I was always the type of person that would sit and stew in silent jealousy after anything good happened for anyone else. I kept quiet about it because I never wanted to make anyone feel bad, I knew it was my own issue that I needed to work through, and though I still get pants of jealousy every now and again, I’ve largely learnt how to really exchange that jealousy for joy.
Be Happy For It
The first thing I did was start changing my attitude. The first thing to happen after I’d started working on my jealousy was my best friend at the time being taken to New York by her mum. An easy thing to be jealous about! But I talked myself through it mentally, why would I be jealous of my best friend rather than overjoyed for her? I had to force it a bit, but everytime we spoke about it and I told her how excited I was for her, how she’d have such a great time, it became more and more true. By the time she actually went I wasn’t jealous, I was just happy she was getting to go on an amazing trip.
Don’t get jealous, get even
Sometimes it’s not a holiday to New York though, sometimes it’s someone’s shoes, or hair, or boyfriend, and guess what? They’re all things you can have too! Okay, you can’t have their exact shoes, hair, or…boyfriend? But they’re all things you can have your own version of and be completely happy. If you’re jealous of what someone else has, chances are you want it too, but they have it and you don’t because they’ve already put in the work to get it. It might take you a while, but if you put the work into your life you can gain your own versions of the things you want, and they’ll be better than anyone else’s because they’ll be yours.
Think about it
If you’re jealous of someone online or someone you don’t know well, really put some thought into why you’re jealous. Is it just that they have something you don’t have? I’d get so jealous of girls on Instagram, yet when I thought about their lives and what they deal with, I’d hate for that to be my life! Sometimes it’s easy to be jealous just of someone else being happy, and once I put some thought into why I was jealous of them, it was easy to transform the jealousy feelings into either something neutral and in damaging, or into feeling happy that that person has the life they want.
Changing your perspective and the way you accept feelings is difficult, but doing so has made me so much happier. Life is easier when you’re not spending it feeling jealous and negative. Someone else will always have something we want, we will always have something someone else wants, but if we appreciate the things we have and work for what we want rather than just getting mad that someone else has it, we can all be a lot happier, I think.
-Dana
Carry on Beautiful! 