What Is Schadenfreude & Why Does It Matter for Your Mental Health?

Understanding the psychology of taking pleasure in others’ misfortune—and what it reveals about you

The Moment You Feel It

Your ex who left you for someone “better” just got cheated on. That person who flexed on you with their new car just got it repossessed. The celebrity who seemed untouchable just got exposed in a scandal. The coworker who threw you under the bus just got demoted.

And you feel… good about it.

That little spark of satisfaction. That quiet “finally.” That sense of justice—or maybe just relief that someone who seemed better than you isn’t doing so well anymore.

That’s schadenfreude.

And if you’ve felt it (and you have, we all have), you’re not a terrible person. You’re human.

But understanding why you feel it—and what it costs you—might change how you relate to it.

What Schadenfreude Actually Is

Schadenfreude comes from German: Schaden (harm) + Freude (joy). Literally, “damage-joy.”

It’s the pleasure, satisfaction, or relief you feel when someone else experiences misfortune—especially when:

That person’s success made you feel inferior
You think they “deserved” what happened
They’re a rival or someone you’re competing against
Their downfall makes you feel better about yourself by comparison

Research shows about 40% of online comments on posts about someone’s misfortune express schadenfreude. It’s everywhere. We just don’t talk about it honestly.

Why Your Brain Rewards It

Here’s what’s happening in your brain when schadenfreude hits:

When you see someone you envy suffer a setback, your ventral striatum lights up—the same reward center that activates when you eat good food or win money. Your brain is literally treating their loss like your win.

Before that, when you were envying them, your anterior cingulate cortex was active—the part of your brain that processes social pain. You felt hurt by their success.

So the sequence is: Their success hurts you (social pain) → They fall → Your brain rewards you (social pleasure).

It’s a pattern designed to track status in small groups. In our evolutionary past, someone else’s loss often did mean more resources for you. But in modern life? Not so much. Your ex’s new relationship failing doesn’t actually make your life better. But your brain still processes it like it does.

The Three Types

Researchers identify three main flavors of schadenfreude:

1. Rivalry-Based

When a competitor fails. The other candidate didn’t get the job. Your rival team lost the championship. Someone vying for the same promotion stumbled.

Root: Competition and comparison.

2. Justice-Based

When someone who did wrong faces consequences. The person who scammed people gets arrested. The bully gets humbled. The cheater gets caught.

Root: Fairness and moral judgment.

3. Aggression-Based

When someone you see as a threat gets weakened. The person who disrespected you publicly faces embarrassment. Someone who made you feel small gets taken down a peg.

Root: Self-protection and status defense.

All three share something in common: they involve seeing the other person as less than fully human in that moment. Your empathy switches off. Your reward system switches on.

Real Examples (You’ve Felt These)

You’re scrolling. You see someone from high school who used to make fun of you. They just posted about losing their job, their relationship ending, gaining weight—whatever their “failure” is.

You don’t comment. But you feel a little lift. A quiet satisfaction. Maybe you screenshot it to show a friend later.

The Ex Who “Upgraded”

They left you for someone they said was “more their type.” Better looking. More successful. Whatever.

Now that relationship is falling apart. And you can’t help but feel a little vindicated. Like the universe proved you weren’t the problem after all.

The Coworker Who Got Ahead

They played politics. Kissed up to the boss. Got the promotion you deserved.

Now they’re failing at the job. Struggling. Getting called out. And part of you is enjoying watching it happen.

The Celebrity Downfall

They were rich, famous, seemingly perfect. Living the life you’ll never have.

Now they’re caught in a scandal. Canceled. Exposed. And millions of people are piling on online—and you’re one of them. It feels good to watch the untouchable get touched.

Why It Feels Justified

Your brain is very good at making schadenfreude feel morally okay.

You tell yourself:

“They deserved it” (maybe they did, maybe they didn’t)
“Karma” (as if the universe is a justice system)
“They had it coming” (based on your interpretation of events)
“I’m not causing harm, just observing it” (true, but you’re still celebrating it)

These rationalizations protect you from feeling like a bad person. But they also prevent you from examining what’s really happening underneath.

What Schadenfreude Actually Tells You

Schadenfreude is diagnostic. It reveals:

Where You Feel Inferior

You don’t feel schadenfreude when someone way below or way above your “level” fails. You feel it when someone near your level—someone you compare yourself to—falls.

That coworker’s demotion stings them, but it satisfies you because you were competing for the same status. The billionaire’s scandal? Less personal. You weren’t comparing yourself to them anyway.

Schadenfreude shows you exactly where your self-worth is contingent on comparison.

Where You’re Still Hurt

That ex’s new relationship failing feels good because their leaving hurt you. The pleasure is masking unhealed pain.

If you were truly over it, their struggles wouldn’t register emotionally. The fact that you feel schadenfreude reveals the wound is still open.

What You Value (or Think You Should)

Justice-based schadenfreude can reveal your moral values. You feel satisfied when cheaters get caught because you value fairness.

But it can also reveal fragile self-worth. If you’re constantly looking for people to fail so you feel better, that’s a sign your sense of self is built on shaky ground—comparison instead of security.

The Cost of Chronic Schadenfreude

Occasional schadenfreude when someone genuinely deserving faces consequences? Pretty normal.

But habitual schadenfreude—when you’re constantly looking for others to fail, when you take pleasure in suffering regularly, when it’s your go-to emotional response—that’s corrosive.

It Erodes Your Empathy

The more you practice feeling good about others’ pain, the less you can access genuine compassion. Your brain gets better at dehumanizing people (“they’re not like me, so their suffering doesn’t matter”).

Over time, this makes all your relationships harder. You become less able to connect, less able to feel for others, more isolated.

It Keeps You Focused on Others Instead of Yourself

Every minute you spend enjoying someone else’s downfall is a minute you’re not spending building your own life.

Schadenfreude is a downward comparison. It makes you feel better temporarily by lowering the bar instead of raising yourself. That’s a trap. You’re not actually growing. You’re just watching others shrink.

It Reinforces Fragile Self-Worth

If your self-esteem depends on others doing worse than you, you’re always vulnerable. What happens when they bounce back? What happens when someone else rises?

Secure self-worth doesn’t need others to fail. It’s built on your own values, your own growth, your own intrinsic sense of worth. Schadenfreude keeps you stuck in comparison mode—and that’s exhausting.

It Makes You Aggressive and Less Satisfied

Research shows that people who experience frequent schadenfreude are more aggressive and report lower life satisfaction. The pleasure is temporary. The bitterness sticks around.

Why? Because schadenfreude often comes packaged with envy, resentment, and a hostile view of the world. Those emotions don’t just disappear when someone you envy fails. They find new targets.

Platforms are schadenfreude machines.

They show you constant streams of others’ failures, scandals, and embarrassments. They make it easy to pile on with a comment, a laugh react, a share. They reward high-arousal emotional content—and schadenfreude is very high-arousal.

Algorithms don’t care that this is corroding your empathy and making you more hostile. They care about engagement. And schadenfreude engages.

The result: public pile-ons, harassment, doxxing, and a culture where millions of people collectively celebrate someone’s suffering—often someone who made a mistake, not a monster.

If you find yourself scrolling specifically to see who’s failing today, that’s a sign. The platform is feeding you schadenfreude, and you’re letting it.

When Schadenfreude Might Be Okay

Not all schadenfreude is toxic.

When Justice Is Actually Served

If someone who genuinely harmed others faces consequences, feeling a sense of satisfaction is human. The abuser gets arrested. The scammer gets exposed. The corrupt politician loses power.

This isn’t the same as savoring their suffering. It’s relief that harm has stopped and fairness has been restored.

The key distinction: Are you glad that justice happened, or are you enjoying the suffering itself?

When It’s Playful and Low-Stakes

Your friend trips on nothing and you laugh. That’s benign schadenfreude. It’s playful, there’s no real harm, and it exists within a relationship of care.

The difference from toxic schadenfreude: You’d help them up. You don’t actually want them hurt. The moment is funny because it’s harmless.

The Way Out

If you recognize that schadenfreude has become a pattern for you—if you’re constantly waiting for rivals to fail, if you spend time enjoying others’ pain, if your mood lifts when you see someone struggling—here’s how to shift:

1. Notice It Without Judgment

First step: Just recognize when it’s happening. “Oh, that’s schadenfreude.”

Don’t beat yourself up. Don’t pretend it’s not there. Just notice it. Label it. Observe it like a scientist, not a judge.

2. Ask What’s Underneath

Schadenfreude is almost always covering something else:

Envy → What do they have that you want?
Hurt → Where are you still wounded?
Insecurity → What are you afraid of about yourself?

The schadenfreude is the surface. The real work is in what’s underneath.

3. Challenge the Zero-Sum Thinking

Your brain wants to believe: Their loss = your gain.

But is that actually true? Does your ex’s failed relationship improve your life in any material way? Does your coworker’s demotion get you promoted?

Usually, no. You’re operating on a false assumption that there’s only so much success to go around. In most areas of life, that’s not true. Someone else’s failure doesn’t make you rise. It just means you’re both lower than you could be.

4. Practice Perspective-Taking

Ask yourself: “If this were me, how would I want people to respond?”

When you failed, when you got exposed, when you struggled—did you want people celebrating? Or did you want compassion, or at least indifference?

Empathy isn’t about being soft. It’s about recognizing shared humanity. They’re a full person with a life, relationships, vulnerabilities—just like you.

5. Reframe Deservingness

Yes, some people do things that have consequences. But slow down the snap judgment that “they deserved it.”

Did they really? Or are you interpreting events to justify your pleasure?

Even when someone genuinely messed up, consider: Is the suffering proportional? Are there systemic factors you’re ignoring? Are you seeing their full story, or just the part that confirms your bias?

6. Shift to Freudenfreude

Freudenfreude is the opposite of schadenfreude: joy in others’ good fortune.

Practice noticing when people succeed and letting yourself feel happy for them—even if they’re rivals, even if it’s not “fair,” even if you wanted that success too.

This is hard. But it rewires your brain away from comparison and toward abundance. It builds empathy instead of eroding it.

Research shows that depressed people have less freudenfreude and more schadenfreude. Training yourself to feel joy for others might actually protect your mental health.

7. Build Self-Worth That Doesn’t Depend on Comparison

This is the deepest work.

If your self-esteem is based on being better than others, you’re always going to be vulnerable to schadenfreude. You need them to fail so you can feel okay.

Secure self-worth is built on:

Your own values (are you living according to what matters to you?)
Your own growth (are you better than you were last year?)
Intrinsic goals (mastery, connection, contribution) instead of extrinsic ones (status, wealth, appearance)

When your worth isn’t tied to comparison, others’ success or failure stops mattering so much. You’re focused on your own path.

What This Means for Your Mental Health

Schadenfreude isn’t just a quirky emotion. It’s connected to:

Depression: More schadenfreude, less joy in others’ success
Anxiety: Constant comparison creates social anxiety
Aggression: Schadenfreude correlates with hostile behavior
Isolation: Eroded empathy makes connection harder
Low life satisfaction: The pleasure is temporary; the bitterness lasts

If you find yourself stuck in schadenfreude patterns, that’s information. It’s telling you:

Your self-worth is fragile
You’re carrying unhealed hurt
Your empathy is underdeveloped
You’re focused on others instead of yourself

All of that is workable. Therapy can help. Compassion practices can help. Mindfulness can help. Even just honest self-reflection can help.

The Bottom Line

Schadenfreude is human. You’re going to feel it sometimes. That’s okay.

But if it’s frequent, if it’s intense, if it’s directed at people who don’t deserve it, if it’s your main emotional response to others’ struggles—that’s a problem.

It’s corroding your empathy. It’s keeping you stuck in comparison. It’s reinforcing bitterness and hostility. And it’s not actually making you feel better in any lasting way.

The path forward isn’t to shame yourself for feeling it. It’s to:

Notice it
Understand what’s underneath it
Challenge the beliefs that feed it
Build empathy and compassion instead
Focus on your own growth, not others’ failures

You can choose a different response. You can feel the spark of schadenfreude and then let it go. You can see someone struggling and choose compassion—or at least indifference—instead of pleasure.

That choice doesn’t make you weak. It makes you free.

Because when you stop needing others to fail so you can feel okay, you’re no longer at the mercy of comparison. You’re building a life based on your own values, your own growth, your own sense of worth.

And that’s liberation.

Key Takeaways

Schadenfreude is:

Pleasure in others’ misfortune
Rooted in envy, comparison, or justice judgments
Processed by your brain’s reward system
Universal but culturally expressed differently

It reveals:

Where you feel inferior (comparison points)
Where you’re still hurt (unhealed wounds)
What you value (or think you should)
How fragile your self-worth is

It costs you:

Empathy and compassion
Genuine connection
Mental energy (focused on others, not yourself)
Life satisfaction and peace

The way out:

Notice it without judgment
Explore what’s underneath (envy, hurt, insecurity)
Challenge zero-sum thinking
Practice perspective-taking and empathy
Shift to freudenfreude (joy in others’ success)
Build comparison-independent self-worth

Remember: You’re not a bad person for feeling schadenfreude. You’re human. But you can choose what you do with it. And that choice shapes the person you become.

If this resonated, you’re not alone. Mental health support shouldn’t require perfection. It should meet you where you are—messy, complex, human.

That’s what we’re building at LEGH.org.

ONE LOVE ✊🏽💙

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