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Ep. 220: When You’re JEALOUS of Other Peoples’ SUCCESS

Today’s we’re taking a deep dive into JEALOUSY and how you have more power⚡️ than you think when it comes to this feeling (and other ones!)

Does the green-eyed monster rear its ugly head when other people seem to be having the WEIGHT LOSS success you want?  Yep, we’re talking about JEALOUSY – a prickly🌵, thorny topic that isn’t always easy to tackle.  But you know what?  You have more power⚡️ than you think you do when it comes to this feeling (and other ones, too!).

In today’s episode of the Fitness Matters podcast, we’re taking a deep dive🤿 into JEALOUSY and chatting about: 

👉 How JEALOUSY shows up in our body

👉 WHY we compare ourselves to others, and

👉 My SIMPLE (but maybe not easy) process   

Let’s GO!

NOTE:  Pahla B’s Book Club pick for January is “How Emotions are Made” by Lisa Feldman Barrett.  First-time Chirp Audiobooks users can get $5 off any purchase by using the code PAHLA5 – this link will take you directly there AND apply the discount: https://bit.ly/JanuaryChirpBookClub

(And previous Chirp users can snag this title at just $2.99 for a limited time!)

Canadian friends: this book is available on Chirp in Canada too!

REGISTER this month’s LIVE Book Club event on January 30th here: https://bit.ly/JANBookClubReg

Enjoy this podcast?  SHARE it with your friends!  💛

When You’re JEALOUS of Other Peoples’  SUCCESS (full transcript) 

You’re listening to the Fitness Matters Podcast with Pahla B, and this is episode number 220, “When You’re Jealous of Other People’s Success.”

Welcome to the Fitness Matters Podcast where every week we talk about the fitness matters that matter to you. I’m Pahla B, YouTuber, certified life and weight loss coach, soon to be author, and your best middle-aged fitness friend. Are you ready to talk about the fitness mindset that matters to you? Me too. Let’s go.

Hello, hello, hello, my friends. It’s so good to not see you, but to be with you here on the podcast as we are. You guys, before we get into today’s really thorny topic . . .  First of all, just really, really, first of all, thank you for clicking on this one. Today’s uncomfortable. Today’s prickly. Today took me so much longer to prepare for than almost any other topic I have ever prepared for ever, because this was something I did not want to talk about. I think that you might feel the same way. But hey, before we start talking about it, let me tell you something really quickly. I’m so excited because next week is the book club. So this month, the month of January, we are reading “How Emotions Are Made” by Lisa Feldman Barrett, and next Sunday, January 30th, we are together live on Zoom, and I am super excited.

You will want to sign up because you will not be admitted into the Zoom room until you have registered to come to the book club. If you don’t know anything about the book club, let me tell you. Hi, I have a book club in partnership with Chirp Audiobooks, which is an audio book retailer. They have super incredible limited time discounts on all kinds of books, including the one that we’re reading this month, “How Emotions Are Made,” which is for a limited time only $2.99. I’m super, super excited about that. They actually discounted it literally for me, for this book club, for you to be able to get it super cheap so that we can talk about it.

If you are a brand new Chirp user in the U.S. or Canada, you can actually get $5 off of your first purchase, which will cover more than the price of this book with the code Pahla5, which is P-A-H-L-A and the number five with no spaces. Wherever you are watching or listening, go ahead and open up the show notes or the description box, and there is a link that will take you directly to the book and already apply the code if you are a new user (or there’s the actual visual of the code, if you’d like to type it in yourself). And there are all kinds of links; there are always links.

And in fact, I already know that I am going to be referencing several other podcasts while we are talking today. So make sure that you open up the show notes or the description box.

Okay. Are you ready to talk about jealousy? I know. Me either. You guys, sometimes things happen. No, things always happen, but sometimes things happen in a cluster of “This happened over here,” and, “That happened over there,” and then, “This other thing happened,” where it becomes really abundantly obvious that there is a topic that I need to talk about on the podcast. And that is exactly what has happened to me this week.

Jealousy has reared its ugly head in so many really disparate places that . . .  I don’t know if I just pronounced that word correctly; is it disparate? For whatever reason it’s coming out of my mouth, and I’m like, “It seems like it should be diseparate,” except that that is not a word. I feel like you know what I’m saying. Let’s just go with disparate and correct me if I’m wrong, please. Literally always correct me if I’m wrong. I’m always okay with that because sometimes I’m wrong, man. Anyway, jealousy has come up in a couple of different ways over the course of the past two or three weeks that I’m like, “You know what? This is something I need to tackle.”

And when I tried to tackle it, I noticed my brain offering me squirrels and shiny objects and, “Oh my goodness, I need to clean.” And you know me and the procrast cleaning, like, I didn’t want to think about this. I really didn’t. And that’s actually where I’m going to start with our conversation. I’m going to give you a little bit of background before we dive into the whole jealousy thing. Let me give you a little bit of background about feelings in general and how to even kind of think about today’s topic. Having a sort of a big picture framework, I think is going to be really helpful for this topic and honestly helpful for a lot of topics. Almost any time we’re talking about any feeling this conversation can be really helpful.

So number one and number two, I’m going to refer you for a much bigger, in-depth conversation about feelings and about how thoughts create feelings and refer you to Episode number 32, which is “How to Change” (https://getyourgoal.com/podcasts/32-how-to-change/)  and Episode number 39, which is “Feelings” (https://pahlabfitness.com/feelings/). So the crux of Episode 32, “How to Change,” is really what I need you to know for every single conversation we ever have. That is such a foundational episode. It explains how we do and get everything in our lives. It’s called “How to Change” because it’s not how to change one thing, it’s literally how to change everything. And it explains how your thoughts create your feelings, then your feelings drive your actions and then your actions get you results in your life.

And the reason you need to know that is because, so, so, so often, really specifically in the case of jealousy, as you will see, we think that our feelings come from outside of us. We think that our feelings come from what people say, what people do, what people have, what people don’t have. We think that feelings are out there and that they come to us. In fact, when I was doing the tiniest bit of Google research today to even know how to define jealousy or what to do with jealousy or what jealousy is and all this stuff . . .  The language regarding emotions in the world is so funny to me because one of the Google entries was talking about how jealousy strikes everybody as though it is beyond our control, as though it is outside of us.

And that is one of the most fundamental things that I can teach you, is not that you are in control of your emotions, but that they come from you. Therefore, you are in control of them, not that they won’t come up on you, not that they won’t feel like they come automatically or from out of the blue or things like that, because that is how they feel frequently.

But you have control over them. You have urgency over them because they are an inside job. You are, for all intents and purposes, a closed system. You create your own thoughts, which create your feelings, which drive your actions, which get you results. So that’s really important to know that jealousy does not come from somebody else – somebody else’s success, somebody else’s failure, somebody else’s whatever they have, in terms of money or possessions or relationships or any of that. Jealousy does not come from other people; jealousy comes from you.

And just really quickly, sometimes when I say that, I hear it the way I would’ve heard it 10 or 15 years ago: that jealousy is my fault. That’s really not what I’m saying. Just to be super, super, super clear, thoughts and emotions are automatic. And in fact, we’re going to get into that quite a bit today. Biologically, we have a reason to think lots of the things that we think and therefore feel the things that we feel. It’s not your fault that you feel jealous, but it is within your ability and within your responsibility to do something about it, if you want to. You don’t have to.

I mean, you noticed that I didn’t title this episode “How to stop feeling jealous of other people’s success.” We are going to talk about that, if you want to, but really, truly what I wanted to talk about was much more just the idea behind it, the intellectual concept of what jealousy is, how we feel it, what happens when we feel it. And then as a total aside, I do have practical steps for you. If you’d like to not feel jealousy, here’s what you can do. Okay.

But anyway, the other thing that I need you to know – I don’t love that word “need,” but here I am just saying it over and over. But the other thing that’s going to be important for you to have a framework for how we’re talking about jealousy is to understand that there are a couple of different ways that we can respond to our feelings.

And there are four different ways, and I sometimes have a hard time remembering them, which is why I’m going to give you a mnemonic device. So here are the four different ways: We can ‘Resist’ our feelings, we can ‘React’ to our feelings, we can ‘Avoid’ our feelings, or we can ‘Allow” our feelings. So it’s two Rs and two As, so I generally say that the four things that we could do with our feelings are “RA, RA.” But if you are a pirate, you might prefer “AR, AR”, and here’s where it’s really important to know this, aside from me being goofy, because I am.

The thing about emotions is that technically speaking, our goal, if we would like to feel our best and be our best in the world, our goal is to allow our feelings. And the reason I refer to that as a goal is because almost none of us actually do that. Like 99.9% percent of the time, our very natural reaction to most of our feelings is going to be to resist, react, or avoid, just almost always.

And that’s why I really wanted to bring this to your attention because sometimes we think of a feeling as synonymous with the reaction to the feeling. Really specifically the one that always comes to me on this one is that we think when we feel angry that we have to yell, scream, say mean things, break things, behave in a reactive, explosive kind of way. And this was something that I just learned very recently. Did you know that you can feel angry and not do anything? Anger exists in your body; it is literally a feeling. It is a vibration. Your insides are vibrating, your heart is beating probably faster than normal, your breathing rate is probably faster than normal, your sweat rate is probably higher than normal. You’re having an adrenaline type reaction. You can feel those physical vibrations in your body without doing anything. I know that’s super novel, especially for anger, but this is the crux of allowing a feeling – to allow that feeling to be in your body.

Here’s why we react so often, especially with anger. It’s really uncomfortable. It’s incredibly uncomfortable. Your heart is pounding. Your breathing is weird. You feel like you want to crawl out of your skin. It relieves some of that feeling to react to it, but a reaction isn’t the same as allowing. And here’s why. You can react to something while simultaneously kind of blocking or avoiding or resisting. Blocking is resisting, like simultaneously doing something else so that the feeling doesn’t truly dissipate on its own. Here’s why you want to allow a feeling to exist in your body: because your body can only do that feeling response for a certain amount of time. Generally speaking, it’s about a minute and a half, maybe two minutes at the most.

I like to think about this as when you get that sudden adrenaline rush from a response to fear, like when you’re driving and you almost hit something and you don’t. And you know how you have that adrenaline – that fight or flight response. That’s what emotions are. It’s your body having a physical, chemical reaction to a thought that then swells up and dissipates. So when we are reacting, exploding out and reacting with it, we might not be allowing it at the same time, which would allow it to dissipate.

I like to think about the four different ways that we can respond to an emotion. And this is not a perfect analogy, let me be really clear, but it’s a pretty good one in a lot of ways. And it’s the one that I come back to in my own mind when I’m like, “How am I behaving? What is my response here?” I like to think about a hair clog in a drain. Okay. Let me rephrase that. I don’t like to think about hair clogs in drains because they’re super-duper gross, but they are a pretty good analogy for what it’s like when we are resisting or reacting or avoiding or allowing our emotions.

It’s most illustrative of resisting because it’s literally blocking water from going down the drain. I always think about it, like when I had really, really long hair. I had really long hair for a really long time, and for whatever reason – I don’t know if it’s because I have shorter hair now – but I don’t seem to shed as much hair as I used to. Sometimes I still do, but I used to be a heavy shedder. That’s how I think about it. And I do wonder now kind of looking back, this is wildly unrelated, but I’m just going to tell you a story.

I do wonder, because the time when I really noticed it, when I had, A) the longest hair, and B) shed the most hair was when I was in my early 40s. And I do wonder if that was one of my pre-perimenopausal symptoms. Because one of the things that happens in menopause is that estrogen actually always controlled hair growth. As we have less estrogen, we have less hair. That includes the hair on your head as well as . . .   I have been told that at some point in my future I might not have to shave my legs anymore, and I’m so looking forward to this. I really don’t want my hair on my head to get any thinner, but oh my gosh, if there is any hope in the world of me not having to pluck my chin hairs or shave my legs anymore, I want this. I do. I want this in my life. Not related.

Anyway, thinking about the difference between having a clog of hair in the drain resisting the water going down and reacting by pushing the water out of the drain and even avoiding because the drain needs to be avoided by the water because it can’t get down into the drain. When you simply pluck the hairball out of the drain, you will allow the water to flow the way it would normally flow, and it will go down the drain. It will dissipate relatively quickly. Unless you are still running the tap, which would be, unless you are still having that thought over and over, which is creating the feeling. Anyway, these are the ways in which you can respond to a feeling, and I will tell you that this is particularly important with jealousy, and I’m going to go out on a limb here.

I don’t like to say, “Oh, things are universal. Everybody reacts this way. Everybody responds this way.” But I’m going to tell you, I think almost everybody dislikes the discomfort of jealousy so much that none of us actually allow it. I truly feel that jealousy is one of the most uncomfortable feelings that we as a people have. In fact so much so that it was no surprise to me at all when I went to I think it was the Merriam-Webster website when I was Googling jealousy and trying to kind of gather my thoughts about jealousy. And there was just comment after comment after comment about, “We need to abolish this word from our lives. Nobody should feel jealousy. And jealousy is the worst, and I hate feeling jealousy, and jealousy is the green-eyed monster.”

And all of these really, I’m going to call them negative reactions where I think it’s incredibly common to resist feeling jealousy and not only to resist feeling jealousy, but to add another layer onto it of judging ourselves for feeling jealousy. So what do we do when we have such a visceral negative reaction to having a feeling? Well, let me explain a little bit, because you know me, I like to explain and I really like to know why we do the things that we do. And as soon as I turned this around in my mind, it was like, “Oh my gosh, this makes so much sense.” And that kind of helped peel back that layer of judgment and frustration and maybe even anger or, not necessarily anger at other people, but anger at myself for feeling jealous.

Jealousy is a by-product of an incredibly normal biological thought process. My friends, you and I compare ourselves; this is normal. This is natural. This is exactly what your brain is actually supposed to do. Way, way, way back in caveman days, we had to compare ourselves to other people. We had to conform to the normative, the norm of our tribe, otherwise we would be cast out. We would die. If we didn’t compare ourselves to make sure that we were fitting in, we could die. So of course we compare ourselves.

The problem with comparing yourself is when we make it mean something more than simply, “I am the same” or “I am different.” “I am the same” can bring about a feeling of, “Okay, I fit in. This is all good here.”  “I am different” can have a lot of different responses, therefore that means that I’m wrong or therefore that means that somebody else is wrong. We can respond to these two things that are different from each other in a lot of different ways. This was actually something else that I saw when I was doing my little bit of Google research. The way that people define jealousy is kind of, not necessarily in response to but in conjunction with lots of other emotions – like anger, resentment, bitterness. It was super interesting to me that most definitions of jealousy went hand in hand with all of these other emotions. And I’m going to get to that in just a little bit here.

Here’s what I’d like you to know about the comparison thing. What frequently happens when we compare ourselves and what really specifically I think happens when we compare ourselves with somebody else’s weight loss success, or even somebody else’s success at anything. I think it’s particularly common to feel jealous of somebody else’s weight loss success because jealousy – that comparison, that very normal comparison thing that we do – can evoke a scarcity thought in us. When we see that somebody else is having success, we very frequently make it mean that we can’t, that there’s only so much success in the world and that if somebody else has it, we can’t have it.

Now, this is really obvious in the case of money, how we . . .   I think we all feel that if one person has money that nobody else can, or that nobody else can have as much. I will tell you just really quickly, this is not entirely related, a little side step over here. This is some of the biggest work that I have done on my money mindset is that actually there is not an unlimited amount of money, but there is so much money in the world it might as well be unlimited. Just because one person has some, it does not mean that there is not enough for everybody else.

The way that money works is that there actually is plenty, and it moves around a lot so that it’s not just a fixed number – here’s an X number of dollars that are ever going to exist in the world, and if one person has a larger slice of the pie, nobody else gets as much. Money just really doesn’t work that way. And spoiler alert for what we’re going to talk about a little bit later: weight loss definitely doesn’t work that way. Somebody else’s body has literally nothing to do with what your body is capable of doing. Okay. So we also, when we do the comparison thing, it can feel like we personally come up short, not just in the scarcity way, but also in the self-worth way. If somebody else has something we want, we can make it mean that we are not worthy of having the thing that we want.

I find this one to be particularly thorny and the crux of a lot of the work that I have done on myself. The two places that I have really, really specifically felt just a lot of jealousy in my lifetime, number one is absolutely with money. I had a lot of work on jealousy with money to do before I could come into my own abundance mindset. We actually talked about this quite a bit, this scarcity thinking on Episode 50 (Getting Older https://pahlabfitness.com/getting-older/), which we were talking about getting older, but I talked about getting older as it related to my money mindset, because it was a very scarcity mindset that I needed to work on – to think about and to think through. So thinking about jealousy as being part of a scarcity mindset, you might get some really good nuggets over on Episode 50. But thinking about jealousy as being a lack of self-worth, this one is absolutely something that I have butted up against frankly, butting up against on my YouTube journey.

I literally just this morning was journaling about whether or not I am worthy of YouTube success. I am, but what I was finding were my thoughts about my worthiness of YouTube success, because I noticed this is one of the ways in which jealousy came to me. Over the course of the past couple of weeks, I have noticed myself playing the compare and despair game on YouTube lately. It is something I haven’t done in a really long time. When I was first starting on YouTube, I used to look at other fitness trainers’ YouTube channels all the time, constantly reminding myself of how they were better than me and how I was never going to have this success. And the only reason that they were successful is because they were prettier and younger and thinner and fitter and better. And all of the ways in which there was scarcity. Because they had some kind of resource that was not enough for me and all kinds of self-worth – if they have it, it means that I can’t. And I never will because I’m not good enough. And I noticed that “not good enough” thing coming up again lately. So, so interesting to me how this comes around and around and how it showed up for me.

Here, let me move forward. We’re going to move into what to do about jealousy before I finish telling that story, because I do have practical steps. As I said, I wanted to discuss the intellectual nature of what jealousy is, but also when you feel it, what do you want to do with that? Well, here, number one, recognize it. And I know this sounds so obvious, but here’s what I noticed. I didn’t think I was feeling jealous. I was so resistant to feeling jealous that I didn’t even want to name it, I didn’t even want to claim it, I didn’t want it to exist at all, and yet I was doing all the jealousy things. I was comparing myself. I was spending time looking at other people’s channels. I was looking at my numbers and looking at their numbers.

And what I heard in my head was that I was justifying it as research, which to be fair is something that I mean. Technically speaking, I’m supposed to do that if somebody else is getting views and subscribers. It is a good thing to look at what they’re doing and see if there are tactics or techniques or words or visuals that might work with my own strategy in order to reach that same audience. So yes, technically it is a business strategy to compare myself with other people. But I will tell you from the churning in my stomach, oh, I was not just doing a business analysis. I was definitely creating jealousy for myself. So recognizing jealousy is the first step. The other thing that I was thinking about really specifically when I was thinking about jealousy, I was thinking about how it shows up, how people talk about it or react to it, or behave from their reactions to jealousy.

And I was thinking about how, when I was a kid – no, not just when I was a kid, I mean, ongoing – that one of the things I heard very frequently from my parents was, “Well, it must be nice.”  ”It must be nice” is jealousy. Y’all, I want you to know when we are behaving, reacting in that snarky sarcastic way, that is a reaction to jealousy.

And the thing about that is that in and of itself, that snarky reaction doesn’t feel like jealousy and that’s really, again, where we’re coming back to. This is why step number one is simply to recognize it. What we frequently do when we feel jealous is we react to it by judging ourselves and then feeling bad about that, and then feeling something else. We often don’t recognize the feeling of jealousy because we have shoved it aside and then have done something else that feels like something else. So when you can simply recognize that what you are feeling is jealousy, that offers you the first step to resolving it.

So step number two, always because jealousy is a feeling, you know I’m going to tell you to find the thought. When you recognize that you are feeling the feeling, which I think is where most of us come at this, I would be hard pressed to say that I have ever actually heard the thought of “She has what I want” in its entirety, in my head like that. If I had ever heard that thought, I would’ve recognized that it created jealousy, but I had to go searching for that thought. So find the thought that is creating the jealousy for you. Generally speaking, this is going to be something so incredibly simple. “She has what I want” is probably pretty similar to what’s going on in your head.

So step two A, here is to just have a lot of compassion for yourself for that one. Because there is a biological basis for this thought. We are supposed to compare ourselves. We’re supposed to, and we’re supposed to recognize that our comparison means something about us. “Do I fit in or do I not fit in?” That’s what your brain is supposed to do. So have compassion for yourself for the fact that you are comparing and noticing that somebody else has something that you want. And let me be really, really clear here. It is not going to stop you from having that thought. It’s not going to stop you from ever feeling jealous. It’s going to help you allow the feeling of jealousy. It’s never my intention to teach you how to not feel something ever again. I actually want you to feel things.

I want you to feel things all the way through because it doesn’t last for very long, and when we are not resisting or reacting or avoiding our feelings, they’re not difficult. They come up, they swell up, they are, for me, almost always snotty. Almost always involve tears. Almost always – no, always – involve sweating and feeling uncomfortable. And then they dissipate. I don’t want you to not feel. Imagine if you didn’t feel your feelings. You would just have a flat affect all day, every day. You’d be a sociopath. Not having feelings is not the goal. Allowing yourself to have all the feelings all the time and knowing that it doesn’t mean anything bad about you is my goal for you. Allow yourself to feel jealous because you have compassion for why you are feeling it. So this is step three: allow yourself to feel the jealousy.

Here’s what happened to me when I resolved a jealousy feeling that I was having, again involving YouTube. I was comparing myself with a specific person who has over a million subscribers, and I was feeling lots of jealousy. The thing that was happening though is that I was noticing the jealous thought, and then . . .  I’m going to step ahead of myself. You guys, feeling the jealousy is step three. Step four is managing your other reactions. And what I mean by managing is simply recognizing that you have other thoughts about your feeling of jealousy. I call these collateral thoughts because you (and I) have a thought that creates a feeling and we don’t want to feel that feeling and therefore everything else that happens after that is actually kind of a reaction or a resistance or an avoidance of feeling that jealousy.

And this is actually what I think most of us actually label as jealousy – the bitterness, the despair, the defeat, the anger, the hatred, the judginess. All of that other junk that comes out is actually a reaction to jealousy. Because here’s what happened. When I had the original thought of, “She has what I want,” I immediately started thinking other things, like “I hate that she has that.” You guys, oh my God. You’re about to hear some things about me that you might not like, that I didn’t like having in my own head, which was a whole other layer of the onion of me judging myself for even having these thoughts. But here you go. This is how we react to jealousy with other thoughts that create other feelings. “I hate that she has that success. She’s not very good. I wish all of her subscribers would leave her.” I can’t even say that with a straight face. I’m so embarrassed to even admit that. I’m so embarrassed by that. But there you go, that’s what my brain offered me.

There was more. You guys, I’m sweating. I’m going to allow myself to feel this embarrassment while I’m in the middle of the podcast, because that was uncomfortable. “I’ll never get there. I’m doing everything wrong.” I get stuck in that one pretty frequently. “I’m doing everything wrong” paired with, “I’m not doing anything right,” which is so interesting. They’re very similar and yet very different. And they have similar but different feelings. So here’s what I’m going to encourage you to do. When you are managing your reactions (aka your collateral thoughts), write them all down and just be really uncomfortable with all of the other feelings that they bring up.

You guys, when you are feeling jealousy in and of itself, here was the thing that surprised me. It didn’t feel like very much. Jealousy is almost nothing. It was a really quiet kind of “meh” emotion that took less than a minute to completely resolve. “She has what I want” didn’t feel like much at all. Oh, but the defeat, the hopelessness, the bitterness, the vindictiveness, the anger, the sarcasm, snarky, bitchy feeling, and then all of the judgment that I had for myself for being a person who thinks these things and feels these things – that was what was uncomfortable and took a little bit more time.

Allowing myself to simply feel the defeat and recognize that it came from a thought. Allowing myself to feel the hopelessness and recognize that it came from a thought. Allowing myself to feel the bitterness – did not care for that one, wanted to resist that one, desperately wanted to avoid that one, felt it all the way through. Did not want to feel vindictiveness all the way through, but did. Did not want to feel anger, although I’ve gotten better at anger. We’ve talked about this many times on the podcast. Anger doesn’t frighten me, I don’t avoid anger the way that I used to. So feeling that one all the way through didn’t take very long. All of the judgment that I had for myself is actually step five: simply forgive yourself. Resolve this guilty, judgy thing because your brain is supposed to think these things. It is. It’s supposed to.

Your brain is supposed to compare you with other people. I think your brain is supposed to not want to feel uncomfortable feelings. This is pretty primitive. We seek pleasure; we avoid pain. Feelings can feel uncomfortable, aka painful. Wanting to avoid an uncomfortable feeling is also incredibly natural. All of this – this whole giant mess of yuck that we feel when we are jealous – it’s all just completely normal and okay. And allow yourself to feel it. Pull that stinky, disgusting mass of hair out of the drain and just allow the water to flow through. And please, please throw that stinky mass of hair away. Go get rid of it. Take it on out to the outside garbage. It’s gross. It’s smelly. It’s disgusting. But pull it up, notice it’s there, and just allow the water to flow.

You guys, it’s uncomfortable, it’s snotty, it’s sweaty, it’s complicated. And I say that like a fact – that’s an opinion. It feels complicated to me because I have the thought that there’s a lot going on with jealousy. Jealousy itself is actually pretty simple, and the resolution to it, I’m going to call it simple, but not easy. You get a lot of opportunity with jealousy to feel a lot of feelings all the way through.

That was good. There was a lot to dig into there, and I think this one was helpful. I think this one was helpful for me, whether or not it was helpful for you. I actually know for a fact that this was helpful for me because I love to know why my brain does things, and I love to know what to do next, and I love the opportunity to feel my feelings all the way through.

For me personally, jealousy allowed me to feel a lot of other feelings, and therefore I’m going to put this one in the win column. You guys, I hope this was a win for you. I will literally see you next week on Zoom. And by the way, if, for whatever reason you can’t make it to the live Zoom, I do have the replay available. I still want you to come and join the conversation, whether you can be there live or not. Come and join the conversation afterwards because I’m going to be posting the replay in all the normal places that I post the podcast the day afterwards. So it’ll come out on Monday instead of Sunday like it normally does. So join me on Sunday, January 30th. Make sure that you register in the show notes or description box wherever you are watching or listening, and I will see you soon. Thanks for listening.

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Transcript

You're listening to the Fitness Matters Podcast with Pahla B, and this is episode number 220, "When You're Jealous of Other People's Success.”

Welcome to the Fitness Matters Podcast where every week we talk about the fitness matters that matter to you. I'm Pahla B, YouTuber, certified life and weight loss coach, soon to be author, and your best middle-aged fitness friend. Are you ready to talk about the fitness mindset that matters to you? Me too. Let's go.

Hello, hello, hello, my friends. It's so good to not see you, but to be with you here on the podcast as we are. You guys, before we get into today's really thorny topic . . . First of all, just really, really, first of all, thank you for clicking on this one. Today's uncomfortable. Today's prickly. Today took me so much longer to prepare for than almost any other topic I have ever prepared for ever, because this was something I did not want to talk about. I think that you might feel the same way. But hey, before we start talking about it, let me tell you something really quickly. I'm so excited because next week is the book club. So this month, the month of January, we are reading “How Emotions Are Made'' by Lisa Feldman Barrett, and next Sunday, January 30th, we are together live on Zoom, and I am super excited.

You will want to sign up because you will not be admitted into the Zoom room until you have registered to come to the book club. If you don't know anything about the book club, let me tell you. Hi, I have a book club in partnership with Chirp Audiobooks, which is an audio book retailer. They have super incredible limited time discounts on all kinds of books, including the one that we're reading this month, “How Emotions Are Made,” which is for a limited time only $2.99. I’m super, super excited about that. They actually discounted it literally for me, for this book club, for you to be able to get it super cheap so that we can talk about it.

If you are a brand new Chirp user in the U.S. or Canada, you can actually get $5 off of your first purchase, which will cover more than the price of this book with the code Pahla5, which is P-A-H-L-A and the number five with no spaces. Wherever you are watching or listening, go ahead and open up the show notes or the description box, and there is a link that will take you directly to the book and already apply the code if you are a new user (or there's the actual visual of the code, if you'd like to type it in yourself). And there are all kinds of links; there are always links.

And in fact, I already know that I am going to be referencing several other podcasts while we are talking today. So make sure that you open up the show notes or the description box.

Okay. Are you ready to talk about jealousy? I know. Me either. You guys, sometimes things happen. No, things always happen, but sometimes things happen in a cluster of “This happened over here,” and, “That happened over there,” and then, “This other thing happened,” where it becomes really abundantly obvious that there is a topic that I need to talk about on the podcast. And that is exactly what has happened to me this week.

Jealousy has reared its ugly head in so many really disparate places that . . . I don't know if I just pronounced that word correctly; is it disparate? For whatever reason it's coming out of my mouth, and I'm like, “It seems like it should be diseparate,” except that that is not a word. I feel like you know what I'm saying. Let's just go with disparate and correct me if I'm wrong, please. Literally always correct me if I'm wrong. I'm always okay with that because sometimes I'm wrong, man. Anyway, jealousy has come up in a couple of different ways over the course of the past two or three weeks that I'm like, “You know what? This is something I need to tackle.”

And when I tried to tackle it, I noticed my brain offering me squirrels and shiny objects and, “Oh my goodness, I need to clean.” And you know me and the procrast cleaning, like, I didn't want to think about this. I really didn't. And that's actually where I'm going to start with our conversation. I'm going to give you a little bit of background before we dive into the whole jealousy thing. Let me give you a little bit of background about feelings in general and how to even kind of think about today's topic. Having a sort of a big picture framework, I think is going to be really helpful for this topic and honestly helpful for a lot of topics. Almost any time we're talking about any feeling this conversation can be really helpful.

So number one and number two, I'm going to refer you for a much bigger, in-depth conversation about feelings and about how thoughts create feelings and refer you to Episode number 32, which is "How to Change" (https://pahlabfitness.com/how-to-change/) and Episode number 39, which is "Feelings" (https://pahlabfitness.com/feelings/). So the crux of Episode 32, "How to Change,” is really what I need you to know for every single conversation we ever have. That is such a foundational episode. It explains how we do and get everything in our lives. It's called “How to Change” because it's not how to change one thing, it's literally how to change everything. And it explains how your thoughts create your feelings, then your feelings drive your actions and then your actions get you results in your life.

And the reason you need to know that is because, so, so, so often, really specifically in the case of jealousy, as you will see, we think that our feelings come from outside of us. We think that our feelings come from what people say, what people do, what people have, what people don't have. We think that feelings are out there and that they come to us. In fact, when I was doing the tiniest bit of Google research today to even know how to define jealousy or what to do with jealousy or what jealousy is and all this stuff . . . The language regarding emotions in the world is so funny to me because one of the Google entries was talking about how jealousy strikes everybody as though it is beyond our control, as though it is outside of us.

And that is one of the most fundamental things that I can teach you, is not that you are in control of your emotions, but that they come from you. Therefore, you are in control of them, not that they won't come up on you, not that they won't feel like they come automatically or from out of the blue or things like that, because that is how they feel frequently.

But you have control over them. You have urgency over them because they are an inside job. You are, for all intents and purposes, a closed system. You create your own thoughts, which create your feelings, which drive your actions, which get you results. So that's really important to know that jealousy does not come from somebody else – somebody else's success, somebody else's failure, somebody else's whatever they have, in terms of money or possessions or relationships or any of that. Jealousy does not come from other people; jealousy comes from you.

And just really quickly, sometimes when I say that, I hear it the way I would've heard it 10 or 15 years ago: that jealousy is my fault. That's really not what I'm saying. Just to be super, super, super clear, thoughts and emotions are automatic. And in fact, we're going to get into that quite a bit today. Biologically, we have a reason to think lots of the things that we think and therefore feel the things that we feel. It's not your fault that you feel jealous, but it is within your ability and within your responsibility to do something about it, if you want to. You don't have to.

I mean, you noticed that I didn't title this episode “How to stop feeling jealous of other people's success.” We are going to talk about that, if you want to, but really, truly what I wanted to talk about was much more just the idea behind it, the intellectual concept of what jealousy is, how we feel it, what happens when we feel it. And then as a total aside, I do have practical steps for you. If you'd like to not feel jealousy, here's what you can do. Okay.

But anyway, the other thing that I need you to know – I don't love that word “need,” but here I am just saying it over and over. But the other thing that's going to be important for you to have a framework for how we're talking about jealousy is to understand that there are a couple of different ways that we can respond to our feelings.

And there are four different ways, and I sometimes have a hard time remembering them, which is why I'm going to give you a mnemonic device. So here are the four different ways: We can 'Resist' our feelings, we can 'React' to our feelings, we can 'Avoid' our feelings, or we can 'Allow" our feelings. So it's two Rs and two As, so I generally say that the four things that we could do with our feelings are "RA, RA.” But if you are a pirate, you might prefer "AR, AR", and here's where it's really important to know this, aside from me being goofy, because I am.

The thing about emotions is that technically speaking, our goal, if we would like to feel our best and be our best in the world, our goal is to allow our feelings. And the reason I refer to that as a goal is because almost none of us actually do that. Like 99.9% percent of the time, our very natural reaction to most of our feelings is going to be to resist, react, or avoid, just almost always.

And that's why I really wanted to bring this to your attention because sometimes we think of a feeling as synonymous with the reaction to the feeling. Really specifically the one that always comes to me on this one is that we think when we feel angry that we have to yell, scream, say mean things, break things, behave in a reactive, explosive kind of way. And this was something that I just learned very recently. Did you know that you can feel angry and not do anything? Anger exists in your body; it is literally a feeling. It is a vibration. Your insides are vibrating, your heart is beating probably faster than normal, your breathing rate is probably faster than normal, your sweat rate is probably higher than normal. You're having an adrenaline type reaction. You can feel those physical vibrations in your body without doing anything. I know that's super novel, especially for anger, but this is the crux of allowing a feeling – to allow that feeling to be in your body.

Here's why we react so often, especially with anger. It’s really uncomfortable. It's incredibly uncomfortable. Your heart is pounding. Your breathing is weird. You feel like you want to crawl out of your skin. It relieves some of that feeling to react to it, but a reaction isn't the same as allowing. And here's why. You can react to something while simultaneously kind of blocking or avoiding or resisting. Blocking is resisting, like simultaneously doing something else so that the feeling doesn't truly dissipate on its own. Here's why you want to allow a feeling to exist in your body: because your body can only do that feeling response for a certain amount of time. Generally speaking, it's about a minute and a half, maybe two minutes at the most.

I like to think about this as when you get that sudden adrenaline rush from a response to fear, like when you're driving and you almost hit something and you don't. And you know how you have that adrenaline – that fight or flight response. That's what emotions are. It’s your body having a physical, chemical reaction to a thought that then swells up and dissipates. So when we are reacting, exploding out and reacting with it, we might not be allowing it at the same time, which would allow it to dissipate.

I like to think about the four different ways that we can respond to an emotion. And this is not a perfect analogy, let me be really clear, but it's a pretty good one in a lot of ways. And it's the one that I come back to in my own mind when I'm like, “How am I behaving? What is my response here?” I like to think about a hair clog in a drain. Okay. Let me rephrase that. I don't like to think about hair clogs in drains because they're super-duper gross, but they are a pretty good analogy for what it's like when we are resisting or reacting or avoiding or allowing our emotions.

It's most illustrative of resisting because it's literally blocking water from going down the drain. I always think about it, like when I had really, really long hair. I had really long hair for a really long time, and for whatever reason – I don't know if it's because I have shorter hair now – but I don't seem to shed as much hair as I used to. Sometimes I still do, but I used to be a heavy shedder. That’s how I think about it. And I do wonder now kind of looking back, this is wildly unrelated, but I'm just going to tell you a story.

I do wonder, because the time when I really noticed it, when I had, A) the longest hair, and B) shed the most hair was when I was in my early 40s. And I do wonder if that was one of my pre-perimenopausal symptoms. Because one of the things that happens in menopause is that estrogen actually always controlled hair growth. As we have less estrogen, we have less hair. That includes the hair on your head as well as . . . I have been told that at some point in my future I might not have to shave my legs anymore, and I'm so looking forward to this. I really don't want my hair on my head to get any thinner, but oh my gosh, if there is any hope in the world of me not having to pluck my chin hairs or shave my legs anymore, I want this. I do. I want this in my life. Not related.

Anyway, thinking about the difference between having a clog of hair in the drain resisting the water going down and reacting by pushing the water out of the drain and even avoiding because the drain needs to be avoided by the water because it can't get down into the drain. When you simply pluck the hairball out of the drain, you will allow the water to flow the way it would normally flow, and it will go down the drain. It will dissipate relatively quickly. Unless you are still running the tap, which would be, unless you are still having that thought over and over, which is creating the feeling. Anyway, these are the ways in which you can respond to a feeling, and I will tell you that this is particularly important with jealousy, and I'm going to go out on a limb here.

I don't like to say, “Oh, things are universal. Everybody reacts this way. Everybody responds this way.” But I'm going to tell you, I think almost everybody dislikes the discomfort of jealousy so much that none of us actually allow it. I truly feel that jealousy is one of the most uncomfortable feelings that we as a people have. In fact so much so that it was no surprise to me at all when I went to I think it was the Merriam-Webster website when I was Googling jealousy and trying to kind of gather my thoughts about jealousy. And there was just comment after comment after comment about, "We need to abolish this word from our lives. Nobody should feel jealousy. And jealousy is the worst, and I hate feeling jealousy, and jealousy is the green-eyed monster."

And all of these really, I'm going to call them negative reactions where I think it's incredibly common to resist feeling jealousy and not only to resist feeling jealousy, but to add another layer onto it of judging ourselves for feeling jealousy. So what do we do when we have such a visceral negative reaction to having a feeling? Well, let me explain a little bit, because you know me, I like to explain and I really like to know why we do the things that we do. And as soon as I turned this around in my mind, it was like, “Oh my gosh, this makes so much sense.” And that kind of helped peel back that layer of judgment and frustration and maybe even anger or, not necessarily anger at other people, but anger at myself for feeling jealous.

Jealousy is a by-product of an incredibly normal biological thought process. My friends, you and I compare ourselves; this is normal. This is natural. This is exactly what your brain is actually supposed to do. Way, way, way back in caveman days, we had to compare ourselves to other people. We had to conform to the normative, the norm of our tribe, otherwise we would be cast out. We would die. If we didn't compare ourselves to make sure that we were fitting in, we could die. So of course we compare ourselves.

The problem with comparing yourself is when we make it mean something more than simply, “I am the same” or “I am different.” “I am the same” can bring about a feeling of, “Okay, I fit in. This is all good here.” “I am different” can have a lot of different responses, therefore that means that I'm wrong or therefore that means that somebody else is wrong. We can respond to these two things that are different from each other in a lot of different ways. This was actually something else that I saw when I was doing my little bit of Google research. The way that people define jealousy is kind of, not necessarily in response to but in conjunction with lots of other emotions – like anger, resentment, bitterness. It was super interesting to me that most definitions of jealousy went hand in hand with all of these other emotions. And I'm going to get to that in just a little bit here.

Here's what I'd like you to know about the comparison thing. What frequently happens when we compare ourselves and what really specifically I think happens when we compare ourselves with somebody else's weight loss success, or even somebody else's success at anything. I think it's particularly common to feel jealous of somebody else's weight loss success because jealousy – that comparison, that very normal comparison thing that we do – can evoke a scarcity thought in us. When we see that somebody else is having success, we very frequently make it mean that we can't, that there's only so much success in the world and that if somebody else has it, we can't have it.

Now, this is really obvious in the case of money, how we . . . I think we all feel that if one person has money that nobody else can, or that nobody else can have as much. I will tell you just really quickly, this is not entirely related, a little side step over here. This is some of the biggest work that I have done on my money mindset is that actually there is not an unlimited amount of money, but there is so much money in the world it might as well be unlimited. Just because one person has some, it does not mean that there is not enough for everybody else.

The way that money works is that there actually is plenty, and it moves around a lot so that it's not just a fixed number – here's an X number of dollars that are ever going to exist in the world, and if one person has a larger slice of the pie, nobody else gets as much. Money just really doesn't work that way. And spoiler alert for what we're going to talk about a little bit later: weight loss definitely doesn't work that way. Somebody else's body has literally nothing to do with what your body is capable of doing. Okay. So we also, when we do the comparison thing, it can feel like we personally come up short, not just in the scarcity way, but also in the self-worth way. If somebody else has something we want, we can make it mean that we are not worthy of having the thing that we want.

I find this one to be particularly thorny and the crux of a lot of the work that I have done on myself. The two places that I have really, really specifically felt just a lot of jealousy in my lifetime, number one is absolutely with money. I had a lot of work on jealousy with money to do before I could come into my own abundance mindset. We actually talked about this quite a bit, this scarcity thinking on Episode 50 (Getting Older https://pahlabfitness.com/getting-older/), which we were talking about getting older, but I talked about getting older as it related to my money mindset, because it was a very scarcity mindset that I needed to work on – to think about and to think through. So thinking about jealousy as being part of a scarcity mindset, you might get some really good nuggets over on Episode 50. But thinking about jealousy as being a lack of self-worth, this one is absolutely something that I have butted up against frankly, butting up against on my YouTube journey.

I literally just this morning was journaling about whether or not I am worthy of YouTube success. I am, but what I was finding were my thoughts about my worthiness of YouTube success, because I noticed this is one of the ways in which jealousy came to me. Over the course of the past couple of weeks, I have noticed myself playing the compare and despair game on YouTube lately. It is something I haven't done in a really long time. When I was first starting on YouTube, I used to look at other fitness trainers' YouTube channels all the time, constantly reminding myself of how they were better than me and how I was never going to have this success. And the only reason that they were successful is because they were prettier and younger and thinner and fitter and better. And all of the ways in which there was scarcity. Because they had some kind of resource that was not enough for me and all kinds of self-worth – if they have it, it means that I can't. And I never will because I'm not good enough. And I noticed that “not good enough” thing coming up again lately. So, so interesting to me how this comes around and around and how it showed up for me.

Here, let me move forward. We're going to move into what to do about jealousy before I finish telling that story, because I do have practical steps. As I said, I wanted to discuss the intellectual nature of what jealousy is, but also when you feel it, what do you want to do with that? Well, here, number one, recognize it. And I know this sounds so obvious, but here's what I noticed. I didn't think I was feeling jealous. I was so resistant to feeling jealous that I didn't even want to name it, I didn't even want to claim it, I didn't want it to exist at all, and yet I was doing all the jealousy things. I was comparing myself. I was spending time looking at other people's channels. I was looking at my numbers and looking at their numbers.

And what I heard in my head was that I was justifying it as research, which to be fair is something that I mean. Technically speaking, I'm supposed to do that if somebody else is getting views and subscribers. It is a good thing to look at what they're doing and see if there are tactics or techniques or words or visuals that might work with my own strategy in order to reach that same audience. So yes, technically it is a business strategy to compare myself with other people. But I will tell you from the churning in my stomach, oh, I was not just doing a business analysis. I was definitely creating jealousy for myself. So recognizing jealousy is the first step. The other thing that I was thinking about really specifically when I was thinking about jealousy, I was thinking about how it shows up, how people talk about it or react to it, or behave from their reactions to jealousy.

And I was thinking about how, when I was a kid – no, not just when I was a kid, I mean, ongoing – that one of the things I heard very frequently from my parents was, "Well, it must be nice." ”It must be nice” is jealousy. Y'all, I want you to know when we are behaving, reacting in that snarky sarcastic way, that is a reaction to jealousy.

And the thing about that is that in and of itself, that snarky reaction doesn't feel like jealousy and that's really, again, where we're coming back to. This is why step number one is simply to recognize it. What we frequently do when we feel jealous is we react to it by judging ourselves and then feeling bad about that, and then feeling something else. We often don't recognize the feeling of jealousy because we have shoved it aside and then have done something else that feels like something else. So when you can simply recognize that what you are feeling is jealousy, that offers you the first step to resolving it.

So step number two, always because jealousy is a feeling, you know I'm going to tell you to find the thought. When you recognize that you are feeling the feeling, which I think is where most of us come at this, I would be hard pressed to say that I have ever actually heard the thought of “She has what I want” in its entirety, in my head like that. If I had ever heard that thought, I would've recognized that it created jealousy, but I had to go searching for that thought. So find the thought that is creating the jealousy for you. Generally speaking, this is going to be something so incredibly simple. “She has what I want” is probably pretty similar to what's going on in your head.

So step two A, here is to just have a lot of compassion for yourself for that one. Because there is a biological basis for this thought. We are supposed to compare ourselves. We're supposed to, and we're supposed to recognize that our comparison means something about us. “Do I fit in or do I not fit in?” That's what your brain is supposed to do. So have compassion for yourself for the fact that you are comparing and noticing that somebody else has something that you want. And let me be really, really clear here. It is not going to stop you from having that thought. It's not going to stop you from ever feeling jealous. It's going to help you allow the feeling of jealousy. It's never my intention to teach you how to not feel something ever again. I actually want you to feel things.

I want you to feel things all the way through because it doesn't last for very long, and when we are not resisting or reacting or avoiding our feelings, they're not difficult. They come up, they swell up, they are, for me, almost always snotty. Almost always involve tears. Almost always – no, always – involve sweating and feeling uncomfortable. And then they dissipate. I don't want you to not feel. Imagine if you didn't feel your feelings. You would just have a flat affect all day, every day. You'd be a sociopath. Not having feelings is not the goal. Allowing yourself to have all the feelings all the time and knowing that it doesn't mean anything bad about you is my goal for you. Allow yourself to feel jealous because you have compassion for why you are feeling it. So this is step three: allow yourself to feel the jealousy.

Here's what happened to me when I resolved a jealousy feeling that I was having, again involving YouTube. I was comparing myself with a specific person who has over a million subscribers, and I was feeling lots of jealousy. The thing that was happening though is that I was noticing the jealous thought, and then . . . I'm going to step ahead of myself. You guys, feeling the jealousy is step three. Step four is managing your other reactions. And what I mean by managing is simply recognizing that you have other thoughts about your feeling of jealousy. I call these collateral thoughts because you (and I) have a thought that creates a feeling and we don't want to feel that feeling and therefore everything else that happens after that is actually kind of a reaction or a resistance or an avoidance of feeling that jealousy.

And this is actually what I think most of us actually label as jealousy – the bitterness, the despair, the defeat, the anger, the hatred, the judginess. All of that other junk that comes out is actually a reaction to jealousy. Because here's what happened. When I had the original thought of, “She has what I want,” I immediately started thinking other things, like “I hate that she has that.” You guys, oh my God. You're about to hear some things about me that you might not like, that I didn't like having in my own head, which was a whole other layer of the onion of me judging myself for even having these thoughts. But here you go. This is how we react to jealousy with other thoughts that create other feelings. "I hate that she has that success. She's not very good. I wish all of her subscribers would leave her." I can't even say that with a straight face. I'm so embarrassed to even admit that. I'm so embarrassed by that. But there you go, that's what my brain offered me.

There was more. You guys, I'm sweating. I'm going to allow myself to feel this embarrassment while I'm in the middle of the podcast, because that was uncomfortable. “I'll never get there. I'm doing everything wrong.” I get stuck in that one pretty frequently. “I'm doing everything wrong” paired with, “I'm not doing anything right,” which is so interesting. They're very similar and yet very different. And they have similar but different feelings. So here's what I'm going to encourage you to do. When you are managing your reactions (aka your collateral thoughts), write them all down and just be really uncomfortable with all of the other feelings that they bring up.

You guys, when you are feeling jealousy in and of itself, here was the thing that surprised me. It didn't feel like very much. Jealousy is almost nothing. It was a really quiet kind of “meh” emotion that took less than a minute to completely resolve. “She has what I want” didn't feel like much at all. Oh, but the defeat, the hopelessness, the bitterness, the vindictiveness, the anger, the sarcasm, snarky, bitchy feeling, and then all of the judgment that I had for myself for being a person who thinks these things and feels these things – that was what was uncomfortable and took a little bit more time.

Allowing myself to simply feel the defeat and recognize that it came from a thought. Allowing myself to feel the hopelessness and recognize that it came from a thought. Allowing myself to feel the bitterness – did not care for that one, wanted to resist that one, desperately wanted to avoid that one, felt it all the way through. Did not want to feel vindictiveness all the way through, but did. Did not want to feel anger, although I've gotten better at anger. We've talked about this many times on the podcast. Anger doesn't frighten me, I don't avoid anger the way that I used to. So feeling that one all the way through didn't take very long. All of the judgment that I had for myself is actually step five: simply forgive yourself. Resolve this guilty, judgy thing because your brain is supposed to think these things. It is. It's supposed to.

Your brain is supposed to compare you with other people. I think your brain is supposed to not want to feel uncomfortable feelings. This is pretty primitive. We seek pleasure; we avoid pain. Feelings can feel uncomfortable, aka painful. Wanting to avoid an uncomfortable feeling is also incredibly natural. All of this – this whole giant mess of yuck that we feel when we are jealous – it's all just completely normal and okay. And allow yourself to feel it. Pull that stinky, disgusting mass of hair out of the drain and just allow the water to flow through. And please, please throw that stinky mass of hair away. Go get rid of it. Take it on out to the outside garbage. It's gross. It's smelly. It's disgusting. But pull it up, notice it's there, and just allow the water to flow.

You guys, it's uncomfortable, it's snotty, it's sweaty, it's complicated. And I say that like a fact – that's an opinion. It feels complicated to me because I have the thought that there's a lot going on with jealousy. Jealousy itself is actually pretty simple, and the resolution to it, I'm going to call it simple, but not easy. You get a lot of opportunity with jealousy to feel a lot of feelings all the way through.

That was good. There was a lot to dig into there, and I think this one was helpful. I think this one was helpful for me, whether or not it was helpful for you. I actually know for a fact that this was helpful for me because I love to know why my brain does things, and I love to know what to do next, and I love the opportunity to feel my feelings all the way through.

For me personally, jealousy allowed me to feel a lot of other feelings, and therefore I'm going to put this one in the win column. You guys, I hope this was a win for you. I will literally see you next week on Zoom. And by the way, if, for whatever reason you can't make it to the live Zoom, I do have the replay available. I still want you to come and join the conversation, whether you can be there live or not. Come and join the conversation afterwards because I'm going to be posting the replay in all the normal places that I post the podcast the day afterwards. So it'll come out on Monday instead of Sunday like it normally does. So join me on Sunday, January 30th. Make sure that you register in the show notes or description box wherever you are watching or listening, and I will see you soon. Thanks for listening.

If you're getting a lot out of the Fitness Matters Podcast and you're ready to take it to the next level, you are going to love the Get Your Goal coaching and accountability group. We take all the theory and knowledge here on the podcast and actually apply it in real life on your real weight loss and fitness goals. It's hands on, it's fun, and it works. Find out more at pahlabfitness.com/get-your-goal and let's get your goal.

Listen to the full episode here, and be sure to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

Originally aired January 23, 2022
Today’s we’re taking a deep dive into JEALOUSY and how you have more power⚡️ than you think when it comes to this feeling (and other ones!)
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Meet Your Host

Mindset expert and certified life coach Pahla B knows a thing or two about changing your mind to change your weight and your life. She’s the creator of The 5-0 Method, Amazon-best selling author of the book “Mind Over Menopause,” and former yo-yo dieter who has cracked the code on lifelong weight maintenance. Join Pahla B each week for the personal insights, transformative mindset shifts, and science-backed body advice that can help you lose all the weight you want and keep it off forever.