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

Two types of envy are often spoken of: pure envy, based on hostility towards others, and healthy envy, of which on many occasions we 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 consensual definition, envy can be understood as a form of greed, a feeling produced by our desire to possess something that someone other than us has and that we believe should be ours. The fact that we see how someone has something desirable that has been denied to us makes unpleasant and painful feelings appear.

Part of this feeling of unease that envy produces is based on what is known as cognitive dissonance: we experience how there is an incongruity 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 is not.. In this way, envy places us in a very uncomfortable situation: that of accepting that ideas about ourselves (and, therefore, those that have to do with 

our self esteem) are too optimistic, or to believe that we have been victims of an injustice, something that must be resolved through our effort to be able to get closer to what we believe we have legitimacy of claim.

Healthy envy, a controversial concept

Thus, the generic concept of "envy" that does not capture the nuances of the idea of ​​healthy envy, is linked to unpleasant sensations. But... Could there be a phenomenon similar to this that does not produce a minimum amount of pain? Is healthy envy something totally different from just envy, or is it just the milder and relatively painless version of this phenomenon?

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

In the first, the person who experiences this sensation focuses his thoughts on the person who has had access to what is coveted and that has not been achieved for himself. In addition, people who present this type of envy in a certain context show a greater tendency to rejoice by imagining that something bad happens to the person they are envious of. People who experience healthy or benign envy, however, focus their thoughts not on the person who owns something that they want, but on what they own and want for themselves.

Thus, while evil envy revolves around thoughts about "luck" someone else has had and the position of disadvantage on which one has started, healthy envy apparently predisposes us to adopt a more pragmatic and constructive point of view.

The downside of healthy envy

Then... Can you just conclude that healthy envy is the best possible way to experience envy? It is a hasty conclusion. Although healthy envy may be experienced less unpleasantly than the other, the following question is worth asking: Which of these two types of envy makes us more capable of detecting injustices where they exist? In the absence of more research to help answer this question, "evil" envy has many numbers to be the one that predisposes us to it.

Healthy envy, by simply focusing 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 private. Somehow, you transfer responsibility for what has happened to yourself, being that sometimes the fact that you do not we can have something does not have to be due to a problem that we individually have (lack of attitude, laziness, etc.) but may be due to social problems, which cannot be reduced to what each individual does on their own.

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

As always, the key to making sense of certain psychological phenomena is knowing how to contextualize this type of research contrasting them with studies carried out from the social sciences.