10 Eye-Opening Reminders That Can Help You Overcome Jealousy

1. Nobody is free from suffering. No one has lived without experiencing loss. Everyone is battling against an endless swarm of fears and wondering if anything can ever be sufficient enough to overcome them. The people you’re jealous of had to go through tough situations, regardless of how flawless they might appear or how epic their life stories might sound.

2. You really don’t know the whole story of someone’s success. You can’t hate on certain people just because their highlight reel looks more breathtaking or more glorious than yours. You haven’t seen the way they cried alone or bullied themselves for not being good enough because they chose not to broadcast it, so you can’t assume that they’ve always had it easy.

3. People have a lot of things to share about the human condition. Being unwilling to learn from them out of envy, however, is a sign that you’re not open to considering new things that might help you get what you want out of life.

4. Intense jealousy is a symptom of not accepting who you are as an individual. If you go about your days feeling jealous most of the time, you feel like can’t be worth anything unless you become like someone else who has been validated as a success.

5. You’re assuming that attaining a desirable and highly coveted outcome is all that it takes to be fulfilled, but you cannot judge how people really feel when they achieve certain goals – for all you know, they could be just as depressed and troubled as they were before.

6. People who use their feelings of jealousy to motivate themselves to do better end up miserable all the same because they haven’t fully accepted themselves. Anything you pursue that’s rooted in feelings of deep insecurity in comparison to others will not give you the fulfillment that you’re seeking. It’ll only reveal how empty you were in the first place.

7. You might not even want the end results that others have. Deep down, what you really want is to actualize your potential and build a life that doesn’t feel so constricting or limiting. Seeing other people accomplish that triggers you because you’re reminded of how much you’ve deprived yourself out of paralyzing fear, self-doubt, and guilt.

8. Being an expert at suppressing feelings of jealousy doesn’t mean you’ve overcome it. It simply means you’re uncomfortable with your own tendencies to overanalyze other people’s successes in contrast to your own failures, and as a result, you don’t have the courage to look at them squarely or admit you have these problems.

9. Jealousy is a tell-tale sign that you subconsciously feel like you deserve awards, accomplishments, praise, others’ approval, and other forms of external validation. It causes you to believe that other people are undeserving of all these things if they look like they can attain it faster than you, since you wrongly judge them for “getting what they want easily and quickly” as a defense mechanism to shield yourself from the painful realization that you aren’t spending your time wisely or doing enough to help yourself do more than just survive.

10. Even though jealousy is a toxic emotion, ignoring it only worsens how you feel – you need to acknowledge that it exists within you and find out exactly what feeds it, so you can better equip yourself to overcome it and finally become more aware of all the capabilities you never knew you had.