ENVY CAUSES REAL PAIN

It turns out that we're not imagining just how terrible envy feels; it can, indeed, make us physically ill or pained. And we know this because of a fascinating study revealed in 2009, in which scientists did brain scans of subjects as they were asked to imagine themselves in social situations in which they were confronted with people who were enviable (wealthy or powerful friends, for instance). The scientists found, the New York Times reported at the time, that when people admitted to feeling envy, "brain regions involved in registering physical pain were aroused: the higher the subjects rated their envy, the more vigorously flared the pain nodes in the brain’s dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and related areas." In other words, the brain actually registers physical pain when we're in situations of envy, much as it does when we're heartbroken or experiencing social rejection.