Jealously-The Ugly Emotion

 

In all honesty, this post is inspired from my immense obsession of Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
This idea clicked me when I was watching this episode(for the 99th time :))

Jealously-The Ugly Emotion

Lets be real, we've all felt this sense of envy towards another person at some point of our lives. Be it them excelling at something or celebrating an event, there's always that small emotion in your heart that keeps you from 100% being happy for them.
Now that's not always a bad thing, except when it gets frequent, it can be closely linked to your FOMO. 

I'll get to the part on how to deal with this, but first let's answer the question,

Why do we feel it?

You fear the fact that someone might be getting better than you and to curb that you fill your minds with thoughts that 'make you feel better about yourself'.

We as humans are extremely insecure about a lot of things. Be it social image or self- we constantly try to 'show' that we're some kind of person who is likeable to everyone. 

Jealousy is attributed to an adaptive response to a threat.

One could argue that, our brains are hardwired to feel jealous, as this encourages us to take action to save the situation. Therefore, it isn’t something that we can avoid or control.

How do we get ourselves through it?

In most cases, what we resort to is 'self-satisfying'. Jealously can get triggered when you believe you are short-changed in someway and will go to great lengths to overcome your inadequacies. You end up doing this by cutting those that are better off down to size, put them down in some way, putting them in their place, or work hard to bring yourself up so you will no longer feel inferior. We need to feel some perceived level of success or at least to measure up. Of course, it is much easier to bring the target of your envy down than to elevate yourself. 

But the above is not a healthy way of coping with this feeling.

A wave of jealousy once in a while is pretty common for me-but only recently I've learnt to turn that into an optimistic feeling.

An example:

Peer to peer competition 

Perhaps all of us at some point have envied our friends, classmates or acquaintances for excelling at something-in this case, school grades.

The other person might be getting a 97 whereas you'd be stuck on a 79.

Being jealous of their excellence is a normal thing-rather a healthy one.

"How did they get better marks. I put in more efforts"

Unless you have some sort of competition in life, you're not going to become a better person.

The best way to combat the 'green-eyed monster' emotion-jealousy- is to accept, work and strive to be better. 

Use that feeling and mould it into your favour in a healthy way by which you are not harming others.

To learn how to do that read my previously written post: here

That was it for today's post! Hope y'all enjoyed reading it! Let me know in the comments a few of your suggestions for next week's post and don't forget to share and follow for more <3

Signing off,

Kuhu :)