Healthy envy: what is it and why is it not so "healthy"?

Healthy envy", under the microscope of science.

We often speak of two types of envy: pure envy, that is pure envyenvy, based on hostility towards others, and healthy envy. healthy envyof which we often only know that, for some reason, it is not as harmful as the other.

But... what really is healthy envy and to what extent can it harm us?

What is envy?

Appealing to the most commonly agreed definition, envy can be understood as a form of greed, a feeling produced by our desire to possess something that someone other than ourselves has and that we believe should be ours.. The fact that we see how someone else has something desirable that has been denied to us causes unpleasant and painful feelings to appear.

Part of this feeling of discomfort produced by envy is based on what is known as cognitive dissonance: we experience how there is an incongruence between our mental scheme of how things are and how things really are, beyond our ideas and beliefs.

In this case, we believe that something belongs to us and yet reality shows us that it does not.. In this way, envy places us in a very uncomfortable situation: that of accepting that our ideas about ourselves (and, therefore, those that have to do with our self-esteem) are too optimistic, or that of believing that we have been victims of an injustice, something that must be resolved through our efforts in order to get closer to what we believe we have the legitimacy to claim.

Healthy envy, a controversial concept

Thus, the generic concept of "envy", which does not include the nuances of the idea of healthy envy, is linked to unpleasant feelings. But... could there be a phenomenon similar to this that does not produce a minimum amount of pain? Is healthy envy something entirely different from plain envy, or is it simply the milder, relatively painless version of this phenomenon?

In 2015, a team of researchers published very specific research on this topic that reinforces the first option. In this study it was found that there are significant differences that allow us to distinguish between two kinds of envy: a malignant and a benign one.

In the former, the person who experiences this feeling focuses his thoughts on the person who has had access to what he covets and has not obtained for himself. In addition, people who exhibit this type of envy in a given context show a greater tendency to rejoice by imagining that something bad is happening to the person they are envious of. People who experience healthy or benign envy, however, focus their thoughts not on the person who possesses something they want, but on what they possess and want for themselves.

Thus, whereas malignant envy revolves around thoughts about "how lucky" another person has been and the disadvantaged position one has started from, healthy envy predisposes us, apparently, to adopt a more pragmatic and constructive point of view..

The downside of healthy envy

So... can one conclude without further ado that healthy envy is the best possible way to experience envy? This is a hasty conclusion. Although healthy envy may be experienced in a less unpleasant way than the other, it is worth asking the following question: Which of these two types of envy makes us more capable of detecting injustice where it exists? In the absence of further research to help answer this question, "evil" envy is likely to be the one that predisposes us to it.

Healthy envy, by focusing simply on what we want, may be related to an inability to analyze the context in which the other person has had access to a resource of limited availability that has been deprived to us. In a way, it shifts the responsibility for what has happened to oneself, being that sometimes the fact that we cannot have something is not necessarily due to a problem that we have individually (lack of attitude, laziness, etc.) but may be due to social problems, which cannot be reduced to what each individual does on his or her own.

For example, being envious of a person who masters a good level of English may simply be a consequence of the fact that, in our neighborhood, the schools we had the option to attend have a serious lack of resources and funding that did not allow us to learn English in good conditions.

As always, the key to making sense of certain psychological phenomena lies in knowing how to contextualize this type of research by contrasting it with studies by contrasting them with studies conducted in the social sciences.