Are jealousy and envy more typical of neurodivergent women?

Cast your mind back to the last time you felt jealousy or envy.

I remember mine vividly.

It begins with my mind fixing, almost involuntarily, on one person. A sudden preoccupation. Then a thought... I don't like the attention person A gave to person B. Within minutes I have blown my entire life up inside my head. Negative fantasies. Free-fall anxiety. Finally transported into that familiar place of unworthiness and self-loathing, questioning my own value and right to exist.

This feeling does not pass quickly. Sometimes it doesn't pass at all.

I have noticed this same pattern in almost every neurodivergent woman I work with.

What are jealousy and envy, really?

We tend to use jealousy and envy interchangeably, but they are very different emotions.

Jealousy typically involves three people. The jealous person feels deprived of attention given to a rival. We begin experiencing it from around six months old. Its evolutionary roots lie in threats to reproductive survival and attachment security.

Envy, by contrast, is usually about what another person has, their status, success, belonging, resources.

Both are survival mechanisms, ancient and deeply wired. Both contain elements of anger, fear and often a flash of hatred.

Jealousy can be rational particularly when trust has genuinely been broken. But it can also become pathological, characterised by extreme insecurity, a collapse of rational thinking and a compulsion to control. In pathological jealousy, very little is needed to trigger an overwhelming response.

Why neurodivergent women may experience this more intensely

Research into jealousy and envy specifically in neurodivergent women is still limited, but what we know about emotional regulation in ADHD and autism gives us some important clues.

Both jealousy and envy are fuelled by obsessive loops of rumination and an inability to disengage attention. This is, at its core, an emotional regulation issue. Emotional dysregulation is one of the most consistent and underreported features of neurodivergent women's experience.

We tend to report more intense emotional experiences that we cannot simply switch off. We overthink, over-analyse and the internal monologue dominates our waking life (and dream life too). Once caught in a ruminating loop, it can feel biologically impossible to stop. For the many late-diagnosed neurodivergent women, it partly is. Chronic stress and sustained cortisol exposure are associated with changes to the hippocampus, the brain region central to memory, learning and emotional regulation. Over time this can impair the very feedback systems that would otherwise help us return to equilibrium.

Alexithymia, is the difficulty in identifying, understanding and accurately naming our internal states and this adds another layer of complexity. Many neurodivergent women struggle to recognise jealousy or envy. We simply feel desperate and unstable. The emotional intensity can build becomming overwhelming. As expert maskers we may hide all of this beneath a surface of exaggerated calm. A composed exterior concealing an internal storm.

It's also worth noting that some behaviours which can look like jealousy particularly in pathological demand avoidance are better understood as fear responses rather than genuine jealousy. The distinction matters for how we work with them.

What jealousy and envy are trying to tell us

These emotions can be useful for understanding ourselves.

One question to ask "Is this feeling coming from a place of lack, a belief that I am not enough, and that someone else's gain confirms it or from a place of genuine longing and desire?"

This distinction is important.

If my envy of someone's career is rooted in a story of unworthiness, then even if I achieve those things I am unlikely to feel satisfied. The envy will simply migrate to the next target.

But if I can turn toward the longing underneath the envy and really look at it then it becomes useful. It offers hints about how I actually want to spend my time, the kind of person I want to become and the life I am quietly reaching for. Jealousy and envy, met with curiosity rather than shame, can become helpful guides.

In the short term, both emotions can illuminate the story we are telling ourselves and the direction we might need to move in. In the long term, left unexamined, they quietly steal our peace of mind and deepen the spiral of self-comparison and inferiority.

However the goal is not to eliminate them. It is to understand what they are asking for.