Wipe That Green Off Your Face

I'm a very envious person, though I don't act on it (meaning I don't try to mess things up for people who are doing well). Where does envy stem from? How can I get rid of it? --Begrudging Woman You see a friend achieving some success and you say, "So happy for you. Well-deserved!" -- which is a more polite way of saying, "I hope you are stricken with a rare deadly form of full-body adult acne." We think of envy as an ugly, counterproductive emotion, but it's really just a tool, like a jackhammer or a blender. To understand this, it helps to understand that even emotions that make us feel crappy have a job to do -- motivating us to act in ways that will help us survive and make a bunch of little buggers who'll totter off through the generations, passing on our genes. In other words, envy is adaptive. Envy is a form of social comparison that probably evolved to help us keep tabs on how well we're doing relative to our rivals. As evolutionary social psychologist Abraham ("Bram") Buunk and his colleagues explain, envy pushes us to dial up our game so we can "narrow the gap" between ourselves and "the superior other" (aka that annoying co-worker who likes to start sentences with "Well, when I was at Harvard..."). So envy is basically a social alarm clock: "Yoo-hoo...get cracking, girl! That witch is about to get that promotion, and you'll be lucky to end up executive vice-scullery maid." Buunk and his team explain that there are actually two kinds of envy, malicious envy and benign envy. Each kind motivates people to try to shrink that "status gap" between themselves and others. The difference is in how. Benign envy pushes people to work harder in hopes of matching or beating the competition. Malicious envy is the nasty kind -- the kind that motivates a person to loosen the ladder rungs, hoping to cause their golden-girl co-worker to topple to her (professional) death. The upshot? Envy isn't something to be ashamed of. You should just see that you use it in a positive way -- as a tool for self-motivation instead of co-worker sabotage. However, getting ahead isn't just a solo act; it's often a cooperative endeavor. To decide when to cooperate and when to compete, consider the level of "scarcity." When resources are scarce -- like when there's just one job available -- go after it with everything you've got (within ethical boundaries, of course). But when the rewards aren't limited, it's good to be the sort of person who brings along other people. This tends to make others more likely to do nice things for you in return -- even helping you get ahead...and without your hiring a hacker to reprogram Miss Fabulous' computer so her screen saver is a pic of the boss with a Hitler mustache. ... For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence," in very affordable trade paperback and only $9.99 on Kindle. It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.