Emotion help: Can jealousy/envy be a healthy emotion? - Help.com

Yes - it can drive you to do things.

Because I feel envious all the time.

This emotion is healthy in small doses, it indicates rational disappointment. Anything more means you’ve lost control. A loss of control over your emotions is very destructive to yourself as well as other people. It can lead to intolerable obsessiveness among other things.

I really don’t have control over my emotions and I’m overwhelmed by destructive thoughts and feelings.

No jealousy is not a positive.it shows u see others as better than yourself as if u are lower down n don’t have as much confidence.I suppose if u realise ur jealous then u can try to build your self esteem n realise that people r all equal n u have just as much wortg as the person your jealous of.I suppose if u realise this n go ahead with it, it can help u grow as a person

I just need to learn that I am worthwhile then.

You certainly are. A good way to learn that you are is to stop basing your worth off of what others think of you - easier said than done. In order to do this, you must set small achievable goals for yourself, and meet them. This will give you pride in yourself and you will develop the knowledge that you have worth. You will like the feeling of reaching your goals, though you must always push yourself, never give in. This attitude will completely transform how you feel about yourself and it will give you more control over your emotion when you are going through rough times. Eventually, you will no longer base your own worth off of what others think or how they treat you. As a result of your confidence, people won’t put you down. People who put others down are weak, and would never have the strength to try do do that to someone who KNOWS who they are and what they are capable of achieving. Good luck on your journey, I have no doubt you’ll show those suckers up, but be patient and never give in.

Sometimes being jealous can make you strive to do things. I’m not sure whether envy is the same thing. I feel like envy is negative but they may be the same thing :(

What we have or don’t have is really irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. So there is no point in jealousy apart from enabling it to eat at you causing you to dismantle your drive to excel and rise up higher in life.

Forget other people and what they have, all this is not meant for you. Even if you had what others had, it will never satisfy you because you will never know how to make the best use of it.

What is relevant is who you really are as an individual and what you have been blessed with in the form of gifts, talents and abilities. This is where your focus should lie and out of it, your purpose in life will emerge. This kind of substantiates why you should start looking at yourself as worthwhile. If you don’t, no one else will.

I feel a great need to prove to everyone that I’m not a loser.

Jealousy and envy are never healthy emotions. Sure, they can help provide some incentive to better yourself and that can be beneficial in the short run, but what about long term? Once you’ve obtained the skill/item you were jealous of, you’ll just find something else to be envious of.

I find that jealousy and envy are rooted within self esteem issues. If you undervalue yourself, you will be envious of this around you for one reason or another. You need to stop focusing on what others have and start focusing on your own life.

These are unattractive human emotions everyone has. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but it is something that needs to be remedied.

I know I really project myself onto other people.
I know they probably don’t think I’m pathetic, but I think that they do.
I feel a great need to prove to people that I’m worth something, so I can prove it to myself.
I need to be validated by other people in a way, I know it’s unhealthy.
every time I’m out in the word and around people my age I feel less than them.

Can jealousy/envy be a healthy emotion?

Yes.

Why or why not?

Because it is a natural human emotion.

A little bit of it is a good thing.

A lot of it is a bad thing.

If you let it get out of control, then consider getting help. Individual counseling, group therapy, or just someone to talk to about it.

The cause of a little bit of jealousy or envy is automatic. It’s going to happen, if you’re emotionally healthy. On the other hand, if there is none at all, when there should be some, then that is a bad thing.

Being too close or too distant attributes to tendencies toward or away from being jealous or envious.

It’s all about finding a balance.