What is envy? What consequences does it have for our lives? How can we stop being envious? Envy is one of the 10 toxic behaviors that harm your life. Other toxic habits include consuming too much news, pretending everything is fine and taking everything too personally, as well as lacking a sense of humor and a certain philosophy of life.
What is envy?
By definition, envy is a feeling of discomfort, pain or sadness at someone else’s good fortune, together with a desire for something we do not have and another person does (definition from the RAE, the Royal Spanish Academy, and Wikipedia).
But if we go into detail and look at how our brain behaves when we feel it, many sources compare envy with admiration for the person who has what we would like to have.
Let’s say it is admiration that has been badly managed and put to poor use.
When we admire someone, it is inevitable to feel a certain degree of envy. But when we wish that person no harm and use that admiration to learn from them, we are using it to set the person who has what we want as an example to follow, not as a threat to our well-being and inner peace.
That is the difference between what is called healthy envy and envy, full stop.
Envy does not arise on its own. It usually appears because of a faulty belief system or corrupted values. In other words, when a person has learned to be glad about other people’s well-being beyond their own, that person is unlikely to develop an unhealthy state of envy.
Instead, they would take the person they admire as an example and follow in their footsteps, trying to achieve what that person has.
What goes on inside an envious person’s mind?
Religion counts envy among the deadly sins, because an envious person’s mind can be a dark place that may lead them to act in unthinkable ways. The envious person does not always want what you have. Sometimes they would be happy simply if you lost what you have. That is enough for them.
If there is an envious person in your circle, remember that your pain will be their happiness. Your failures will be the oxygen they need, and in some cases the envious person’s mission is to do whatever they can to help you lose what you have.
That is why an envious person will not hesitate to speak ill of you if they think it will harm you in someone else’s eyes.
Likewise, your happiness will be their pain. Your successes will be blades that cut them, stab wounds inflicted simply because things are going well for you.
Focus problems in the envious mind
The main problem with an envious person (apart from a faulty belief system and values) is that they do not focus on their own progress; their focus is on comparing themselves with everyone else. And there is always someone who has more things than they do, more success, more happiness. So the envious person is destined to live a life full of anguish, pain and unhappiness.
See also: 16 hard things we will have to do to achieve success
By definition, this makes them one of the toxic people you may have in your circle.
How to stop being envious
An envious person rarely seeks psychological treatment. They may develop other problems later on or seek treatment, but for other reasons, caused not only by envy but by the corrupt belief system that gave rise to it.
The first thing to teach a person is not to focus on others but on themselves; that is, to focus on and compare themselves only with themselves, with their own progress.
This person needs to review their belief system and their scale of values. It is hard to teach someone to appreciate other people’s well-being, to be glad about other people’s successes, to see people as examples to follow and not as enemies.
An envious person must first recognize that what they really suffer from is low self-esteem, and that is why, instead of going after what they want, they settle for criticizing whoever has it.
Ultimately, envy is mismanaged admiration, but low self-esteem makes the envious person admire more people than others do. They have more idols than anyone else, but instead of inspiring them, those idols cause them pain.
See also: 6 smart ways to deal with toxic people
Featured image: School of Leonardo da Vinci, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
