When Nina Hobson found herself engulfed with envy, she was too ashamed to talk about it. Then she realised that her feelings held an important message for her

Morning had barely broken and I was nursing my three-month-old. Or rather, I was trying to, but he kept spitting up. His face was a patchwork of blotches and his tiny frame was jerking violently. His screams were so loud that my two-year-old woke up. I glanced at the TV and saw an old school friend presenting the news. She looked professional, confident and glamorous. I felt my chest tighten, my eyes well up and nausea in the pit of my stomach. Quietly, I began to cry.

I felt many things that morning four years ago: shame, resentment, anger, frustration, regret, self-loathing and despair… but they all stemmed from the same emotion - envy.

I want what she’s having

Unlike jealousy, which occurs when something we have - usually a relationship - is threatened by a third person, envy is about wanting a thing or quality someone else possesses. Psychology distinguishes between malicious envy, a destructive force in which the envier seeks to bring down the other person and benign envy, where the envier strives to better themselves to match the other person.

While the envy I felt wasn’t malicious, it did cause me suffering. I had no desire to get into news reporting, so what was I experiencing? Was I just feeling sorry for myself, or was it more complex?

I asked Niels van de Ven, an associate professor of human behaviour at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, whether a spectrum of envy exists. No one knows, he said. ‘We haven’t figured out whether it’s a continuum or if different feelings co-occur. I would call what you experienced a subtype of envy.’