How to Identify Envy, Get Rid of It, and Why It is Important

I believe envy is something anyone experiences at some point in life. We often look at what have others achieved and wish we had the same. To my mind it has also become an issue here on Steemit, and some of us have fallen for this unpleasant feeling. I invite you to discover more about this emotion as I believe that life without envy is much more pleasant, productive and happier.

Envy is a distressing emotion that we feel when we desire something someone else has. Those desires could be both material possessions or non-material values as beauty, success, love, honour, etc. An envious person compares him- or herself with others and fills inner self with pity, jealousy, anger and other negative emotions. He or she focuses on others rather on own self.
Usually in psychology term envy is divided into two sub-terms – constructive envy and destructive envy. To my mind, there is no constructive envy, I would advise you to work on your feelings and personality in order to eliminate this feeling from your inner world. Another thing is when you want something, not because somebody else has it, but because this is the thing that you truly want in your life, then you find an example, a teacher, an adviser to follow, and from him or her learn how to achieve things you want. You see these people as your mentors, as a walking evidence that something you want is actually possible to achieve. That is, you do not envy those people, but you do respect them, admire maybe, they are of some inspiration for you and interaction with them brings the best out of you, not the negative emotions.

How to Identify Envy?

This step requires the ability to look inside yourself and conduct introspection. But of course there are some quite easy ways how to understand if you’re envious, but you certainly need to be honest with yourself:

• try to notice your thoughts and subjects and people you’re thinking about. If you have some obsessive thoughts about someone who has something, it’s a good indicator that you may be envious. These thoughts are also accompanied with negative emotions.
• Constant conversations about other people who have something you want, which also includes negative emotions and usually discontent with other people’s achievements.
• In some extreme cases it involves wishing evil on another person, in this situation a person constantly tries to find a way to ruin lives of other people and gets a feeling of delight if he or she succeeds, but usually this feeling does not last long.
• Then there is also observed a behaviour of general discontent with life, endless wondering why life is so unfair, etc.

Ok, maybe some of us have found some evidence that he or she is envious, but now you could wonder, why is it bad at all? Maybe it’s not? I wouldn’t say so.

• The problem is that envy is a highly destructive feeling, and it is destructive for the person who feels envy first of all. As they say,
  
• Besides, an envious person is so much obsessed with this feeling and is concerned with other people, that he or she literally forgets about hem- or herself. This person does not live his or her life in such a way provoking self-destruction of an individual self.
• The mood of such a person is constantly bad, nothing delights him or her, he or she feels squeezed like a lemon.
• This person loses precious time of his or her life, because he or she spends time and energy on thinking about other people and their achievements while he or she themselves could be working on achieving their goals.
• The whole situation causes a lot of stress and this could easily end up in having some health problems beginning with insomnia and depression to some serious illnesses.

All this should be enough to be a reason to to work on yourself and your inner world if you did identify some aspects of envy in yourself. So, what could be done? Here are some proposals! :)

• Do conduct introspection from time to time in order to know yourself better and to be aware if anything as envy ever absorbs your feelings.
• Figure out what you are envious for. This means you put the envy aside and try to realise why you were envious in the first place? Which desires provoked that feeling? What are your dreams? Try to listen to yourself and be ready to work hard to make achievements, as from now you stop being envious, but put time and energy in creating life you want.
• Learn not to compare yourself with other people. The only person you should compare yourself with is you the day before. When you look back you should see how much have you improved and achieved in comparison with what you had earlier. This is the only comparison that matters.
• When you decided you want something it’s healthy to find someone who has already achieved your goal in order to learn from them. Here some relative comparison is needed in order to analyse what is needed for you in order to achieve your goal, but here the differences you operate with are just the facts for you. You do not just compare, detect the differences and do everything the other person did, but you do analyse and figure out what is needed for you and move on to actions.
• You really need to be ready to work on yourself and be ready to make changes
• A positive and creative attitude is needed!
• And finally, think of what will you achieve by having this destructive feeling? It hardly will make any changes to the person you feel envious to. But this feeling will if not destroy and ruin your life, then definitely will lower the quality of your life.

I invite you to have a moment to appreciate everything you have right now, because I am sure each and everyone have a lot to be thankful for. And I also do believe that we should first give something, and only then there may be something that will be given to us. We all have exactly what we deserve, I truly believe it all depends on our decisions and actions, as we ourselves choose our path.