Four Questions to Ask Yourself the Next Time You Feel Envious
This essay originally appeared in the Monday morning newsletter on 7/20/20.
When was the last time you felt envious?
Maybe you’ve felt envious scrolling through social media or hearing about someone else’s career advancement. Maybe you felt it while in conversation with a friend or family member.
We all feel envious from time to time. And I think we can all agree it’s not exactly a pleasant feeling, right?
When I think about the last time I felt envious, I instantly feel a mix of negative feelings like shame and even embarrassment.
But what if there was another meaning to our feeling of envy?
Before we ponder that, I think we need to start by defining what envy is and what envy is not.
Envy and jealousy are commonly used synonymously, but they actually have different definitions.
Both envy and jealousy elicit similar responses, but specifically, you feel envy when you want something someone else has and you feel jealousy over something you already have but are afraid of losing.
Additionally, according to an international team of research psychologists, there are actually two types of envy: malicious envy and benign envy.
Both involve comparing yourself to someone else. But with malicious envy your focus is on the person and wishing they didn’t have the advantage you covet, whereas benign envy involves greater focus on the object of your envy and how you might achieve it for yourself. Some languages, like Dutch and German, even have two words for “envy” to distinguish between the different types!
So, thinking back to the question that was posed in the beginning: when you reflect on the last time you felt envious, do you think you experienced malicious envy or benign envy?
If you chose the latter, I challenge you to reconsider the situation. Instead of focusing on the negative feelings like shame and embarrassment (like I did), think about what the benign envy could be telling you on a subconscious level.
I can’t remember when I first heard this idea, but I know I was reading or listening to an interview with Gretchen Rubin (author of “The Happiness Project”). In this interview, Gretchen said she figured out she wanted to be an author because when she was working as a lawyer, she would read her monthly law school alumni newsletter and noticed she never felt envious learning about classmates making partner or advancing in their law careers. But when she did feel that pang of envy was when she read about someone being a “New York Times Bestselling Author.”
Making this connection was a lightbulb moment for her. She started writing for fun on the side, discovered she was really good at it, and most importantly, realized how fulfilled it made her feel. Now, many years and 10 published books later, her life has fundamentally changed for the better all because she paid attention to that subliminal cue.
Maybe we instinctively experience those negative feelings when we feel envious because we don’t want to take away from the person who has something we are coveting. But what if we instead shifted our focus away from the person and to what we are actually coveting?
Just like we talked about loneliness last week and how it can be a signal similar to thirst or hunger, maybe envy can be a signal for something we want in our life.
As a experiment, here are four things to ask yourself the next time you feel envious:
- Take a breath and remind yourself that envy is one of the most common feelings. We all experience it.
- Express a quick moment of gratitude for your realization that you are feeling envious and for the person/thing that triggered this emotion.
- Dig deeper. Shift focus away from the person and ask yourself: what exactly am I envious of? Is it a career, lifestyle, relationship, athletic ability, etc.?
- Think about how you could apply a small element of this to your own life. This doesn’t need to be a big sweeping gesture. A small action (like researching a certain career or a 5k training program) could be the perfect first step.
What do you think? Do you agree that the above four questions could be helpful for getting to the root cause of why you feel envious in some scenarios?
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