We’ve all been there. After months of planning, applying and interviewing, you finally land your dream role. At first, everything at the office seems perfect. Then, within just a few months, you start daydreaming about a different role at a different office. You can’t help feeling jealous of your friend’s fancy office parties or your sister’s flexible working hours. It feels like everyone else has it slightly better than you.

Or maybe, you go through a similar process when it comes to relationships. You meet someone who seems ideal for you on the apps. You go on a few dates. So far so good. Then, a few months into the relationship, you start noticing signs that your relationship might not be quite as strong or quite as healthy as the relationships you see playing out online or amongst your social circle. So, you jump ship, hoping that the next relationship will be even better.

This constant feeling that things should just be – well – a little bit better than they are is known as ‘grass is greener syndrome’. While it may not be a real, medically recognised condition, it is certainly a very real phenomenon in which we gaze over the (metaphorical) fence and admire our neighbours’ (metaphorical) grass. Compared to our own grass, it looked just a touch more green! And so, we fixate on it and fail to see all of the great things about our own grass. Or, as Ragini Jha at Cardamom Consulting explains it, “We tend to idealise the unknown while focusing on the negatives of our current situation.”

And we can do this with just about any aspect of our lives: jobs, relationships, friendships, clothes… everything.

While always looking to make our lives better isn’t an intrinsic problem in itself, getting into a “grass is greener” thought pattern does have its dangers. Here’s what Jha says about where it comes from, why we do it and, most importantly, how we can stop.

Is the grass always greener? When to stick and when to twist, according to a psychologist