Not All Envy Is Toxic: How Benign Envy Can Drive Self-Improvement
Envy comes in two kinds that feel alike and lead in opposite directions. How to tell which one you are feeling, what flips it, and how to audit your feed.
You scroll past a colleague's announcement that something they built just shipped, and a small hot thing rises in your chest. Then, within a second or two, it goes one of two ways. Either it hardens into something sour, a quick search for the flaw, the luck, the unfairness. Or it turns into a quiet, slightly uncomfortable question: how did they do that, and could I?
Both reactions get called envy, and for a long time we treated the word as a single sin. Psychologists have spent years pulling it into two feelings that look alike from the outside and behave very differently afterwards. I could not find one 2026 peer-reviewed study that ties all of this together, so what follows is a pattern across several studies, not a single headline result. It is still a pattern worth knowing, because it changes what you do with the feeling.
Two feelings wearing one name
Researchers separate benign envy from malicious envy. The work most often associated with this split comes from Niels van de Ven and colleagues. Both start with the same sting of seeing someone else have something you want. The difference is the direction of the pull. Benign envy pulls you upward: you want what they have and you are moved to improve. Malicious envy pulls them downward: you want them to lose it, and you are moved to criticise, gossip or undermine.
In social media settings, the studies line up on this. A 2021 study in Telematics and Informatics of 469 Facebook users found that benign envy led to an intention to improve oneself, while malicious envy led to negative gossip. A 2023 daily-diary study asked whether Instagram use makes people gossip about others or work on themselves, and looked at how the two kinds of envy shaped the answer. A 2025 set of four studies in the Journal of Interactive Marketing reported that benign envy went with positive interactions and self-enhancement, while malicious envy went with hostile interactions toward the person envied.
A caveat that applies to all of it: much of this research rests on self-report, and the effects are usually modest. Treat it as a useful map, not a prediction about you.
How to tell which one you are feeling
The sting itself will not tell you. Both feel like a tight chest and a flash of heat. What separates them is what you want to do next, so that is where to look.
- Where does your attention go? Toward what they did (the method, the habits, the path) or toward them (their flaws, their luck, what they do not deserve)?
- What do you want to say? A question you would like to ask them, or a comment you would like to make about them to someone else?
- Could you congratulate them and mean it? Not at once, perhaps, but eventually. If the thought makes you wince, notice that.
- Do you want to learn or to win? Benign envy wants the skill. Malicious envy wants the scoreboard to change.
I find the second question the most honest. Typing a reply is easy to disguise as wit. The private thing you want to say to a friend about the person is harder to hide from yourself.
Why some comparison fuels motivation instead of misery
Comparison is not a defect of character. We learn where we stand by looking at others, and that is how a lot of human skill spreads. A person who is just ahead of you shows you that the path exists. In that moment, the sting is information: this matters to me, and someone has got there.
Benign envy turns that information into effort. It makes the other person a kind of unpaid teacher. Malicious envy treats the same information as a threat and spends its energy on defence. The person on the receiving end of either may never know. The one who feels it will, because one leaves you with a plan and the other leaves you with a bad afternoon.
The conditions that flip benign into malicious
The van de Ven line of work points to two appraisals that matter most. The first is deservingness: does their advantage feel earned? The second is attainability: does it feel like something you could reach with effort? When the advantage looks earned and reachable, benign envy is more likely. When it looks unfair, or hopelessly out of range, the feeling tends to sour.
A feed distorts both appraisals at once. It shows you results and hides the process, so you cannot judge whether the win was earned. It selects the polished moments, so the gap looks wider than it is and attainability collapses. It also hands you a count of likes and followers, which turns a gap in skill into a gap in rank, and rank is exactly where malicious envy lives.
That is not an argument against using these platforms. It is an argument for noticing which accounts push those two appraisals the wrong way, which is what the worksheet further down is for.
A reframe for the moment it happens
When the heat rises, try three steps, in roughly this order:
- Name it. "This is envy." Saying so out loud, even silently, puts a small gap between you and the feeling.
- Ask what exactly you want. Not "what they have" but the specific piece: the skill, the freedom, the recognition, the calm. Envy is often a very precise signal of a value you have been ignoring.
- Convert it into one small action. Send them a question. Save the post and pull out a single habit. Block thirty minutes for the thing you were envying. Make it small enough that you could do it today.
If the third step feels impossible, that is information too. It may mean that what you want is out of your control, and the kinder move is to close the app and let the feeling pass without feeding it.
In the Heartfulness practice I follow, the evening sitting is a place where these small stings tend to come up again, unprompted. Meeting them without a story attached is a skill I am still learning. The sting usually softens faster when I stop arguing with it.
A feed-audit worksheet
Go through the accounts you follow, and sort them by what they reliably leave you with. Not by what you wish they left you with. Then take the action in the last column.
| Type of account | Typical envy response | Action step |
|---|---|---|
| People a step or two ahead of you in your own field | Often benign. The path looks reachable. | Keep them. Pick one thing they do and try it for two weeks. |
| Accounts that show the process, including the mess | Mostly benign. You can judge whether the result was earned. | Keep them. Move them to the top of your list. |
| Far-ahead figures with a polished highlight reel | Mixed. The gap can feel unreachable. | Limit to a small dose. Notice how you feel after ten minutes. |
| Friends and family posting their best moments | Mixed, and it can sting more because it is personal. | Reach out directly. A real message beats a silent scroll. |
| Lifestyle and wealth displays from strangers | Often malicious. The advantage feels unearned and out of range. | Mute or unfollow. You are not learning anything from them. |
| Accounts built around ranking, metrics and winners | Often malicious. They turn skill gaps into status gaps. | Unfollow, or turn off the counts if the platform lets you. |
One round of this is not enough. Check again after a month, because the feeling that an account produces changes as you do.
FAQ
Is envy always a bad feeling?
No. The research separates a kind that motivates you to improve from a kind that makes you want to bring someone down. The first can be useful. The second tends to leave you worse off and sometimes harms the other person.
Can malicious envy turn into benign envy?
It can, and the appraisals above are the likely levers. If you can find out how the person got there, the advantage may start to look earned, and the goal may start to look reachable. Time and distance from the feed also help.
Does social media make envy worse?
It gives envy more to work with. The studies I found link social media use with both kinds of envy, and the size of the effect varies. The medium matters less than the accounts you choose and how you respond.
What if I envy a close friend?
Tell yourself the honest version first, and, if the friendship can hold it, say something simple to them. "I was a bit jealous of that, and also very happy for you" is usually easier to hear than you expect.
Should I unfollow everyone who makes me envious?
Not necessarily. Keep the ones who point you toward something you actually want and who leave you with a next step. Let go of the ones that only leave you with a ranking.