The wrong question to ask an uncomfortable feeling

Here’s a feeling most of us have had and almost none of us talk about.

Someone you know gets the thing. The job, the flat, the relationship, the easy-looking life on a screen. And something tightens. It isn’t pleasant. It arrives uninvited, and it usually arrives with a second feeling stacked on top of it — a small shame at having felt the first one at all.

A study published this week looked at that feeling closely, and found something we’ve been thinking about ever since.

What the researcher actually did

The study, by Christophe Haag at emlyon business school in France, appears in Personality and Individual Differences. It surveyed 442 French-speaking adults recruited online, aged 18 to 72, with an average age of around 40.

The starting point was a distinction psychologists make that most of us don’t. Envy, in the research literature, splits into two kinds. Benign envy is the version that points upward — the discomfort that makes you want to raise yourself. Malicious envy points sideways — the version that wants to bring the other person down.

Both feel bad. That’s the part worth sitting with. From the inside, in the first second, they can be almost indistinguishable. What separates them isn’t how unpleasant they are. It’s where they lead.

Rather than asking people to rate their own emotional skills — which tends to measure confidence as much as ability — participants took a performance-based test. They read four emotionally demanding scenarios and had to choose the most effective way to handle the emotion in each. The average score was about 54% correct, which is a quietly humanising number. Nobody is fluent at this.

Then they rated their own tendencies toward each kind of envy on a six-point scale. Benign envy averaged 3.74. Malicious envy averaged 1.66 — much lower.

The finding

People who scored higher on that emotion test reported more benign envy. Not less envy overall. More of the kind that points upward.

The effect was modest — a standard deviation increase in the emotion score was linked to about a 0.165 standard deviation increase in benign envy. And the link to malicious envy wasn’t statistically significant at all.

That asymmetry is the whole story. As Haag put it: emotional skill “does not appear here as a mechanism that suppresses an unpleasant emotion; rather, it may be associated with the direction that emotion takes.”

He drew the practical version out even more plainly. The useful question, he suggested, may be “less ‘How do I stop feeling this?’ and more ‘What is this emotion going to make me do?’”

What this doesn’t prove

We want to be careful here, because this is a small, honest study and it deserves to be reported as one.

It’s cross-sectional — a single snapshot in time. Haag says so himself: “we cannot conclude from these data that greater emotion-regulation ability causes envy to become constructive.” It could easily run the other way, or both ways at once. The sample was 88.5% women, so it isn’t clear how evenly this holds across different populations. The emotional test was brief. The researcher is asking for replication with broader samples and longer designs, which is what good science sounds like.

So: a real finding, modest in size, pointing in an interesting direction. Not a rule. Not a technique.

Why we keep coming back to it

There’s a version of wellbeing advice — you’ve met it — where the goal is to have fewer bad feelings. Feel less envy. Feel less anger. Feel less of the awkward stuff, and eventually you’ll arrive somewhere clean.

Haag pushes back on that directly, and it’s the line that stayed with us: “An emotionally intelligent person can experience an intensely unpleasant emotion.” He’d rather we described feelings as pleasant or unpleasant, and saved positive and negative for what those feelings go on to produce.

That reframe takes a lot of pressure off. It means the tight feeling when your friend announces good news isn’t evidence of a character flaw. It’s a signal — uncomfortable, informative, and pointing at something you want. What matters next is what you do with it.

It’s also, more or less, the principle Nagi is built on. Nagi doesn’t try to talk you out of what you’re feeling, or reframe it into something more presentable. There’s no interpreting, no correcting, no cheerful redirection. Nagi reflects back what you’ve said and asks the open, curious question — which is usually a version of the one this study lands on. Not: why are you feeling that? But: what’s that feeling asking of you?

And there’s a longer view, which is where the four-tap check-in comes in. A single uncomfortable evening tells you almost nothing. But a private record of how you’ve been over weeks can show you the direction of travel — whether a recurring feeling tends to pull you toward something or away from it. That’s a pattern you genuinely cannot see from inside one bad Tuesday.

The takeaway

You are probably not going to stop feeling the uncomfortable thing. That’s fine. The research doesn’t suggest the people who are best at this feel it less.

What seems to matter more is the question you ask next. Not how do I get rid of this, but where is this taking me — and whether that’s a direction you’d choose.

It’s a smaller, kinder question. And it’s one you can only really answer by noticing.

If you want a private place to start noticing your own patterns, Nagi is on Google Play and the App Store — or in your browser at app.nagiandme.app. The first 15 messages are free. No name, no email. Just you, checking in.

— The Nagi team

Source: Emotional intelligence predicts whether envy leads to self-improvement or hostility, PsyPost, 19 August 2026. Underlying study: Christophe Haag, “Emotional intelligence shapes the motivational direction of envy”, Personality and Individual Differences.

Nagi & Me is a mental health companion app, not a medical device, and nothing here is medical advice. If you’re struggling, please reach out to a professional or someone you trust.