We all feel the occasional sting in our stomach when someone we know gets incredibly lucky with something we wouldn’t mind ourselves. We all experienced envy in our lifes, most of us probably more than we feel comfortable with, but why is that ?
Envy is typically seen as a negative emotion, since both the causes and products of this feeling are a lack of satisfaction with yourself. This causes a downward spiral of negative feeling towards yourself and others.
A typical trigger for envy could look like this: you and your friend are writing and exam that you learnt a lot for, but your friend didn’t, so you obviously expect to do well on your exam. Next week you get your results back and you got the majority of the questions right and receive a good but not grade mark, so you are contempt with yourself. Being curious you ask your friend what he received and with a bright grin on his face he shows you his grade, he got an excellent grade even though he supposedly didn’t study at all. Now your result becomes unsatisfactory all of a sudden and the sudden you feel this uncomfortable sensation in your stomach. You are envious.
So what is the result of this situation? You may start feelings of inadequacy and
question your own abilities, or even worse you may start to resent your friend for his good grade. This of course is irrational since there are many possible reasons for his good grade.
For one he might have cheated or started starting learning weeks in advance so he can brag about his effortlessness or he just might be naturally gifted in this subject whatever might be the case there is nothing you can change about it. A common solution that can be heard from mothers around the world is to stop comparing yourself to others, but this can be extremely difficult since we humans are extremely social and competitive, our brains are wired to be this way.
One of the most effective coping mechanisms for envy is simple rationalization, because most of the time the person we are envying didn’t get as lucky as we might have thought initially, so by questioning their success and weighing out the potential sacrifices the envy is already gone most of the time.
In the rare instances where Fortuna undoubtedly blessed someone waiting to see how the lucky event plays out and might even turn out as a burden can help you with feeling less envious.
Of course this could all be avoided if we stopped looking and comparing our situation with others, but not many people can aspire to be this disciplined with themselves, nevertheless this is a goal worth striving for and even small improvements can have a huge effect on our well being.