Jay Shetty had an episode on his podcast that I really loved this week. The episode was about the 4 types of jealousy, and it's incredibly thought provoking.
It was interesting to hear the research about the common things that women and men envy. Women admitted they envied physical attractiveness, popularity, social ease, family relationships, and clothing the most. While men admitted they envied other people's romantic success, greater access to financial resources, ownership of status items, greater academic success, and superior athletic talent the most. Jay goes over several types of jealousy and how to manage different situations, but I'm highlighting one below that I think may resonate the most.
First type of jealousy: you're going through a challenge, and other people are not going through that challenge. I think most of us have felt this at one point or another. To improve this mindset, Jay argues, zoom out to look at the big picture and not the specific thing. There are so many moments in our life where ours will be easier than others, and when you zoom out it changes your perspective. Loved this analogy he gave: If you walk in halfway through a movie, you may think a character is having the most incredible time. But if you look at what happened before, and what happened after, you get a full perspective of someone's journey. And this quote he shared by Robin Roberts really stuck with me: If we all threw our problems in a huge pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours right back.
Lastly, one of his team members said something incredibly thought provoking. We're only jealous of people we know less about and we're not jealous of people we know more about. And then they shared this sobering statistic: 57% of people said that after going on social media, they felt that someone they follow has a better life than they do. But just a reminder, it's easy to think that if you only see 5% of someone's life.
