Regret-induced jealousy, how to deal with this?

[shivajikobardan]

It is sad to say but I ruined my engineering university life by not studying. I was suffering from various mental health issues. And I didn't know I needed to visit doctor for it and I was not self conscious and wasted my time on lots of useless things like making a blog, trying to make money online and so on..I absolutely regret. Now slowly, I am back on track. But whenever I see someone who is aware of stuffs that I am aware now, and is younger than me, I feel so jealous as that makes me remember my regrets very much.
How do I deal with this?

 

[sysprog]

<peptalk>Be glad that you're alive, and carry on. Get over the anger by accepting, as often as you need to, that no-one is to blame. Understand always that everyone sees something or someone as enviable. Healthy people don't dwell on it so much as they turn it into stronger resolve to attend to and achieve their aspirations. Try to be busy, but not frantically busy. Recognize that envy and self-pity are counterproductive. Each day seek to accomplish something useful.</peptalk>

 

[shivajikobardan]

<peptalk>Be glad that you're alive, and carry on. Get over the anger by accepting, as often as you need to, that no-one is to blame. Understand always that everyone sees something or someone as enviable. Healthy people don't dwell on it so much as they turn it into stronger resolve to attend to and achieve their aspirations. Try to be busy, but not frantically busy. Recognize that envy and self-pity are counterproductive. Each day seek to accomplish something useful.</peptalk>

yeah I don't get this feeling most of the times. It had been 1 year since I got this type of feeling, but suddenly I got triggered again. And Looks like I am going to be back on a loop. IDK man.

 

[Rive]

I would say it's completely normal. As long as you recognize the feeling and don't let it influence you (too much), it's just fine.
So just don't get obsessed with supressing it and let it pass as you move forward.

 

[sysprog]

yeah I don't get this feeling most of the times. It had been 1 year since I got this type of feeling, but suddenly I got triggered again. And Looks like I am going to be back on a loop. IDK man.

Every so often you have to do a reset on coping with your frustrations. It's like when you work serving the public, and you've been patient with a thousand people about a frequently-exhibited annoyance, and one day you encounter person 1001, and you unlease an impolite response to your pent-up annoyedness on him. But that person didn't annoy you a 1001 times, he, like all the others, did it to you only once, and should be afforded the same patience that you accord to everyone else. Don't forget that you've been making progress.

 

[shivajikobardan]

So just don't get obsessed with supressing it and let it pass as you move forward.

I mean that's the hardest part. I do realize. My regrets were burning my chest 1 year ago. Now, they aren't that much and suddenly I got triggered to the same state.
How do I stop obsessing over it? Any line of thought?

 

[sysprog]

I think that I can't offer much more here than I've already said.

 

[Rive]

How do I stop obsessing over it? Any line of thought?

Just accept this feeling being normal. Don't spend too much effort on it, since it won't help too much anyway.
Though it'll come back regularly, if you are on the right track it'll be weaker every time.

You have already noticed that time buries these kind of things. Just leave it to that and move forward.

If that helps, I too have some regret-flashbacks even from my childhood. Can't be helped. But I have a life and I intend to live that now. So I just don't spend too much time on that big pile of old garbage. I know it's there, it stinks sometimes, and that's that.

 

[Klystron]

I mean that's the hardest part. I do realize. My regrets were burning my chest 1 year ago. Now, they aren't that much and suddenly I got triggered to the same state.
How do I stop obsessing over it? Any line of thought?

When faced with recurring regrets I find comfort in the hoary maxim, "No matter what you do, you will regret it.".

The importance of imagining the past beyond feeling guilt, remorse and regret is to strive to improve your current interactions. Kindness to others also requires you be kind to yourself.

 

[Mondayman]

Take it from someone who spent a number of years drinking my time away. I made a lot of regretful decisions, some of which still burn at me from time to time. The key is in living in the moment, using past experiences as lessons for improving yourself. And in being kind to yourself as others say.

 

[Choppy]

The race is long and in the end, it's only with yourself.

Sure, it's easy to get jealous of people who've traveled an easier road, who made better choices, or even those who rolled the same dice you did and landed a natural twenty. But the thing is the past is the past and as much as you might want to, you can't change it.

When you feel yourself getting down about missed opportunities I think it's totally valid to recognize those feelings. But then try to focus on the future, on what's ahead for you, on improvements you can make moving forward.

Think about your long term goals. If you don't have any, maybe invest some time in establishing some.

Think about and develop a plan for getting to those goals. Break them into smaller goals. Think about how you're going to measure progress. Set a timeline for yourself.

Surround yourself with people who are moving in the same direction, people you can learn from, and grow with.

 

[DennisN]

It is sad to say but I ruined my engineering university life by not studying. I was suffering from various mental health issues. And I didn't know I needed to visit doctor for it and I was not self conscious and wasted my time on lots of useless things like making a blog, trying to make money online and so on..I absolutely regret. Now slowly, I am back on track. But whenever I see someone who is aware of stuffs that I am aware now, and is younger than me, I feel so jealous as that makes me remember my regrets very much.
How do I deal with this?

There is a technique which can be incredibly powerful for such things, and that is cognitive reframing.
See e.g.

• Cognitive reframing (Wikipedia)
• Reframing - The transformative power of suffering (Psychology Today)

(it's something I was taught by a quite knowledgeable person in this area, and I've used it with success)

For instance, one way to reframe the way you view the issue in your post is that despite the challenges you had, and the mistakes you made, you are back on track (you said yourself "Now slowly, I am back on track").

That's positive, and you could pat yourself on the back for that.

And you could work on reframing "I ruined my engineering university life" to "my engineering university life was delayed due to unexpected challenges".

Also, remember, we all make mistakes. Nobody is perfect (even more, perfection is an unrealistic illusion, I'd say ).

 

[Xogroroth]

How do I deal with this?

Easy.
Make up for it!
Finish your studies.

Question:
You suffered from mental issues.
Surely you knew back then:
Seeing you did not act, think nor feel like others did, was a dead give-away, no?

In my youth, I was a lone wolf.
I severely despised my peers, I found them so damn silly, childish, and far too busy/hectic for my liking.
Where they played outside, being all "stupid", my "activity" was encyclopedia and similar.
Since early child, I was reading these, in fact.

I was 6, tore my dad's music installation apart, put it back together ... and it worked.
And only, because I just HAD to know how it worked.

Same for the vacuum cleaner, and almost the TV we had.
If my dad did not arrive on time, I might have had quite a shocker (static electricity from the picture tube, which was of deadly voltages).

Of course, this made me an outsider.
We had one big "playground" in school, divided by a long building of toilets on both sides.
One side was for "the kiddies", the other side for the Humaniora (higher college), and while only 6 (and this up to my 12, until I went to the Humaniora myself), the Humaniora is where I was to be found.
Never on my own playground, since, these "silly kiddies" annoyed the flying hell out of me.

I also enjoyed to be around the elderly, who were so damn wise, life-experienced, patient (which was needed, you'll soon learn why), calm ... "my type of people".

But I was alone.
I noticed that.
Others my age were not like that, I was the only one.
And I was laughed with, ridiculed, but I cared less.
It never got to me.
What did was if someone got bullied:
I became a raging lunatic then (I could not stand injustice to others), and bullies got quite a beating then.

When I got older, and finally could act a bit on myself -not that prone to my parent's wishes any more- I went to see a psychologist.
And he fairly quickly got it figured out:
Serious case of ADHD (which was DAMN obvious: I could not sit stil for a second) (get it, why I loved the elderly being so patient?), and additionally ... quite severely so, as well.

Been tested:
Asperger's ... and all that came with it.
My hatred vs bullies and other injust things?
Well, Asperger's ...
The rage?
This sense of inability to cope with injustice and thus angered me ... fuelled by my ADHD!
Creating a quite explosive mixture.

In short:
I knew straight away, even as toddler, that i was different.
Once I could, took measures in my own hands, dealt with it.

You too should have picked something up in that regard, being different ... no?
So ... what happened?
Or, NOT?

 

[sysprog]

I might have had quite a shocker (static electricity from the picture tube, which was of deadly voltages).

Voltage is a measure of difference in electrical potential. By itself voltage isn't deadly or even shocking; current flow can be deadly, but current won't flow unless the voltage is high enough to overcome resistance.

Ten car batteries connected in parallel will provide more than enough current to be lethal, but if the batteries are connected in series, the 120v has only 1 battery's worth of current to deliver, so although they're still electrically dangerous like any car battery is, the series-connected batteries are nowhere near as dangerous as the parallel-connected ones are.

You can get a serious high-voltage shock from touching the anode of the cathode ray tube when the TV is on, but that's not from 'static' electricity; the anode is supplied by the flyback transformer, which produces strong AC at high voltage. The conductive coatings inside the CRT form a high-voltage capacitor, but the energy is only about 0.05 µJ (about 1 kilocalorie).

In a TV that's not plugged in, and which has ineffective (e.g. burned-out) quick-discharge resistors in the power supply, the large capacitors there can still zap you pretty hard.

 

[Fervent Freyja]

How do I stop obsessing over it? Any line of thought?

The only way I can get out of tunnel vision or overthinking is to take action towards what’s bothering me. Then there is relief. I cannot always do that. It’s hard.

When you know there are people better, smarter, or out there getting something that you want, then it’s natural to constantly compare yourself with them. It can be overwhelming if you don’t find your way back to who you are. I try to remember that I am enough where I am in life. Those people we compare ourselves with aren’t us. We don’t know why or how they got there. They may have fought hard for it or had it easier along the way. An objective perspective is helpful here: it’s good if someone is winning something even if I am not.

A good trick to mentally do with envy when you encounter it and it flares, is to make a split second decision about how you will handle it. Most of the time, I end up deciding that I appreciate trait/thing/skill/situation in that person when I realize it isn’t for me. The rest of the time, I will decide to let that inspire me. I’ll try it out and do more tests to see if that is genuinely something that suits me. If you don’t deal with the envy in the moment, it can fester. I’ve noticed that envy is very frequently accompanied by more important emotions. Often, there is a sense of injustice about the situation or they perceive the lucky person undeserving during the comparison. Other emotions like frustration or agitation can accompany envy. People that are down on luck or oppressed tend to be vulnerable to envious feelings. This has certainly happened to me during my hardest times. Personally, I would turn it inwardly and be harder on myself, which was the worst thing I could have done/do. It reads like you’ve had a hard life and I think these feelings are perfectly normal and a good thing that indicates that you are about to grow.

Your mental health is more important than achievements. I’m sorry that you’ve had to deal with this. It is, indeed, unfair. I think that you can get through this. Once we find awareness and we have a spark of drive, growth tends to happen naturally. You’ll get there and you are perfectly fine where you are at now!

Also, evaluate your environment though to make sure it isn’t a root cause of your mental health issues. There can be external oppressive factors that prevent us from healing and growing. Toxic people and bad relationships can hold us back. Escaping detrimental thought patterns are difficult if you are in a bad situation or around toxic people.

 

[Xogroroth]

In a TV that's not plugged in, and which has ineffective (e.g. burned-out) quick-discharge resistors in the power supply, the large capacitors there can still zap you pretty hard.

This, yes.
Being a child back then ... could've been quite a bad thing.

 

[berkeman]

Thread closed temporarily for Moderation...

Update: This thread has become a magnet for some posts that did not comply with the PF rules (those posts are now deleted), so this thread will be closed now, similar to the OP's other thread that was closed today.

Thank you to everybody who has been trying to help the OP get through their difficulties. There has been lots of good advice posted in this thread.