more purpose driven projects. meant
putting a pause button on my career growth and focusing on things that give fulfillment.
While I did that, when I would see other people achieve success and go higher, I would feel jealous. I used to be at the top of the game and now people are doing so much better than me, even though I've chosen a different path.
Even though I would rationalize that, hey, I've consciously chosen a different path, I cannot compete with this.
Is this a wrong expectation to have? That would not help. So I spent two years journaling, sitting with my feelings, getting some nourishment and dealing with it.
After doing this for these two years, One day a realization emerged. Just because I've shifted from this achievement path, that doesn't mean this achievement mindset deep within me, which I've followed for 40, 45 years has gone away.
It's still there, at the core of it, it's the need to shine. in the career part, shining meant doing well, getting promoted better. Net worth in the fulfillment part, there's a different metric. Shining could mean the kind of impact I'm having.
The depth of the impact, the changes I'm bringing about. The skills in the achievement mindset was business acumen. The skills here would be more on creativity, because now I'm writing and speaking, That really helps shift focus, and understand that, in this path as well, the fulfillment path, I can go ahead and shine.
That helped me launch the podcast, which is doing well. I've also gone out and started speaking in world class organizations on resilience, mental health, and there are many more plans in this space for me to shine as well as find fulfillment.
I hope that story was useful.
If this this resonated with you, here's an action step. All of us could do. At this point, what is one area of our life which is driving jealousy or envy? Let's look at the emotions that it brings about. Maybe we can try sitting with them in some way.
How can we nourish it? What's the way to reduce the intensity of the emotion?
And once we do that, what's the way in which we can learn something from it? Best of luck as you do this exercise. I hope you enjoyed this podcast
The next episode will drop two weeks from now.
Please do join us for that. Till next time, have a wonderful day ahead. Bye-bye.