Managing Jealousy

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Jealousy is often thought of as a young people’s affliction, but it can affect us at any age—whether we are the one being jealous, or perhaps a partner.

And, the “green-eyed monster” can really ruin a lot of things; relationships, friendships, general happiness, physical health even (per stress and anxiety and bad sleep), and more.

The thing is, jealousy looks like one thing, but is actually mostly another.

Jealousy is a Scooby-Doo villain

That is to say: we can unmask it and see what much less threatening thing is underneath. Which is usually nothing more nor less than: insecurities

  • Insecurity about losing one’s partner
  • Insecurity about not being good enough
  • Insecurity about looking bad socially

…etc. The latter, by the way, is usually the case when one’s partner is socially considered to be giving cause for jealousy, but the primary concern is not actually relational loss or any kind of infidelity, but rather, looking like one cannot keep one’s partner’s full attention romantically/sexually. This drives a lot of people to act on jealousy for the sake of appearances, in situations where they might otherwise, if they didn’t feel like they’d be adversely judged for it, be considerably more chill.

Thus, while monogamy certainly has its fine merits, there can also be a kind of “toxic monogamy” at hand, where a relationship becomes unhealthy because one partner is just trying to live up to social expectations of keeping the other partner in check.

This, by the way, is something that people in polyamorous and/or open relationships typically handle quite neatly, even if a lot of the following still applies. But today, we’re making the statistically safe assumption of a monogamous relationship, and talking about that!

How to deal with the social aspect

If you sit down with your partner and work out in advance the acceptable parameters of your relationship, you’ll be ahead of most people already. For example…

  • What counts as cheating? Is it all and any sex acts with all and any people? If not, where’s the line?
  • What about kissing? What about touching other body parts? If there are boundaries that are important to you, talk about them. Nothing is “too obvious” because it’s astonishing how many times it will happen that later someone says (in good faith or not), “but I thought…”
  • What about being seen in various states of undress? Or seeing other people in various states of undress?
  • Is meaningless flirting between friends ok, and if so, how do we draw the line with regard to what is meaningless? And how are we defining flirting, for that matter? Talk about it and ensure you are both on the same page.
  • If a third party is possibly making moves on one of us under the guise of “just being friendly”, where and how do we draw the line between friendliness and romantic/sexual advances? What’s the difference between a lunch date with a friend and a romantic meal out for two, and how can we define the difference in a way that doesn’t rely on subjective “well I didn’t think it was romantic”?

If all this seems like a lot of work, please bear in mind, it’s a lot more fun to cover this cheerfully as a fun couple exercise in advance, than it is to argue about it after the fact!

See also: Boundary-Setting Beyond “No”

How to deal with the more intrinsic insecurities

For example, when jealousy is a sign of a partner fearing not being good enough, not measuring up, or perhaps even losing their partner.

The key here might not shock you: communication

Specifically, reassurance. But critically, the correct reassurance!

A partner who is jealous will often seek the wrong reassurance, for example wanting to read their partner’s messages on their phone, or things like that. And while a natural desire when experiencing jealousy, it’s not actually helpful. Because while incriminating messages could confirm infidelity, it’s impossible to prove a negative, and if nothing incriminating is found, the jealous partner can just go on fearing the worst regardless. After all, their partner could have a burner phone somewhere, or a hidden app for cheating, or something else like that. So, no reassurance can ever be given/gained by such requests (which can also become unpleasantly controlling, which hopefully nobody wants).

A quick note on “if you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide”: rhetorically that works, but practically it doesn’t.

Writer’s example: when my late partner and I formalized our relationship, we discussed boundaries, and I expressed “so far as I am concerned, I have no secrets from you, except secrets that are not mine to share. For example, if someone has confided in me and asked that I not share it, I won’t. Aside from that, you have access-all-areas in my life; me being yours has its privileges” and this policy itself would already pre-empt any desire to read my messages.

Now indeed, I had nothing to hide. I am by character devoted to a fault. But my friends may well sometimes have things they don’t want me to share, which made that a necessary boundary to highlight (which my partner, an absolute angel by the way and not prone to unhealthy manifestations of jealousy in any case, understood completely).

So, it is best if the partner of a jealous person can explain the above principles as necessary, and offer the correct reassurance instead. Which could be any number of things, but for example:

  • I am yours, and nobody else has a chance
  • I fully intend to stay with you for life
  • You are the best partner I have ever had
  • Being with you makes my life so much better

…etc. Note that none of these are “you don’t have to worry about so-and-so”, or “I am not cheating on you”, etc, because it’s about yours and your partner’s relationship. If they ask for reassurances with regard to other people or activities, by all means state them as appropriate, but try to keep the focus on you two.

And if your partner (or you, if it’s you who’s jealous) can express the insecurity in the format…

“I’m afraid of _____ because _____”

…then the “because” will allow for much more specific reassurance. We all have insecurities, we all have reasons we might fear not being good enough for our partner, or losing their affection, and the best thing we can do is choose to trust our partners at least enough to discuss those fears openly with each other.

See also: Save Time With Better Communication ← this can avoid a lot of time-consuming arguments

What about if the insecurity is based in something demonstrably correct?

By this we mean, something like a prior history of cheating, or other reasons for trust issues. In such a case, the jealous partner may well have a reason for their jealousy that isn’t based on a personal insecurity.

In our previous article about boundaries, we talked about relationships (romantic or otherwise) having a “price of entry”. In this case, you each have a “price of entry”:

  • The “price of entry” to being with the person who has previously cheated (or similar), is being able to accept that.
  • And for the person who cheated (or similar), very likely their partner will have the “price of entry” of “don’t do that again, and also meanwhile accept in good grace that I might be jittery about it”.

And, if the betrayal of trust was something that happened between the current partners in the current relationship, most likely that was also traumatic for the person whose trust was betrayed. Many people in that situation find that trust can indeed be rebuilt, but slowly, and the pain itself may also need treatment (such as therapy and/or couples therapy specifically).

See also: Relationships: When To Stick It Out & When To Call It Quits ← this covers both sides

And finally, to finish on a happy note:

Only One Kind Of Relationship Promotes Longevity This Much!

Take care!

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  • Plum vs Persimmon – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing plum to persimmon, we picked the plum.

    Why?

    Looking at the macros first, persimmon has 3x the carbs for only the same amount of fiber, on account of which plum has the lower glycemic index, so we’ll go with plum here, though your opinion could vary.

    In terms of vitamins, it’s much less subjective: plums have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, E, K, and choline, while persimmon has more vitamin C. So, unless you have scurvy, plums will be the best choice for most people.

    In the category of minerals, plums have more copper, magnesium, manganese, and zinc, while persimmon has more calcium, iron, phosphorus, and potassium—thus, a 4:4 tie on minerals.

    Adding up the sections gives an overall win for plums, but of course, enjoy either or both; diversity is good!

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    Enjoy!

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  • ADHD… As An Adult?

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    ADHD—not just for kids!

    Consider the following:

    • If a kid has consistent problems paying attention, it’s easy and common to say “Aha, ADHD!”
    • If a young adult has consistent problems paying attention, it’s easy and common to say “Aha, a disinterested ne’er-do-well!”
    • If an older adult has consistent problems paying attention, it’s easy and common to say “Aha, a senior moment!”

    Yet, if we recognize that ADHD is fundamentally a brain difference in children (and we do; there are physiological characteristics that we can test), and we can recognize that as people get older our brains typically have less neuroplasticity (ability to change) than when we are younger rather than less, then… Surely, there are just as many adults with ADHD as kids!

    After all, that rather goes with the linear nature of time and the progressive nature of getting older.

    So why do kids get diagnoses so much more often than adults?

    Parents—and schools—can find children’s ADHD challenging, and it’s their problem, so they look for an explanation, and ADHD isn’t too difficult to find as a diagnosis.

    Meanwhile, adults with ADHD have usually developed coping mechanisms, have learned to mask and/or compensate for their symptoms, and we expect adults to manage their own problems, so nobody’s rushing to find an explanation on their behalf.

    Additionally, the stigma of neurodivergence—especially something popularly associated with children—isn’t something that many adults will want for themselves.

    But, if you have an ADHD brain, then recognizing that (even if just privately to yourself) can open the door to much better management of your symptoms… and your life.

    So what does ADHD look like in adults?

    ADHD involves a spread of symptoms, and not everyone will have them all, or have them in the same magnitude. However, very commonly most noticeable traits include:

    • Lack of focus (ease of distraction)
      • Conversely: high focus (on the wrong things)
        • To illustrate: someone with ADHD might set out to quickly tidy the sock drawer, and end up Marie Kondo-ing their entire wardrobe… when they were supposed to doing something else
    • Poor time management (especially: tendency to procrastinate)
    • Forgetfulness (of various kinds—for example, forgetting information, and forgetting to do things)

    Want To Take A Quick Test? Click Here ← this one is reputable, and free. No sign in required; the test is right there.

    Wait, where’s the hyperactivity in this Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder?

    It’s often not there. ADHD is simply badly-named. This stems from how a lot of mental health issues are considered by society in terms of how much they affect (and are observable by) other people. Since ADHD was originally noticed in children (in fact being originally called “Hyperkinetic Reaction of Childhood”), it ended up being something like:

    “Oh, your brain has an inconvenient relationship with dopamine and you are driven to try to correct that by shifting attention from boring things to stimulating things? You might have trouble-sitting-still disorder”

    Hmm, this sounds like me (or my loved one); what to do now at the age of __?

    Some things to consider:

    • If you don’t want medication (there are pros and cons, beyond the scope of today’s article), you might consider an official diagnosis not worth pursuing. That’s fine if so, because…
    • More important than whether or not you meet certain diagnostic criteria, is whether or not the strategies recommended for it might help you.
    • Whether or not you talk to other people about it is entirely up to you. Maybe it’s a stigma you’d rather avoid… Or maybe it’ll help those around you to better understand and support you.
      • Either way, you might want to learn more about ADHD in adults. Today’s article was about recognizing it—we’ll write more about managing it another time!

    In the meantime… We recommended a great book about this a couple of weeks ago; you might want to check it out:

    Click here to see our review of “The Silent Struggle: Taking Charge of ADHD in Adults”!

    Note: the review is at the bottom of that page. You’ll need to scroll past the video (which is also about ADHD) without getting distracted by it and forgetting you were there to see about the book. So:

    1. Click the above link
    2. Scroll straight to the review!

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  • Upgrade Your Life – by Pat Divilly

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    We know that we should eat for brain health, but often that knowledge doesn’t go a lot further than “we should eat some nuts… but also not the wrong nuts, which would be bad”.

    However, as Dr. Lisa Mosconi lays out for us, there’s a lot more than that!

    This book is as much a treatise of brain health in the context of nutrition, as it is a “eat this and avoid that” guide.

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    Whereas in reality: much of what we eat interacts positively or negatively with other things, and thus needs to be kept in balance. And not only that, but other peri-nutritional factors play a big part too! From obvious things like hydration, to less obvious things like maintaining good gut microbiota, our brains rely on us to do a lot of things for them.

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    Don’t Forget…

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  • How To Avoid Self-Hatred & Learn To Love Oneself More

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Alain de Botton gives a compassionate, but realistic, explanation in this video:

    The enemy within

    Or rather, the collaborator within. Because there’s usually first an enemy without—those who are critical of us, who consider that we are bad people in some fashion, and may indeed get quite colorful in their expressions of this.

    Sometimes, their words will bounce straight off us; sometimes, their words will stick. So what’s the difference, and can we do anything about it?

    The difference is: when their words stick, it’s usually because on some level we believe their words may be true. That doesn’t mean they necessarily are true!

    They could be (and it would be a special kind of hubris to assume no detractor could ever find a valid criticism of us), but very often the reason we have that belief, or at least that fear/insecurity, is simply because it was taught to us at an early age, often by harsh words/actions of those around us; perhaps our parents, perhaps our schoolteachers, perhaps our classmates, and so forth.

    The problem—and solution—is that we learn emotions much the same way that we learn language; only in part by reasoned thought, and rather for the most part, by immersion and repetition.

    It can take a lot of conscious self-talk to undo the harm of decades of unconscious self-talk based on what was probably a few years of external criticisms when we were small and very impressionable… But, having missed the opportunity to start fixing this sooner, the next best time to do it is now.

    We cannot, of course, simply do what a kind friend might do and expect any better results; if a kind friend tells us something nice that we do not believe is true, then however much they mean it, we’re not going to internalize it. So instead, we must simply chip away at those unhelpful longstanding counterproductive beliefs, and simply build up the habit of viewing ourselves in a kinder light.

    For more on all this, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

    Take care!

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  • Sleep Tracking, For Five Million Nights

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    5 Sleep Phenotypes, By Actual Science

    You probably know people can be broadly divided into “early birds” and “night owls”:

    Early Bird Or Night Owl? Genes vs Environment

    …and then the term “hummingbird” gets used for a person who flits between the two.

    That’s three animals so far. If you read a book we reviewed recently, specifically this one:

    The Power of When – by Dr. Michael Breus

    …then you may have used the guide within to self-diagnose your circadian rhythm type (chronotype) according to Dr. Breus’s system, which divides people into bears, lions, wolves, and dolphins.

    That’s another four animals. If you have a FitBit, it can “diagnose” you with being those and/or a menagerie of others, such as giraffe, hedgehog, parrot, and tortoise:

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    Five million nights

    A team of researchers recently took a step away from this veritable zoo of 11 different animals and counting, and used a sophisticated modelling system to create a spatial-temporal map of people’s sleep habits, and this map created five main “islands” that people’s sleep habits could settle on, or sometimes move from island to island.

    Those “five million nights” by the way? It was actually 5,095,798 nights! You might notice that would take from the 2020s to the 15970s to complete, so this was rather a matter of monitoring 33,152 individuals between January and October of the same year. Between them, they got those 5,095,798 nights of sleep (or in some cases, nights of little or no sleep, but still, they were there for the nights).

    The five main phenotypes that the researchers found were:

    1. What we think of as “normal” sleep. In this phenotype, people get about eight hours of uninterrupted sleep for at least six days in a row.
    2. As above for half the nights, but they only sleep for short periods of time in bouts of less than three hours the other half.
    3. As per normal sleep, but with one interrupted night per week, consisting of a 5 hour sleep period and then broken sleep for a few more hours.
    4. As per normal sleep generally, but with occasional nights in which long bouts of sleep are separated by a mid-sleep waking.
    5. Sleeping for very short periods of time every night. This phenotype was the rarest the researchers found, and represents extremely disrupted sleep.

    As you might suspect, phenotype 1 is healthier than phenotype 5. But that’s not hugely informational, as the correlation between getting good sleep and having good health is well-established. So, what did the study teach us?

    ❝We found that little changes in sleep quality helped us identify health risks. Those little changes wouldn’t show up on an average night, or on a questionnaire, so it really shows how wearables help us detect risks that would otherwise be missed.❞

    ~ Dr. Benjamin Smarr

    More specifically,

    ❝We found that the little differences in how sleep disruptions occur can tell us a lot. Even if these instances are rare, their frequency is also telling. So it’s not just whether you sleep well or not – it’s the patterns of sleep over time where the key info hides❞

    ~ Dr. Edward Wang

    …and, which gets to the absolute point,

    ❝If you imagine there’s a landscape of sleep types, then it’s less about where you tend to live on that landscape, and more about how often you leave that area❞

    ~ Dr. Varun Viswanath

    In other words: if your sleep pattern is not ideal, that’s one thing and it’d probably be good to address it, by improving your sleep. However, if your sleep pattern changes phenotype without an obvious known reason why, this may be considered an alarm bell warning of something else that needs addressing, which may be an underlying illness or condition—meaning it can be worthwhile being a little extra vigilant when it comes to regular health screenings, in case something new has appeared.

    Want to read more?

    You can read the paper in full here:

    Five million nights: temporal dynamics in human sleep phenotypes

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

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