Feeling Ashamed of Being Jealous

The second habit makes jealousy even harder to deal with: we feel ashamed of feeling it.

We’ve been taught that jealousy says something ugly about us. If you envy the coursemate who keeps getting As, the friend who always seems to afford another holiday, or the sibling who appears to have everything figured out, you’re supposed to feel embarrassed by the very existence of the feeling.

That creates a strange trap. First comes the jealousy. Then you judge yourself for it. Now you have two problems.

But feeling jealous doesn’t make you a bad person. Your brain can produce envy before your more deliberate thinking has had time to catch up, so the question is what you do with the information.

Imagine seeing an old classmate become wildly successful. Your first reaction might be a small, unpleasant thought: Why them? You don’t have to act on the thought, but you don’t have to beat yourself up for having it either.

Research by Boecker, Loschelder, and Topolinski distinguishes between emotional reactions to other people’s outcomes and the behavioural responses that follow. The feeling can arrive automatically; the response is where your choices begin.

Shame rarely makes people more honest. It usually makes them better at hiding things. Your brain can produce an ugly feeling without issuing you an ugly-person membership card.