Envy is a state of desiring something that someone else possesses. It also just feels horrible. Admitting that we are experiencing envy can be very threatening, because it means acknowledging our own weakness and insecurity. The first clue that envy is lurking may be irrational feelings of hostility towards the object of our envy. Just the sight of them might make your skin crawl, even though they have done nothing wrong that you can put your finger on.
We are better off unravelling this form of vague resentment and identifying its green-colored root before it gets the better of us and damages our relationships. It is tempting—but generally unhelpful—to try to counteract envy with pride.
You might feel vindicated in the moment, but sooner or later someone is going to come along who has a nicer car than you and is better looking. In other words, reassuring ourselves about our own enviable traits is unlikely to be sustainable, and it maintains the same unstable social comparison hierarchy where someone else needs to be put down in order for us to feel boosted up, and vice versa. Instead of responding to the pain of envy with efforts to bolster your self-esteem, try self-compassion instead.
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An envy attack can involve: Putting you down — either overtly, or subtly. Provoking a reaction in you, from anger to sadness to outrage — then standing back and watching sparks fly. Undermining your opinion or stance so you begin to doubt yourself. Showing off about their own achievements, or the accomplishments of their children or other family members, even when rather modest. This can feel humiliating.
Copying you — or pre-empting you beyond the limit of simple flattery. Generally just making you feel bad about yourself.
How to survive an envy attack: If you start to feel small, this is what the envious person wants. Try to catch that feeling of diminishing yourself and stop yourself from doing it.
Remind the envious person of their own strengths and successes. Encourage them to count their own blessings. Create ways to protect your energies from being sucked out of you. Think about visualising yourself in a protective bubble, so any envy attack coming your way can bounce off you.
Ultimately, choose to hang out with people who make you feel good about yourself, rather than those who deplete you. Karen Dempsey With a year career in print and online publishing and an MA in creative writing, Karen Dempsey has worked as a journalist, editor and copywriter and has managed large editorial teams. Leave new gregory mee. Amy Launder. We're usually envious of things to do with status or possessions, though, as we'll discover, what we envy changes significantly with our age, gender, and social status.
Here are seven things to do know about how envy works in human psychology. Next time you grit your teeth with misery at how well a friend's brother is doing at his dream job, take comfort in the knowledge that science says it's only human. Why on earth do we feel envious? Wouldn't it be nicer for everybody if we were able to contemplate somebody else's material gains, pretty wife, awesome house or general success with peace and celebration?
Well, possibly not. One theory about envy's existence in human psychology is that it developed as part of our evolution as a species, to provide the basis for our competitive edge. The basis for envy is wanting what another person has, and it's proposed that it's not actually an unhelpful thing to feel; it's a part of our development of what Psychology Today describes as our "self-evaluation," in which we compare ourselves to others and compete with them.
We assess rank and status compared with other humans, and the theory goes, as Richard Smith explains in The Evolutionary Psychology Of Envy , that "envy has played an important role in humans' quest for the resources necessary for successful survival and reproduction over the course of evolutionary time".
Envy motivates us to strive to take what another person possesses, achieve it for ourselves, or better it; and all these impulses were pretty good ones when it came to guaranteeing the survival and evolution of early humans fighting for resources. Next time you're bitten by the envy bug, be aware that it may be part of a very ancient part of your brain.
There's an ongoing argument in philosophy about what envy actually does to our perspective on the world and how it functions. When did you first feel envious? Was it in the playground, watching another child have something and deciding that you wanted it? For some thinkers, including Freud, this is a seminal moment in our development of "fairness": the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that, according to this argument, envy motivates us to seek a more egalitarian arrangement , so that one person doesn't have more than us and make us feel bad.
We think this is "unfair" and seek to either take the desired thing for ourselves, or level the playing field. If one person has special treatment or gets away with something, we see it as problematic because we want it for ourselves and can't have it. Kind of depressing, really.
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