How to Overcome Envy: 5 Effective Tips

“Envy consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon, but Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed.”
Bertrand Russell

“Envy is the art of counting the other fellow's blessings instead of your own.”
Harold Coffin

Envy can be like a tiny devil on your shoulder that whisper words into your ear, gnashes on your soul and makes life into something that is often filled with suffering and much negativity.

Or the envy can just be something that irritates and distracts you from time to time.

In any case, it doesn’t have to be that way. If you want to, then you can at least minimize it in your life.

So that you can spend your time here in a lighter and happier headspace.

Focus on yourself when it comes to comparing.

Comparing what you have to what others have is a good way to make yourself miserable.

It feeds your ego when you buy a nicer car or get a better job than someone else. You feel great for a while.

But this mindset and the focus on comparing always winds up in you noticing someone that has more than you. That someone has an even better job or car than you.

And so you don’t feel so good anymore.

The thing is that there is always someone with better or more than you. So you can never “win”. You just feel good for a while and then you don’t.

A more useful way to compare is to just compare yourself to yourself.

Look at how you have grown and what you have achieved. Appreciate what you have done and what you have.

See how far you have come and what you are planning to do.

This will make you make you more positive and emotionally stable since you are no longer comparing and feeling envious of what the other guy have that you haven’t.

Be grateful for what you got.

Besides comparing yourself to yourself it can be helpful to add a regular gratitude exercise to your life to minimize the envy.

So take just two minutes out of your day to focus on being grateful for all the things you got. Make a list of them in your head or write them down in journal at the beginning or end of the day.

Develop an abundance mentality.

Envy often seems to come from a perceived scarcity in some area of your life.

Maybe you feel envious because someone else got the job you wanted. Or because someone else got the opportunity that you had hoped for.

Perhaps you are feeling envious because you are afraid of losing something and feel that if you do then you have hit rock bottom.

Focusing your mind on the scarcity can really screw with your thoughts, feelings and life. It can cause much stronger negative emotions than is really reasonable.

And it gets you really stuck in the envy, intensifying it, making it stronger and more long-lasting by feeding it with more thoughts and emotional energy.

To get out of this confining and destructive mentality you can choose to focus on the opportunities and the new chances. You can develop an abundance mentality.

There are always new business opportunities to find, new tests in school to take and new people to date/make friends with.

This way of thinking relieves much of the pressure you may feel if you have a scarcity mentality that makes you think that you only got this shot right now.

Or makes you feel like an utter failure just because you just stumbled and things didn’t work out this time.

So keep your focus steadily on the opportunities, on the new chances, on what you can learn from your failures as best you can instead of confining your mind and your life.

It is sometimes hard to do so from day to day but it is even harder in the long run to live a life where you don’t keep that positive focus.

Think about what’s in it for you.

I have found this to be helpful in many cases when I have negative thoughts or when I’m behaving in a less than useful way.

Basically, I ask myself: What’s in it for me? And each time I fall back into that negative headspace and behaviour I remind myself of this question and the answer.

This reinforces to me the pointlessness of what I’m thinking. And often I just think to myself: “Oh, I’m being stupid again. Time to focus on something useful/fun/positive instead”.

Now, there are upsides of being envious that can make it hard to let go of it.

When you are being envious you may not take chances or go into the unknown. You just judge people that have taken the chances from the safety of the sidelines.

Feeling envious can also make you feel like a victim. Such a mentality may sound very unattractive for anyone to want.

But in reality it brings you attention and validation because you can always get good feelings from other people as they are concerned about you and try to help you out.

And you don’t have to take the sometimes heavy responsibility. Taking responsibility for your own life can be hard work, you have to make difficult decisions and it is just heavy sometimes.

When you are ready to let go of that safety and those somewhat strange upsides it will be easier to change how you act and how you think about things.

Get a life.

Simple and perhaps the best tip in my opinion.

If you find yourself sitting around too much and not having enough to do then it’s very easy to feel stuck and to get stuck in thought loops and go into a downward spiral.

Simply by filling your life with more fun activities and people and the things you want out of life you won’t have time or a reason to be envious. Other benefits of getting a life are that you become a lot more relaxed and less prone to overreacting about the little things.

So spend less time analyzing life and more time living and exploring it in whatever way you’d like.

Image by Florencia Cárcamo (license).