How to handle envy?

According to Aristotle, "envy is the pain caused by the good fortune of others." This pain tends to expand, making us bring out, more and more, the worst in ourselves. Envy has a powerful destructive force and it can evolve into anger or other dangerous emotions if we don't learn to channel it.

One of the things that makes envy grow more and more bitter is the fact that it is always silenced: it is denied, concealed or lied to, but it is never recognized. Manifesting it would lead us to a bad self-concept or even rejection by others, and like all things, the more they are locked up, the more they rot.

Envy can manifest itself in many ways: resentment, anger, indignation, irritability, sadness, insecurity, self-pity, despair ... There may also be different phases in our internal perception, we can oscillate, for example from anger to anger at different times.

Some theorists consider envy no longer just a emotion or feeling but even as a personality trait.

Why happens?

Envy is an adaptive experience, it is in our genes, and it has made us evolve as a species. It is the result of the competition for limited resources, it leads us to prosper or to want to improve.

Practically anything is liable to generate envy: the happiness of others, material goods, style, beauty, economic conditions, family, qualities, health, luck, beliefs, social skills ... It makes us see ourselves as inferior and that feeling is is expanding. We secretly become a symbolic rival of the other, even if the other does not know it. We compete internally. The more poignant the emotion, the more it affects us in other areas that have nothing to do with it, even going so far as to block us or shut ourselves in on ourselves.

Envy has many facets:

• Feeling of inferiority with respect to oneself.
• Desire and longing for the quality of the other.
• The other is held responsible for his own anger, he is blamed for his own misery.
• for the very fact of feeling envy.
• towards the world, for the injustice committed with respect to one's fate.
• Admiration and longing for the envied, identification with him, emulation of his characteristics.
• At an organic level, envy releases cortisol, the stress hormone, into the blood. To rebalance it, we need to generate oxytocin and serotonin, which we obtain naturally with relaxation, sociability, sex, humor, contact with nature, etc.

How to approach it?

Envy, like the rest of the emotions, is a messenger, a carrier of information that tells us what things are internally disfigured and what needs to be restructured. All of us are capable of seeing what good things others have, and this may or may not cause us discomfort. Detecting them in the form of envy can lead us to make changes in our reality to achieve what we want.

Although it is true that we will not always be able to have exactly what we want, we can produce changes that make us feel more comfortable with our reality. This would be well-channeled envy: Take action!

Some recommendations that can facilitate this process:

• Redefines: What situation, attribute or attitude is the envy that you have to change about yourself is telling you? Work on it on an emotional level.
• Look for the origin: What is it that really triggers your envy? Sometimes we polarize our envy towards something, when in reality what we want most is something else from that person, which we do not allow ourselves to feel.
• Find patterns: Have you felt something similar in other situations? What is the common denominator?
• Change the sign of your emotion: transform envy into admiration.
• Learn to enjoy what you have: do not live in hypothetical or remote futures of what would happen if you had what you envy.
• Relativize: no one represents complete perfection. What things do you have that the person you envy does not have? What do you think the other person would envy of you and how do you think they would handle this lack?
• Readjust your beliefs: Many times we think “if I had what X has, I would be happy”, but this is not the case. That quality will surely not be the key to happiness for the envied and therefore it would not be yours either. It is much more important to value what you have rather than what you don't have.
• Don't torture yourself: Remember that envy is a normal and universal emotion, like so many others, and it is expected to have it. Throughout life we ​​will all envy and be envied in one way or another.

• One of the things that makes envy grow more and more bitter is the fact that it is always silenced: it is denied, concealed or lied to, but it is never recognized.
• Although it is true that we will not always be able to have exactly what we want, we can produce changes that make us feel more comfortable with our reality. This would be well-channeled envy.
• All of us are capable of seeing what good things others have, and this may or may not cause us discomfort. Detecting them in the form of envy can lead us to make changes in our reality to achieve what we want.