Green eyes

When Nina Hobson found herself engulfed with envy, she was too ashamed to talk about it. Then she realised that her feelings held an important message for her

Morning had barely broken and I was nursing my three-month-old. Or rather, I was trying to, but he kept spitting up. His face was a patchwork of blotches and his tiny frame was jerking violently. His screams were so loud that my two-year-old woke up. I glanced at the TV and saw an old school friend presenting the news. She looked professional, confident and glamorous. I felt my chest tighten, my eyes well up and nausea in the pit of my stomach. Quietly, I began to cry.

I felt many things that morning four years ago: shame, resentment, anger, frustration, regret, self-loathing and despair… but they all stemmed from the same emotion – envy.

I want what she’s having

Unlike jealousy, which occurs when something we have – usually a relationship – is threatened by a third person, envy is about wanting a thing or quality someone else possesses. Psychology distinguishes between malicious envy, a destructive force in which the envier seeks to bring down the other person and benign envy, where the envier strives to better themselves to match the other person.

While the envy I felt wasn’t malicious, it did cause me suffering. I had no desire to get into news reporting, so what was I experiencing? Was I just feeling sorry for myself, or was it more complex?

I asked Niels van de Ven, an associate professor of human behaviour at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, whether a spectrum of envy exists. No one knows, he said. ‘We haven’t figured out whether it’s a continuum or if different feelings co-occur. I would call what you experienced a subtype of envy.’

Facadebook

One thing was certain – I was not alone. In a study, 75 per cent of people reported feeling some type of envy in the previous year.* Social media plays a large role. Decades ago, we only had our neighbours and colleagues to compare ourselves with, now we have the whole worldwide web. And the more we try to compensate for envy through pretending we have it all sorted, the stronger the feelings of envy become in a ‘self-promotion-envy spiral’.**

Envy is everywhere. Job envy, body envy, holiday envy, handbag envy… you name it, we can envy it. No one is immune, yet few of us talk about it. I didn’t admit my feelings to anyone, not even myself, because envy feels shameful. It is, after all, a ‘sin’.

But Van de Ven argues that we should embrace envy as a natural feeling. ‘All emotions are there for a reason,’ he said. ‘Anger, joy, regret and envy – they are all useful. Just as anger helps us stand up for ourselves, envy can help us too.’ Illustrating this in his research, he showed that envy was a stronger motivator than admiration for students to do better.†

So, how can we use envy as a positive tool instead of allowing it to get the better of us? Coach Jenny Garrett