The Green-Eyed Monster: On the Benefits and Pitfalls of Experiencing Envy

All emotions, envy and jealousy included, are drivers of survival. A response to our environment may be rather simple, such as seeing water and drinking it, but emotions drive a more organized and more intricate pattern of behavior. They influence a wide array of functions, both neurological and physiological. And some emotions are more complex than others. Fear and anger are more intuitive, more clearly triggered, with outcomes that are more immediately obvious and useful from a survival perspective.

In contrast, emotions such as envy and jealousy, and indeed others like guilt, shame or pride, require a degree of introspection, some self-knowledge—a linkage of these emotions to higher areas of cognition and a deep understanding of the social world we inhabit. The evolutionary imperative of these simple emotions is also more immediately apparent too, primal guardians of our existence. Fear, for example, reduces the risk of predation or intra-species conflict; anger drives violence in the defense of possessions such as food, partners or territory.

So why is it that we experience these unpleasant emotions: envy and jealousy? Why does someone else’s advantage induce these painful feelings? What are the evolutionary benefits, those survival advantages that these emotions bring? The most obvious explanation is that advantages held by others have profound consequences for oneself. Since these advantages confer benefits, in terms of mating, food, success in broader terms, and we live in a competitive world, one person’s advantage is another’s handicap.

The two faces of envy

Benign envy, the sort without hostility, may have some very positive outcomes. Comparison of oneself to others deemed superior may actually drive feelings of hope—that improvement and achievement are within grasp. It may also drive creativity and motivation. The key here, however, is to envy someone like you, someone who you can emulate, who is within your realm. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes no sense for us to envy Elon Musk’s, Jeff Bezos’s or Bill Gates’s stupendous wealth—their position is so far outside our reach that to envy them serves no useful purpose. In contrast, to envy our neighbor, who earns a little more, or drives a nicer car, has much more evolutionary logic. As the famous neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran and his colleague write: “The whole purpose of envy is to motivate you into action either by independently trying harder (envy) or by coveting and stealing what the other has (jealousy)… Envy evolved to motivate access to resources that are in demand by others in your group.”

That envy proper, ‘malicious’ envy, has a hostility associated with it—an unpleasantness—serves as an emotional reinforcer of that motivation, that striving to compete for limited natural resources. Hostility makes one more resolute, more focussed. The alternative would be to be submissive in the face of one’s own inferiority, for fear of being harmed by a superior; of reprisal. The hostility associated with envy proper may help one break free from this tendency to submission.

Like other emotions, therefore, envy and jealousy have an evolutionary purpose. They motivate us to better ourselves, to compete for finite resources, to defend what is loved by us from others. These emotions are fundamental to our being, and arguably responsible for the progression of the human race.

Yet it is these very same forces, when out of control, that cause murder and mayhem, conflict and war. I can understand the ancient religious proscriptions, that we should value ourselves by our moral and spiritual virtues rather than external factors. That our self-esteem should not depend upon our wealth, our looks or our possessions. If we find ourselves wanting in our internal sphere, we should try to improve ourselves rather than envying others. But these religious strictures fight against our nature, sometimes to be defeated.

And even the religions recognize the complex nature of envy, that it has positive and negative attributes. Jewish texts contain proverbs such as: “Be envious for my sake! Were it not for envy, the world could not be sustained. No one would plant a vineyard, no one would take a wife, no one would build a house.” Similarly, Islam recognizes the difference between hasad—malicious envy—and ghibtah, benign envy, which leads enviers to work for Allah.

Blurred boundaries between the normal and pathological

Both envy and jealousy can therefore serve us, but may also become pathological. From a clinical perspective, it is when these emotions are so intense that they create distress in everyday life, in relationships—when they result in harmful, sometimes dangerous, conduct—that they come to medical attention. In Sarah’s case, her jealousy was so profound that it resulted in violence and led to her being involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

In fact, envy is rarely viewed as a medical issue but remains largely in the domain of the philosophical, theological, social and psychological. It is usually in the realm of the normal rather than pathological, although the boundaries between the two are so often indistinct and arbitrary. In the context of envy, this problem of defining pathology is of particular significance when it comes to personality disorders, as we will see.

This issue of what constitutes a state of being that is simply at the extremes of the spectrum of normality, and what tips over into becoming a disease or disorder, riddles the world of medicine, and psychiatry in particular. In the absence of clear tests, on blood or on brain, that hoist a red flag declaring a pattern of behavior or thinking as being a disease, the diagnosis in most cases rests upon the subjective view of the doctor. It is a matter of interpreting what the patient, or their family, might be telling them.

In many cases, abnormality may be obvious, manifesting as florid hallucinations or delusions—those false beliefs so firmly held despite evidence to the contrary—but frequently it is not. Hence the persistent debates between various schools of psychiatric and psychological thought about how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) defines and classifies mental health conditions. There are frequent accusations of the medicalization of normality (often accompanied by the suggestion that the pharmaceutical industry has lent a hand, to fuel prescribing of their wares). These arguments have relevance for many of the Seven Deadly Sins. Even the editor of one of the previous iterations of the DSM has heavily criticized the latest fifth edition, DSM-5.

In an article in The Huffington Post, he railed against the dangers of defining heightened normal behaviors as psychiatric diagnoses, that DSM-5 risked turning temper tantrums, normal grief or occasional binge-eating into psychiatric disorders. And by labelling these as disorders, it opened the door to people being unnecessarily medicated: “New diagnoses in psychiatry are more dangerous than new drugs… DSM-5 has created a slippery slope…to make a mental disorder of everything we like to do a lot.”

These arguments among psychiatrists and psychologists regarding what constitutes mental illness are distilled in the concept of personality disorders, and whether these conditions truly represent a mental illness. As we have seen in relation to borderline personality disorder, more broadly, personality disorders are typically defined as an enduring inflexible pattern of thought processes or behavior that deviates significantly from that expected within someone’s culture, leading to distress or impairment in varying aspects of life. These thoughts or actions are not attributable to medications, recreational drugs or another medical or psychiatric disorder, but are innate.

While there are differences between definitions in the various standard classifications such as the DSM and the International Classification of Diseases, essentially personality disorders are considered to represent normal personality traits that in that individual are so extreme as to cause harm to themselves or to those around them. By definition, this description recognizes that these features of our personalities exist in all of us to a greater or lesser degree, that we all sit somewhere on a spectrum of all of these aspects of human behavior. The challenge when it comes to these traits, including our propensity to ‘sin,’ is to define the point at which normal becomes abnormal; when a trait becomes a disorder.

As such, personality disorders, like our psychological traits, are at the core of that individual, a function of their longstanding personality, with resulting implications that they are less amenable to treatment and cannot be ‘cured.’ Many of the terms used by psychiatrists to define or subdivide these personality disorders have entered everyday parlance: histrionic, paranoid, borderline (now more usually termed ‘emotionally unstable’), narcissistic, sociopathic, etc. These disorders are incredibly common, with up to 10 per cent of the population meeting diagnostic criteria.

While the origins of personality disorders are poorly understood, they are thought to result from interactions between an underlying neurobiological predisposition—in part genetic—and stresses during development. As we have already seen, childhood trauma, especially abuse or neglect, is a known risk factor. Yet increasingly it is recognized that there are strong biological factors at play. Personality is strongly influenced by hereditary factors, and twin studies comparing identical and non-identical twins suggest that genes have a potent role in the development of personality disorders too. Research in personality disorders also suggests differences in neurotransmitter systems, volumes of certain brain structures important in the regulation of emotions and disruption in networks that are involved in behavior.

In keeping with the view that these disorders are hard-wired into the brain, and are not as a result of a disease process affecting the mind or the brain, most psychiatrists consider personality disorders not to be mental illnesses. While undoubtedly personality disorders are risk factors for mental illness, and complicate its treatment, they are viewed as distinct, separate entities. You could argue that a personality disorder ultimately reflects a difference in brain function, possibly even structure, in much the same way as any other psychiatric or neurological disorder; that it could be considered in a similar light to other conditions which develop early in childhood and persist throughout life, such as autistic spectrum disorder, for example. And that this is purely a question of semantics: how you define an illness, a disease or disorder. However, it does not change the fact that treating a condition that is enmeshed in the fabric of our brains, that is an intrinsic aspect of who we are, is going to be more challenging than treating an abnormality of the brain resulting from infection, inflammation or chemical imbalance.

Personality and envy

Of particular relevance to envy is one specific personality disorder: narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). At first glance, this seems very counterintuitive.

The hallmarks of this personality trait when extreme, as in NPD, result in a sense of being special: an entitlement, feelings of self-importance to the point of grandiosity, preoccupations of brilliance or success and excessive arrogance. These features are accompanied by a lack of empathy, the tendency to exploit others to achieve their own ends, and attention-seeking behaviour. People with narcissistic traits (rather than the personality disorder) will often be extremely successful, as these characteristics facilitate sociability and getting what you want. But in people with the personality disorder, rather than just having narcissistic traits, their overconfidence and antisocial behaviors—manifesting as looking down on others, impatience when others are perceived to be getting more attention and hostility when criticized—impair their ability to function in the workplace and in their social and family lives.

In the context of heightened self-importance and feelings of superiority, the emotion of envy seems distinctly out of place. Surely you only envy people who have more than you, achieve more than you or are somehow else more successful than you. After all, if you go through life feeling the best, the cleverest, the most beautiful, the most interesting, what do you have to envy? Yet despite this, many people with NPD exhibit very heightened feelings of envy, contributing to the destructive nature of this disorder.

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Excerpted from Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human by Dr. Guy Leschziner. Copyright © 2024. Available from St. Martin’s Press, a division of Macmillan, Inc.