Cast your mind back to the last time you felt jealousy or envy.
I remember it vividly.
A seemingly rational thought. "I don't like the attention person (A) gave to person (B)." Within a couple of minutes I had blown my whole life up in my head. I was going to war.
For me it starts with a tightening of the chest. My mind is automatically focussed on a particular train of thought and within seconds i'm filled with negative fantasies playing out in front of my eyes. A minute later, I hit free-fall anxiety, closely followed by fear.
As I began to spiral I passed through feelings of incompetence, laziness and finally hit self-loathing transported into that place of unworthiness and ultimatley questioning my very existence.
Yep, jealousy has one hell'a kick.
So why are these emotions so powerful?
One word. Evolution.
Although very different we tend to confuse jealousy and envy.
The former is the fear of losing a relationship or a valued part of that relationship. It can be perceived or real. Jealously usually involves three people in that the jealous one feels deprived of the attention given to a third person, a rival or competitor. The evolutionary origin of jealousy is derived from threats to reproductive survival - as women it’s built into our genes or a child that may be replaced by his / her mother.
Jealousy can also be rational and usually when trust is broken. It can also be pathological and may result from an underlying mental health disorder such as anxiety, OCD or schizophrenia.
Pathological jealousy can include extreme insecurity, as well as a desire to control and manipulate. In this case there is an absence of rational thinking and it doesn’t take much to provoke extreme jealousy.
Envy is different, typically it's when we want something another person has. Envy probably has it’s roots in survival such as the distribution of wealth, status, belonging and food. So tribal.
In evolutionary terms jealousy and envy are survival mechanisms, particularly for women.
Jealousy and envy contain a degree of anger, fear and often hatred. The origins of these emotions are designed to galvanise us into battle, to warn off potential and actual threats to our survival and to deter other women.
Us humans are not designed to be perfect, natural selction (predominantly via women) means that the force molds us into genetically controlled traits that allow us to survive long enough to reproduce and raise our kids.
Those of us who reproduce will pass their genes onto others, the next generation. Designs that hamper survival in youth tend to be weeded out once we pass our reproductive years. If not it becomes a declaration of our inferiority.
We witness both jealousy and envy today especially on social media and especailly as women continue to compete for the attention of men. The pervasiveness of technology means our brains are living through a time of comparison that has never before been experienced. Jealousy and envy are hiding behind every social media post. We are continually triggered.
So how do we cope with such powerful energy in today's world?
It’s hard and our mental health is in decline. I'm writing this post from a womans persepctive but at a time when the biggest killer of men under 50 is suicide often suggested as a result of men losing their role in society. Since it's women that fuel sexual selection we have a role to play in this.
Jealousy and envy are fuelled by rumination and the inabilty to focus our attention. Both of these components are arguably the biggest threat to our mental health. Ultimately we have to decide if we want to subject ourselves to the possibility of such a painful experience or whether we want try something different? It doesn't change on it's own.
The narratives that we use to beat ourselves up whether they be envy or jealousy related keep us stuck in our head. These powerful emotions are short term coping mechanisms, part of survival mechanism. If we don't act on them they fuel tension in the body which longer term causes stress and keeps us from being who we are.
Once we are caught in the ruminating pattern it can feel impossible to stop. We must ask ourselves if this emotion is coming from a place of lack in which we want something and if we don't get that thing we feel inferior, or alternatively a place of genuine longing and desire?
For example, I may feel envious of someone's job, career, money, sense of adventure, their joie de vivre or lifestyle. And if it's coming from a lack of self-worth, I feel envious and set up conditions whereby if I achieve these things I will feel happier. These conditional statements are always a bottomless pit of lies.
On the other hand if we are prepared to look inside at our own longing and desire then perhaps we can use this as a source of motivation. They can give us hints about how we would like to spend out time, challenge our sense of who we are, the kind of character traits we want to develop and the lifestyle that we desire.
Allowing jealousy and envy can therefore in the short term give us signals as to the story we are telling ourselves, longer term they steal our peace of mind and we spiral into inferiority. This increased torment dysregulates our nervous system and it's as if we are back in survival mode competing for resources.
As always learning to pay attention to those tiny singals, the tightening, the shallowness, the change is our attention so as to find calm before the storm of full blown jealous rage.
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