We aren’t designed to feel bad about anything

Summary: Feeling bad is a net negative for a human being from a physical and mental health perspective so its not an ideal tool for humans to use. The fact that we the ability to feel bad about things shows that our creator gave us this “feature” but I argue that it’s a feature we’re intended to evolve from using. Rather than feel bad we can instead recognize that we likely dislike (probably severely) whatever we would feel bad about and use that insight to inform future behaviors, strategies, or how how we’d like to immediately respond.

Here’s why I hold this view:

1. If we stay aware, we can recognize that our body provides feedback in some shape of form that, well, feels bad. For example this feedback may be in the form of the fight or flight response we feel bad. Research has shown that “chronic stress, experiencing stressors over a prolonged period of time, can result in a long-term drain on the body. As the autonomic nervous system continues to trigger physical reactions, it causes a wear-and-tear on the body.” I argue that whenever we feel bad or experience negative emotions we are stressing the body. Would you disagree that we aren’t designed to do or endure things that rob us from optimally functioning? If continual stress diminishes the optional function and feeling bad causes bodily stress, does that not suggest that we aren’t designed to feel bad? Some may ask, why do we have negative emotions in the first place? I’d call that a philosophical question which I’m happy to provide a take on if you wish but for now I’m going to focus on helping you see why we aren’t meant to ever feel bad.

Why do we feel bad about things in the first place? Note: In my writing, “feeling bad” or the word unhappiness is really just another way to describe us experiencing emotions we dislike. Sometime before 1970, a man with a background in religion, philosophy, and psychology came to the remarkable conclusion that:

“We know that people believe that unhappiness is necessary, and this is why they are unhappy…they believe it is an inescapable truth.

The cause of unhappiness is a belief. What happens, no matter how undesirable or destructive to our life, health, desires or loves, does not cause unhappiness. The belief that we have to be unhappy is the only cause. To state it simply: If a person did not believe they had to be unhappy, they would not and could not be. We merely believe we need to have things or avoid things in order to avoid unhappiness, which we would not have to fear if we did not believe we needed to be unhappy.”

Bruce Di Marsico

This may sound too simplistic or even unbelievable but I encourage you to give this insight jut a few minutes of your time because it can help you see that we actually can control our emotions. Here’s more from Bruce to help your understanding:

I’d like to try to make clear how the belief affects the feeling. Let’s say you have a situation of a young girl going off to college. She’s out in front of her home with her mother, her father, her younger sister, and there’s a stranger passing on the sidewalk. And she’s saying goodbye to them and she’s going to college. Her mother is very distraught and very unhappy; there are tears in her eyes; she’s feeling very sad. She’s going to miss her daughter. She believes that what’s happening is really kind of bad; she can’t understand why she has to go away to school–there’s a perfectly good school in town. Why she has to leave her family, etc. And the mother sees the situation pretty much as something that’s to be unhappy about. And so she feels unhappy about it.

Her father, on the other hand, is kind of mixed. He feels that he’s going to miss his little girl a little bit and he kind of wishes she was staying home; he was just getting to know her and they were just becoming friends. But he also sees that she’s going to be off with her friends at a school that she’s very much looking forward to being at, and how it’s going to be really helpful to her for her maturity and her intellectual growth. And so in a way, he’s kind of glad, too; he’s a little sad and he’s a little glad that she’s going away. And of course the younger sister is overjoyed! She’s just imagining having the room all to herself now, and the telephone all to herself, and nothing could be better than her big sister’s going off to college. And the stranger walking down the street, he looks at the situation and he feels nothing and just walks by.

Now I use that to show you that there’s one event taking place: A young woman going off to college is the event. And yet there are four different emotional reactions to that. There’s a feeling good and a happy feeling about it, which the young girl felt; there’s a feeling bad or an unhappy feeling, which the mother felt; there’s a feeling good and bad, which the father felt; and then there’s feeling nothing, which is an emotional state, which the stranger felt. The one event occurred and yet there were four different emotional responses. How do we explain that? If it was the event itself and the event itself was a good event, then everybody should have been happy about it. If the event itself was a bad event, then everybody should have been unhappy about it. If it was neither good nor bad, then everyone should have felt neither good nor bad about it. We explain it by saying that the event in itself was just an event.

The feelings about the event are based on the judgments about the event. And that the feelings we have are a result of the judgments that we make. So that if we believe a thing to be good, we feel good; if we believe it to be bad, we feel bad. Now sometimes we feel that when we feel bad, we have no choice; we just simply must feel bad.
That’s in the nature of feeling bad. That’s exactly what it’s all about.

Part of feeling bad is believing that we have no choice, that we must feel bad, that we have to feel bad.

There are a number of reasons for this, which we’ll explore. What stands in the way of further growth and further happiness? There are lots of things, like lack of self-confidence, despair, and depression, whatever. Almost all these phenomena are a result of some kind of judgments that we’re making.

And sometimes they’re very mistaken judgments; sometimes we assume that we have to feel bad.

We just simply assume it. And so since we assume we have to feel bad about a certain situation, we go ahead and do that. Like I said, it’s inconceivable that we could do otherwise. Once we believe the thing is something to feel bad about, we are going to feel bad about it. Once we believe the thing is something to feel good about, we will do that. But that isn’t a problem for anybody none of us are suffering from too much happiness. But a lot of us are not as happy as we’d like to be, and we never will be. And that’s part of a whole search for happiness-to be happier and happier and happier. No matter how happy we are, we want to be happier.

Bruce Di Marsico – The Myth of Unhappiness Volume 1 page 7-8

The critical insight is that we feel bad about things for one or more reasons and we’re often unaware of these reasons. Fortunately, it’s possible to stop or limit living life like this. How do we make this change? Bruce created a system of questions he called the Option Method to help people logically uncover the reasons why they think they should feel bad about something. In most cases we can’t change until we uncover these reasons and evaluate them. This process is what often leads to a an instant transformation in thinking and being(our behaviors and how we respond to things).

If you’re anything like me it may help to see the application of this insight and the Option Method in action to make things more real.

• I have 3 videos of me finding the root cause of an anxiety trigger using the Option Method I’ve shared in the eliminating anxiety triggers playlist here.
• I have 2 counseling session recordings with a practitioner who has practiced the Option Method for over 40 years. This practitioner helped me uncover the root cause of a few anxiety triggers I wanted help with. (coming soon)

Those who would like more examples

• I have 3 more counseling session recordings available for 1$ each. In these sessions I explore topics like uncertainty, caring what others think, and the beliefs that give rise to issues people face regarding these things. (coming soon)
• A best-selling author named Barry Neil Kaufmann who learned and trained under Bruce has been practicing the essence of Bruce’s method for over a quarter of a century. He’s published 19 case studies (1on1 client sessions) where he and people who’ve worked under his guidance helped people uncover the beliefs driving negative emotions and undesirable behaviors. These case studies are the transcriptions of the session.
  • 11 case studies are in PowerDialogues and 8 additional case studies are in his book Giant Steps.
• Therapist Frank Mosca also studied and learned from Bruce to first help himself. He wrote several books using his understanding and experience to evangelize the Option Method and the insight in post to others and published 8 case studies in his book Joywords. These are transcripts of sessions he had helping clients unravel and eliminate negative emotions and general feelings of unhappiness.

The insight in this post is the basis for most of my work. My goal is to produce resources that help you uncover and dismantle the beliefs that make you feel bad. I submit to you that the lack of awareness of what you’ve read today is the root cause of several psychological issues of our time like low self-esteem, low self-confidence, a lack of self-trust, peace-stealing inner critics, people-pleasing, inferiority and superiority complexes, and the like.

Won’t I and other people become psychopaths if we don’t feel bad about anything?

This question is addressed here.

I’ll leave you with this. Do we have to feel shame or can we know we don’t like whatever we’d feel shame about? Unless you think that awareness won’t produce the same result as feeling shame then what’s the benefit of feeling shame? For insight on where shame comes from and why we use it I suggest this.

• A 20-year researcher of shame, Brene Brown defines shame: “Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.” Brene further describes shame as “painful.” As far as I can see, to feel shame is to feel bad. Brene Brown also agrees that shame–which is a “feeling bad” moment–isn’t optimal for humans. She asserts: “But really, true guilt, the psychological discomfort, like cognitive dissonance, motivates meaningful change. It’s as powerful as shame, but its influence is positive, while shame’s is destructive.“
• We have evidence that people don’t want to feel bad: In fact anxiety disorders represent the single largest mental health problem in the United States (Barlow, 2002), with more than 19 million American adults having an anxiety disorder in any given year (National Institute of Mental Health, 2001). Approximately 12–19% of primary care patients meet diagnostic criteria for an anxiety disorder (Ansseau et al., 2004; Olfson et al., 1997). Moreover, antidepressants and mood stabilizers are the third most prescribed pharmacotherapy class, having 2003 global sales of $19.5 billion (IMS, 2004). Thus millions of people worldwide mount a daily struggle against clinical anxiety and its symptoms. These disorders cause a significant economic, social and health care burden for all countries, especially in developing countries that face frequent social and political upheavals and high rates of natural disaster.¹

1. Clark, D. A., & Beck, A. T. (2011). Cognitive Therapy of Anxiety Disorders: Science and Practice. New York: Guilford Press. ↩︎