Envy is usually treated as something to be ashamed of. When people notice it in themselves, the habitual response is to push it away or tell themselves they shouldn’t feel it. It’s easy to assume that people who are doing well in life have simply outgrown the feeling.

That assumption doesn’t hold up very well. Envy is a common, ordinary human emotion , and there’s no good reason to think successful people feel it less often.

What seems to set them apart is a habit of treating envy as information. When they feel it, they ask what it says about what they want, and then they work toward that thing instead of resenting the person who has it.

A recent study published in Personality and Individual Differences helps explain why some people respond to envy this way and others don’t. It found that people who are better at regulating their emotions are more likely to experience the kind of envy that motivates self-improvement.

Why Envy Is Essential To This Habit

The study’s author, Christophe Haag, is a professor of organizational behavior at emlyon business school in France who studies unpleasant emotions. He argues that it’s more accurate to describe an emotion as pleasant or unpleasant than as good or bad. Whether it turns out to be good or bad depends on what it leads a person to do.

Envy fits this idea well. Psychologists have long distinguished between two forms of it:

  1. Benign envy is uncomfortable, but it pushes a person to improve so they can have what someone else has.
  2. Malicious envy is uncomfortable too, but it pushes a person toward resentment and a wish to see the other person lose their advantage.

The two feel similar in the moment, yet they lead to very different behavior. Why some people tend toward one and not the other has been an open question.

Haag wondered whether emotional intelligence might explain part of it. He focused on emotion regulation, which is the ability to choose an effective way of handling a feeling once it has been triggered.

The problem was that most studies ask people to rate their own emotional skills, and people’s ratings of themselves often reflect general confidence as much as actual skill.

So Haag measured the skill directly. He gave 442 French-speaking adults a set of emotionally difficult scenarios and asked them to pick the most effective way to handle each one.

Participants also described how they usually experience envy. Haag took into account other factors known to affect how people respond to social threats, including self-esteem and insecurity in relationships.

People who were better at regulating their emotions did not report feeling less envy overall. They reported more benign envy . Their regulation skills had no significant connection to malicious envy. The skill seemed to shape the direction envy took, not whether it appeared.

The Habit Of Asking What Envy Is Pointing At

Consider someone who learns that a colleague got the promotion they had been hoping for. For most people, the first reaction is a mix of disappointment and discomfort. What happens next is where people differ.

Some people start looking for reasons the colleague didn’t deserve it. Others let the initial sting settle and then start thinking about what the colleague did differently and what they themselves might need to work on.

The second response is the habit that successful people tend to share. They treat envy as information rather than as a verdict on their worth. This works because envy is quite specific. People rarely feel it about things they don’t care about. It tends to show up around the goals they already hold, even ones they haven’t admitted to themselves. Paying attention to it can clarify what a person actually wants.

Haag puts the shift in terms of the question a person asks. Rather than asking how to stop feeling envious, he suggests asking, “What is this emotion going to make me do?”

This is the connection to success. Research on benign envy has linked it to setting more ambitious goals and putting in more effort. A person who regularly turns envy into a plan is likely to keep improving over time, and the motivation is coming from a feeling most people would rather not acknowledge.

It’s worth being clear that this is not the same as suppressing envy. Pushing a feeling down doesn’t make it go away, and envy that isn’t acknowledged may be more likely to turn into resentment. The skill Haag measured involves noticing the feeling and working with it.

What This Habit Can’t Do For You

The study has limits that matter. It measured people at a single point in time, so it can’t show that regulation skills cause envy to become constructive. It’s possible that the relationship runs the other way, and that people who spend years working toward goals develop better regulation skills along the way. Most participants were women, the regulation test was short, and the effect was modest in size.

The study also says something useful about people who tend toward malicious envy. Anxiety about rejection was strongly linked to it. That suggests the urge to bring someone down often comes from feeling threatened rather than from bad character. For many people, it may ease as they come to feel more secure.

What This Habit Really Comes Down To

Envy is not likely to go away, and trying to eliminate it may not be the right goal. It tells a person something real about what they care about.

The people who handle it well are not the ones who never feel it. They are the ones who notice it, take a moment to understand what it’s telling them, and then act on it.

Wondering which habits drive your ambition? Find out what’s fueling your competitive streak, and where its shadow side shows up, with this science-backed test: Competitive Instinct Profile