Does your morning ever look like this? You wake up, open your phone and are immediately confronted with an Instagram photo dump of a luxury holiday a friend has taken, only to be reminded that your own annual leave has run out. On the way into work, you spy a woman with the designer bag you’ve had your eye on for months but can’t afford. Later, your email pings with a LinkedIn notification asking you to congratulate your colleague on their promotion, yet you’ve been working at the same level for years. Between the WhatsApp groups announcing yet another friend’s engagement to the shopping hauls your favourite influencer posts online, there’s no denying that living in a society that encourages us to constantly publicise our ‘wins’ makes it incredibly easy to feel like everyone else in the world is doing better than you.

In real-time, we can watch someone driving a nicer car, going out for fancy dinners or generally having an all-round better time of life than we feel we’re having ourselves. And even when we know we’re only seeing the highlight reel, the constant portrayal of the ‘perfect life’ online can so easily send us into a spiral of shame and open the door to the familiar green-eyed monster known as jealousy.

Even admitting to being jealous feels uncomfortable, a bit juvenile even. Envy is often presented as something we experience as children and then grow out of when we stop coveting someone else’s cooler school bag or how many more presents they got for Christmas. Yet for many of us, jealousy is hard-wired into us as adults, a symptom of a world filled with constant opportunities to measure ourselves up against our peers and see how we fare. In fact, young people are more likely to get jealous than any other age group, according to a study that found eight out of 10 people under-30 admitted to being envious of someone else in the past year.

Confessions of a green-eyed monster: “I’m so jealous of others it’s ruining my friendships and career”