Understanding Envy and Emotions in the Digital Age: How to Reconnect with Yourself

Envy is one of humanity’s oldest emotions, yet today it shows up in new ways. The constant connection offered by smartphones and social media makes it easy to compare ourselves to others on a daily basis. This exposure can stir envy, lower self-esteem, and make it harder to connect with our true emotions.

At the same time, many people find it difficult to understand or even name what they feel, especially if they grew up in families that didn’t discuss emotions openly.

Exploring both envy and emotional awareness can help you understand yourself better and improve how you respond to others. When you learn how to notice and manage what you feel, you begin to replace envy and self-criticism with self-compassion and emotional balance.

Emotional Awareness Therapy and the Role of Envy

Envy is a universal emotion. It is defined as a resentful longing for what someone else has. Yet its expression has changed dramatically due to technology.

With the rise of the Internet, we are constantly connected to others’ lives. Social media gives us instant access to images and stories designed to impress. In a few minutes of scrolling, we can experience beauty envy, career envy, or lifestyle envy. The highlight reels people share often hide the struggles behind the scenes, leaving us feeling inadequate by comparison.

Apps like Instagram and Snapchat even allow anyone to modify their appearance through filters, creating unrealistic versions of reality. In the past, people compared themselves to neighbors or coworkers. Today, the “Joneses” are global. We can compare ourselves to anyone with a Wi-Fi connection.

The psychology behind modern envy is powerful because it ties into how we view ourselves. Knowing logically that others are posting edited moments doesn’t erase emotional reactions. Seeing others’ highlight reels can spark feelings of failure or self-doubt, especially when their achievements reflect goals we haven’t met.

Psychologist Sherry Turkle also points out that envy isn’t just directed outward. Many of us envy our own online selves: the version we present to the world that looks happier, more confident, or more successful than we feel inside. This gap between our public image and private reality can lead to feelings of disconnection and shame.

Smartphones keep us constantly plugged in, making it harder to escape these comparisons. The first and last thing many people do each day is check their phone. The cycle of scrolling, comparing, and feeling inadequate becomes part of daily life.

Building Awareness: How to Understand and Manage Emotions

One of the most effective ways to reduce envy and emotional distress is to cultivate greater awareness of your feelings and their underlying causes. Emotional awareness therapy helps people identify, understand, and respond to their emotions in healthier ways.

Many people struggle to recognize emotions because they grew up in environments where feelings weren’t discussed. Learning to describe and process emotions can feel like learning a new language. Others may have spent years suppressing feelings to avoid discomfort or conflict. Over time, this disconnection can make it difficult to know what’s happening inside, even when your body gives clues through tension, fatigue, or anxiety.

A helpful tool for learning emotional language is the feelings wheel, which categorizes emotions. Using it, you can start to name what you’re feeling with greater accuracy. Writing can also deepen this understanding. Below are several prompts to help you connect with your emotions and begin to interpret what they might be telling you:

• Look at the feelings wheel and identify what you’re feeling. Take deep breaths, place a hand over your heart, and ask what that feeling is trying to communicate.
• Write a short letter to your emotion. What do you want it to know? What message is it sending you?
• Rate how intense the emotion feels on a scale of 1 to 10. You can even assign it a color to visualize its strength.
• Reflect on when you’ve felt this emotion before. What experiences or relationships bring it up?
• If you’re feeling angry, look beneath the anger. Often, emotions like sadness, fear, or disappointment are hiding underneath.
• Visualize the emotion as a character or image. What does it look or sound like? This exercise helps create space between you and the feeling.
• Notice any judgments or “shoulds” that come up. Statements like “I shouldn’t feel this way” often reflect old beliefs about which emotions are acceptable.
• Imagine sharing your feelings with someone you trust. How would they respond? Try to give yourself the same understanding and kindness they would offer you.

Changing How You Respond to Envy

While self-reflection helps, practical steps can also make a difference in how you relate to envy. Consider the following approaches to help shift your mindset:

• Work on self-esteem. Low self-esteem can intensify envy. Focus on building confidence in your abilities and values, not external achievements.
• Challenge deprivation intolerance. This refers to the inability to handle not getting what you want. Learn to accept that you can still move forward and feel complete without every new success or possession.
• Use social media intentionally. Research shows that being active by engaging with friends or sharing meaningful content leads to better well-being than passively scrolling.
• Take breaks from comparison. If social media leaves you feeling inadequate, step away for a while. Time offline allows you to reconnect with yourself and your real-life priorities.

Understanding envy doesn’t mean you stop feeling it entirely; envy is part of being human. However, through self-awareness and emotional understanding, it becomes possible to respond with compassion rather than resentment.

How Do We Break Free from People-Pleasing?

People-pleasing is difficult for many of us to avoid. We find joy in making others happy and being there to support them during difficult times.

When does being a good person cross over into being a people pleaser? This happens when putting others first comes at a detriment to us. Choosing other people’s joy over our own. Hurting ourselves to avoid hurting others.

People pleasers eventually lose themselves as they’re functioning to others’ desires and not their own. Living a life that’s untrue to yourself can cause unhappiness, sadness, and despair. Being the truest you, the best you, happens when you define yourself.

What makes you happy? What career excites you? Who do you want to love? What are you passionate about? It’s found in the small questions, too. What you want to eat for dinner, how you want to dress, and how you spend your time. If you find yourself falling more and more into the category of people pleasing, all hope is not lost! There are many ways we can begin breaking free of the confining box that people pleasing can be.

1. Bring Awareness to this Need

Ask yourself what you’re hoping to gain by engaging in these actions. Maybe you’re hoping someone will love you more. Or maybe it’s that you’ll get a promotion if you keep working those extra hours, letting your boss use you. Whatever it may be, acknowledging what it is that you are doing and what you’re hoping to gain is the first step.

2. Practice Saying No

This may sound silly or easy, but for individuals who are people pleasers, this can be one of the hardest things to do. When you say no, you may feel like you’re letting other people down, disappointing them.

Still, when you say no to others, potentially disappointing them, you’re saying yes to yourself. That is what matters most. Because saying no might feel foreign to you, it’s helpful to roleplay this interaction with someone you trust. Practice until it’s something you’re more comfortable saying. The first couple of times may be difficult, but then you’ll be able to see that you actually gain more respect for saying no, rather than less.

3. Speak Up Kindly

Take some time to think about and develop your own perspective. Journal, engage in conversations, read, and take the time to reflect on your own thoughts and perspectives. Listen to others and hear their opinions and viewpoints.

Pause and reflect on what others have said before responding. Then, give a thoughtful, compassionate response with the aim of engaging in a meaningful dialogue. If you feel frustrated, focus on your breathing and make sure you’re calm before responding. Lean into areas where you feel resistance; it’s there to teach you. Be open to other opinions, see if they fit for you; if they don’t, move on. Don’t apologize for your perspective. 

4. Set Small, Attainable Goals

If you set your goal to be “stop people pleasing,” that’s something that may feel overwhelming to consider all at once. Instead, set small goals along the way. Maybe it’s saying no to someone once this week.

Maybe it’s speaking up in a conversation or two. Maybe it’s taking the time to reflect on a conversation and develop your true thoughts and feelings around the topic. Whatever it is, set small, attainable goals.

5. Challenge your Inner Critic

Our inner critics can be harsh. We’re frequently the toughest on ourselves, which is important to remember. Acknowledge your inner critic while recognizing that they need approval from others, which has led to disapproval of yourself.

Instead of functioning in accordance with your inner critic, listen to your inner voice. As time goes on, it’ll be the louder, more prominent voice in your mind.

Connecting Emotional Awareness and Therapy

Emotional awareness therapy provides tools to help you recognize, name, and regulate emotions before they lead to unhealthy behaviors like comparison or withdrawal. In counseling, clients learn to pause, notice what’s happening inside, and make sense of feelings without judgment. Over time, this process helps strengthen self-trust and emotional resilience.

When you identify envy or discomfort as signals rather than flaws, you open the door to personal growth. Therapy can also help uncover the roots of envy, such as unmet needs, perfectionism, or fear of failure, and provide space to explore them safely.

How Symmetry Counseling Can Help

At Symmetry Counseling, our therapists specialize in helping clients manage emotions that feel confusing, overwhelming, or hard to manage. Through individualized therapy, you can learn to understand your feelings, reduce comparison, and develop healthier ways to connect with yourself and others.

If you find that envy, stress, or emotional disconnection are affecting your well-being, you don’t have to face it alone. Contact us today at 312-578-9990 to connect with a therapist who can help you rediscover balance and self-understanding.

References

1. Sarner, M. The age of envy: How to be happy when everyone else’s life looks perfect. GetPocket. Retrieved from https://getpocket.com