Envy. It’s an emotion that kills inner peace, boosts ego, and drives people to commit terrible crimes.

If you’re reading this article, you’re aware of your jealousy, and want to stop being envious of others. It isn’t hard to do, and all it requires is simple changes in your beliefs and lifestyle.

While everyone else will keep seeking external validation and envy those around them, you’ll overcome this state, and learn to be happy with yourself.

In this article, we’ll discuss main reasons for envy, 8 ways to stop being envious, and practical exercises to develop your mind. Let’s begin.

Reasons for Your Envy of Others

First and foremost, why do people envy others? What causes them to indulge in self-comparison, overthink social situations, and try to tear others down?

There are several possible reasons for this, with the biggest one being low self-esteem. If you see yourself as inferior to others, you inevitably feel threatened by other people’s successes, as it further worsens your perception of self.

Low self-esteem causes other problems, like oversensitivity to criticism, emotional impulsiveness, and fear of failure. Luckily, it can be fixed by using some simple strategies we’ll discuss later in the article.

Another common reason for envy is materialistic pursuits. Jealous people often measure their self-worth by material factors, which cannot be fully controlled.

Beauty, physical attributes (except physique), luxury – all of these can be taken away in a blink of an eye, or surpassed by someone you may not even know about. Therefore, basing one’s self-worth around materialism is often detrimental to happiness and self-esteem.

When all your happiness and contentment can be destroyed in an instant, is it any wonder you feel insecure and jealous whenever somebody has more of what you value?

Lastly, jealousy appears when you aren’t satisfied with your life. You aren’t content with how you live, what you do, and escape into other people’s lives to feel better.

Whether that’s through social media, TV shows, or gossip blogs, you compare your life to the lives of celebrities and oligarchs, blaming yourself for not being like them.

8 Ways to Stop Being Envious of Others

Now that you know the main reasons for envy, we can focus on solutions to your problem. Most of them come down to shifting your focus to your own life, and engaging in productive activities.

The first step is to recognize that envy does no good for you.

1: Accept Envy as Unproductive

Envy doesn’t bring anything good into your life. It is a negative, unproductive emotion that doesn’t contribute to your existence. The only thing it does is distract you from what’s truly important – your happiness and progress.

Both of them require your attention, effort, and willingness to improve. Envy takes that away by making you despise other people instead of bringing yourself up.

If you still feel the need to envy, think about this: will despising other people for possessing what you want actually bring you these things? Or will it deplete your energy, time, and attention you could’ve spent on actually acquiring them?

Obviously, the answer is the latter. Envy only makes your life worse, and therefore, you should aim to feel it as little as possible.

This doesn’t mean you should be guilty and beat yourself up for feeling envy. It simply means that you’ll stop torturing yourself and change your life for the better.

Once you’ve done some critical thinking and recognized the unproductive nature of envy, we can move on to the next step: building up your self-esteem.

Recommended article: How to Improve Your Character: 10 Ways to Become Virtuous

2: Shift Your Perspective on Self-Worth to Stop Being Envious of Others

As I said before, the underlying cause of envy in most cases is low self-esteem. You believe that your self-worth is determined by how good you are compared to others.

Thus, whenever someone is better than you in terms of possessions or achievements, you feel hurt, attacked, as they are more “worthy” than you are. You are inferior to them in musculature/dating/finances, and therefore, you feel inferior as a person.

The truth is: objectively, no human is worse or better than the other. Just because someone is richer than you doesn’t mean you as a person are worse than them.

Similarly, if you’re superior to other people at a certain skill, it doesn’t mean that you as an individual are superior. It shows that you have more expertise in the field than others do.

Adopt this mindset and remind yourself of it whenever you feel envy. Replace “he has more X than me, I feel attacked” by “he’s spent more time on building this success than me, and I’m no worse or better than this person.”

This perspective will allow you to be more stoic, develop self-respect, and stop being envious of others. What will help you beat jealousy entirely is learning to be happy from within.

Related article: How to Be More Stoic: 10 Ways to Become Unbeatable

3: Learn to Be Happy From Within

Many envious people are uncomfortable with themselves. They cannot internalize praise and compliments, and thus, they feel the constant need to receive external validation.

When they don’t get that validation, and see someone else acquire it, they feel attacked, robbed, and deprived from their essential psychological need.

Listen. We cannot control the outside world and what other people think of us. Basing your happiness around being liked by others is unreliable and guaranteed to result in disappointment.

To stop being envious, you should learn to like yourself. Spend more time in solitude, engaging in meaningful work and building good habits. Start reading books, meditating, lifting weights, painting, or doing whatever else you enjoy.

Internalize validation and praise yourself for being good at your hobbies. If you don’t have any hobbies, you can look at my list of productive activities to spend free time on.

It’s going to be uncomfortable at first. But the more you’ll spend time on the right things, the more you’ll learn to respect yourself. Thanks to this, you’ll no longer feel envy whenever someone else’s good at something, since you’re competent at other things.

Recommended article: 30 Masculine Hobbies to Start

4: Focus on Your Own Pursuits to Stop Being Envious of Others

Having hobbies is good, but even then you can feel jealous about other people’s lives. After all, they can have better careers than you, earn more money than you, look better than you.

No matter how hard you try to improve yourself, you’re still going to be inferior to some. It’s important to not only improve the general aspects of yourself, but find goals you can shift all your attention towards.

Instead of scrolling on social media and comparing yourself to your peers, you can work on your goals, make progress, and feel amazing about it.

It’s not hard to feel bad about yourself when you have no ambition, aspirations, or plans for the future. To solve the problem, give yourself some plans.

Think of what work you want to do, and what impact you want to make on the world. Maybe you can be a great businessman, run a company, and sell innovative products. Or, maybe you want to be a content creator, and share useful insights with others.

Whatever your dream work is, focus your thoughts on this pursuit. Spend 2-3 hours a day working on your favorite craft, and love the process of producing value. Practice, make mistakes, fix them, and learn useful skills along the way.

After finding your purpose in life, you’ll no longer feel the urge to compare. You’ll feel happy from your own efforts, not from somebody else’s approval.

Speaking of approval: to stop being envious of others, it’s essential that you first cease comparing yourself to other people.

Related article: Deep Work: How to Achieve Exceptional Results (4 Rules)

5: Stop Comparing Yourself to Others

Speaking about comparison, you should eliminate it. Most of the time it does nothing but destroy your mental health.

Why bother doom scrolling on Instagram, comparing yourself to rich alpha males, and feeling shit about yourself, when you can do other things instead?

Same goes with watching movies, TV shows, and news: on a subconscious level, you want to consume them, because you want to see others live the life you want.

You waste essential time, focus, and energy on feeling inferior instead of bringing yourself up. For this reason, you should stop constantly comparing yourself to others.

Take a break from social media, news, and TV shows. replace them with something more productive, like listening to ambient music and sounds of nature. Focus on your personal goals and do your best to achieve them.

Minimizing information input, quitting addictions, and maximizing productivity will rewire your brain, helping it find contentment in your thoughts and actions rather than material possessions.

No man that doesn’t follow his soul is happy. It’s also necessary that you regularly reflect on your internal thought process to stop being envious of others.

6: Reflect on Your Internal Monologue to Stop Being Envious of Others

Aside from picking up new hobbies, working on goals, and taking a break from social media, another thing you can do to stop being envious is observe your internal dialogue.

What do you usually think about during the day? What thoughts pop up in your head whenever you do well, or when somebody else does? Do you feel encouragement, motivation, and drive, or envy, anger, and resentment?

In both cases, the situation itself is the same: someone is successful in the sphere you want to be successful in. Our emotions concerning this situation aren’t caused by the situation itself, but by our perceptions of it.

You can stop feeling jealous by noticing envious thoughts, observing them calmly, and replacing your judgment with a more objective, or even positive perspective.

For example, whenever you feel envious about some guy having more mass than you, observe your thoughts for a moment. Are they caused by the situation, or by your perception of that person’s success?

After that, change your perception to a more positive one. Replace envy and resentment with motivation and self-encouragement. Use that man’s superior muscle mass as motivation to grind in the gym and reach his level rather than indulge in self-loathing.

This won’t be easy at first, and it will require practice and patience. Slowly but surely, though, you’ll learn to spot and convert envy into motivation to grow.

Related article: How to Erase Negative Thoughts For Good

7: Practice Gratitude for What You Have

We often forget to be grateful for what we have. We chase cars, mansions, fame, luxury, and sex, while taking simple, yet beautiful things for granted.

People can live without luxury, fame, expensive cars, and still feel happy. Meanwhile, there are many celebrities who live extravagant lifestyles, yet are absolutely miserable.

Why is that the case? The main components of happiness aren’t luxury, materialism, and indulgence. It consists of gratitude, presence, purpose, and self-respect. Without these 4 things, you won’t feel happy, no matter how much you’ll physically have in contrast to others.

So, how do you cultivate them? Build self-respect using the strategies above, enjoy every moment of your life, work towards a goal greater than you, and be grateful for everything you have.

Instead of envying people for being “better” than you, dedicate your thoughts to gratitude. Every morning, write about how grateful you are for being alive, having water to drink, food to eat, and a home to live in.

If you do what you love and have your basic necessities fulfilled, what’s the point in envying other people’s lives? You already possess what you need, and if you don’t, you can get it by making simple lifestyle changes.

Finally, the last way to stop feeling envious of others completely is to willingly help other people.

8: Seek to Help Other People

Envy is a self-centered emotion. Envious people are driven by the desire to feel superior and reassure that they indeed are better than others.

We as humans aren’t meant to constantly compare and compete. We are on this planet to coexist, cooperate, and help each other with difficult problems. Envy destroys cooperation, and shifts a person’s focus to satisfying selfish interests rather than improving his community.

Aside from all the strategies we’ve discussed above, another great way to stop feeling envious is helping other people. Shift the focus from satisfying your desire of superiority to making other people’s lives better.

Start volunteering in a local club, help strangers carry heavy stuff, clean up a dirty area in your neighborhood, and reach out to friends who you know need support.

There are dozens of ways you can help others selflessly, and I can even write a separate article about them. For now, though, focus on the basics. Take responsibility, start thinking less of yourself, and more about others.

Research shows that it’s more pleasant to give gifts rather than receive them. Same goes here: doing kind things for others is better than receiving them yourself.

Of course, you should be your own priority in life, and you shouldn’t sacrifice your needs for someone else. Despite that, you should help other people from time to time. Practicing selflessness will eliminate envy, make you happier, and help you find meaning in life.

Recommended article: How to Find a Masculine Purpose in Life

Stop Being Envious of Others

Many people suffer from constant envy. They spend hours comparing themselves, overthinking their flaws, and sometimes, they actively seek to tear others down.

Envy often arises due to incorrect perception of self-worth, lack of achievements, and overthinking. To deal with this emotion, try doing these things:

• Accept envy as unproductive;
• Shift your perspective on self-worth;
• Generate happiness from within;
• Focus on your own pursuits;
• Stop comparing yourself with others;
• Reflect on your internal dialogue;
• Express gratitude for simple things;
• Seek to help other people.

Your mind will try to resist your attempts to change. It’ll seek to keep being jealous, miserable, because it’s used to these emotions. Resist the urge to harm yourself, and remind yourself of the benefits to come:

After 3-4 weeks of implementing these steps, you’ll rewire your mind, achieve peace, and stop sabotaging being envious of others. All it takes is a few simple habits and mindset changes.

Work, learn, improve, and grow. Good luck, and see you soon, brother.

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