When a Colleague's Pay Raise Leaves You Feeling Unsettled: Things to Reflect On
makedreamJuly 27, 2026
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Mental Health
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Once you pass the 3-year mark in your career, your mindset can subtly shift into a tangle of complex emotions. You have a decent handle on how your own work runs, yet news of a desk neighbor's promotion or rumors of someone else's substantial pay raise can cause your heart to drop.
When Incruit surveyed office workers with over five years of experience, 90.6% reported experiencing a career slump. The primary cause was job dissatisfaction, followed by boredom and low salary. Interestingly, nearly half of them tried to handle the situation by escaping through a job change rather than resolving the root problem.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called this mental state ressentiment—which roughly translates to resentment or envy. When we feel powerless to change our own lives, human nature activates a very convenient defense mechanism. We belittle others' achievements by thinking, "They must have cut corners," or we wrap our identity in moral superiority, telling ourselves, "At least I don't live like such a snob."
Looking at a high-performing colleague and concluding, "That person has no work-life balance," is a defensive signal sent by your mind. In psychology, envy is divided into two types: malicious envy and benign envy. The former wishes for the other person to fail, while the latter acknowledges their achievement and uses it as fuel to elevate oneself.
You cannot completely stop the initial sting of jealousy. However, you can give that emotion a name.
This simple exercise alone can dramatically reduce how often you get immediately swept away by emotion. It transforms another person's success into objective data to analyze.
Tearing others down offers an immediate sense of relief. But if you pull out a calculator, it is a horribly losing trade. Survey data on office workers shows that average individuals spend 30 minutes to an hour every day gossiping or complaining at work. Add the time spent stewing over other people's social media, and daily productivity drops by more than 20%.
Psychologists Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl call this behavior "short-term mood repair." It is merely a disposable bandage placed on a momentary wound—in the long run, it corrodes your ability to solve the underlying problem.
To stop wasting emotional energy, you need to change your environment first.
Saving just one hour a day gives you 20 hours a month. That is more than enough time to build your own skill set.
The reason we get angry at others' achievements is that we only see the outcome, not the process. It mirrors the iceberg model in organizational psychology. The visible salary or title accounts for only 10%. Resting beneath the surface's 90% are overtime hours, chronic stress, and the fear of failure.
You need to break down the real costs hidden behind their success.
If you have no intention of making that trade, the matter is settled. It is simply an opportunity cost incurred as the price of choosing your current comfort. Once you finish this calculation, the feeling of inferiority naturally extinguishes itself.
You cannot fully control other people's evaluations or company titles. Goals where the initiative lies in the hands of others inevitably breed anxiety. The only way forward is to shift your benchmark to an internal locus of control that measures only your own actions.
Strip away external outcomes and create a weekly scorecard:
When you step away from the gaze of others and focus on breaking your own records, stress decreases while real capability accumulates.
The essence of self-rationalization is not laziness, but fear. Feeling anxious, the brain's amygdala overrides reason and chooses avoidance. To break this loop, you must trick your brain by breaking tasks down into tiny pieces.
When you complete a single small action, your brain remembers the experience of success. The only way to end a life spent standing still while finding fault with others is to actually carry out the smallest thing you can do today.