How to Deal With Envy Without Hating Yourself for Feeling It

You were scrolling, and there she was. The new kitchen. The trip to Portugal. The husband who brings her flowers for no reason. You typed “congratulations!” and something in your stomach went sour.

Then the second feeling came, worse than the first. What kind of person is jealous of her own friend? She’s had a hard year. You should be happy for her.

So you put the phone down, picked it up again, and looked at the photos one more time.

If that’s where you are tonight, here’s the first thing we’d say. Envy doesn’t make you a bad person. It’s one of the most ordinary feelings there is. The trouble isn’t the envy. It’s what we do so we don’t have to feel it: the scrolling, the comparing, the little comment at lunch, the quiet decision that she’s not that great anyway.

Envy vs jealousy: what’s the difference?

People use the two words for the same thing, but they’re a little different.

Jealousy is about losing something you have. Your partner’s attention. Your place with a friend. It’s fear with a third person in it. (We wrote about that in how to stop feeling jealous.)

Envy is about wanting something someone else has. Her ease. Her money. Her body. Her mother, who calls every Sunday. Envy says: she got it, and I didn’t.

In the body they can feel alike. But envy often has a particular taste. Something sour. A slow tightening rather than a hot flash. A feeling of being smaller, standing next to someone who seems bigger.

Why do I feel envious, even of people I love?

Envy is rarely about the other person. It’s about a place in you that already felt like it got less.

Our book has a sentence that explains most of it: “Nobody puts feelings into you. Other people switch on a feeling that is already in you.” Her photos from Portugal didn’t create the ache. It switched on something that was already there. Maybe an old sense that you have to earn good things. Or that other people are allowed to have it easy and you’re not.

Rytis knows this from the inside. For many years he believed that what he was worth depended on money, his body, his looks, his status at work. He says he still carries that belief, only less than before. When your worth lives outside you, every person who has more of it becomes a threat.

We put it this way in the book: “When you go outside looking for your worth, you are trading a thousand euros for seven cents. You are the thousand euros, and you keep selling yourself for seven cents.”

What envy may be pointing to

Envy often comes with a small judgment: she’s too loud at every dinner, she charges far too much for what she does, she seems to spend half her life resting, and she’s a bit full of herself.

Our book offers a quiet question for exactly this moment: “where do I treat myself like that? Where don’t I allow myself to be like that?”

Try it on the woman you envy. Where don’t I allow myself to rest? To be seen? To ask for more money? To be loved without earning it?

Sometimes the answer is very simple, and a little painful. What you envy in her is something you’ve been forbidding yourself. That doesn’t mean you must go and get it tomorrow. It just means the envy isn’t only poison. There’s a want in it, and the want is yours.

How to deal with envy when it hits

The moment envy hits, the mind wants to compare. List what she has. List what you don’t. That list never ends, because there’s always another woman with another holiday to post.

So the way through is the opposite of the list. Put the phone in another room. Lie down for five minutes, and go to the place in your body where the sour feeling sits.

Practice5 min

A five-minute Feeling Session

Lie down. Floor or bed. Twenty minutes, or five.
Cover your eyes. Let the outside go dark.
Put your arms by your sides, palms down. Nothing to grab.
Close your mouth and leave the breath alone.
Now stop moving. Completely.
Ask one question: where is it heaviest in my body right now? Not yesterday. Right now.
Put all of your attention there, and keep it there.
Don’t follow the thoughts. Let them pass like cars on a street. The moment you notice you’re in a story, come back.
Don’t run. When it gets stronger, stay one more minute if you can.

The thoughts will be about her. Her photos, her life, the thing she said. Let them pass, and come back to the body. The envy doesn’t need her to be in the room. It’s in yours.

What you might notice: the sourness may get stronger first. Under it there might be sadness, or longing, or an old tiredness from trying so hard. Or not much at all, the first time. That’s fine.

You’ve probably tried talking yourself out of envy, or counting your blessings until the list ran out. Our book goes the other way, back into the body, and shows what to do when the sour feeling comes back with the next photo.

When the next photo comes

Mute, don’t hate. If one account always sets it off, mute it for a week. Not as punishment. Just to give the feeling some room.
Name the want. Under the envy, what do you actually wish you had? Write one line. Don’t judge it.
Ask the quiet question once: where don’t I allow myself to be like her? Then feel your body while you answer.
Do one small thing from the want. Rest for twenty minutes, or buy yourself the flowers, not to keep up with her but because the want is yours.
Let both be true. Send her the kind message if you want to. You can feel envious and still be a good friend.

If the envy comes with shame, the hot face and the wish to hide, read shame stored in the body. If you often feel you have to earn your place, we wrote about why do I feel like a burden. And if someone’s success left you feeling hurt as well as envious, see how to stop feeling hurt. Jealousy, guilt and the other feelings that sit close to envy each have a page in emotions, and the whole method lives in the Feeling Session.

There’s a picture in our book about a birch tree. Nobody walks up to it and asks why it isn’t an apple tree. Tonight you don’t have to grow anyone else’s fruit. You can just stand where you are, and feel the roots.