Many people confuse stress and envy…and it makes them miserable.

Is the emotion you are feeling stress, or envy?

Loved this little nugget of wisdom from @matthewmcounoghwy

“Stress is a word that has such a bad name right now, and I think it’s getting a bad name kind of unfairly,” he said. “Having a little bit of stress means you give a shit.”

“We’re labeling everything stress,” he says, pointing to a child psychologist he’s researched who interviewed children about what stresses them the most. “They were like, ‘Well, I don’t have as good of grades as Joe, I don’t have the shoes that Jane has, I don’t look as good as so and so’ and he says, ‘that’s not stress, that’s envy.’

As soon as he relabelled it envy for the child, the child was like, ‘Oh, I can deal with that. I just didn’t know how to deal with stress.’

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I have found distinction between stress and envy personally liberating and have also been using it with several of my coaching clients.

So, what’s the difference between stress and envy?

Simply said, stress is the experience of believing that we do not have the time resources or skill to accomplish our goals.

Envy is a feeling of discontentment caused by someone else’s success, possessions, or achievements.

Stress is based on us feeling we’re not able to do something we want to do.

Envy is based on the feeling we’re not able to do something someone else has done.

One is grounded in our personal

Goals, the other is grounded in comparison.

So, is there anything in your life currently stressing you out?

Is the goals that stresses you out truly important for you and the people that depend on you?

Or, does it exist because you are comparing yourself to someone else and what they have achieved?

A common example I see with my clients is in the area of money.

It is not uncommon for the people who have plenty of money to frequently feel stressed about having enough.

The anecdote lies in establishing personal goals that we can measure our progress against.

So, how much money do I need to feel financially abundant? And…how am I doing? From there it become easier to evaluate our progress towards our own goals, instead of simply comparing ourselves to someone else.

It’s great to get inspired by other people and their accomplishments on the path…

But if we value happiness, it’s important to remember that comparing ourselves to others is a fools errand.