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. The fact that humans feel bad about things only means we have the ability to feel bad about things, not that we are supposed to feel bad about things. Rather than feel bad about something, you can recognize that you likely dislike (probably severely) whatever you’re feeling bad about and use that awareness to help you take a future action or next step.

Understanding shame

This post will also help you understand and overcome shame. It’s often overlooked but shame is just another way of describing the fact that someone feels bad about something.

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 also describes shame as “painful.”

Why we aren’t supposed to feel bad about htings

Here’s the reasoning for this view, which has yet to be disproven:

1. It goes without saying that whenever you’re feeling bad about something, you feel suboptimal or simply put, bad. For example, you may be experience a fight or flight response. 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.” Until disproven, whenever you feel bad or experience negative emotions, your body is under stress. Since stress robs the body from optimally functioning, feeling bad also robs the body from optimally functioning.

Brene Brown also agrees that shame (aka “feeling bad”) 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.“

Why do we feel bad about things in the first place?

Note: In our writing, unhappiness = feeling bad. Feeling bad happens whenever you experience a negative emotion or an emotion you dislike.

Sometime before 1970, a man with a background in religion, philosophy, and psychology came to the remarkable conclusion that:

This may sound too simplistic or even unbelievable but we encourage you to reflect on this insight for a few minutes so you can see that you can actually can control your 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

How to overcome feeling bad

The critical insight is that we (humans) 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? Whenever you feel bad about something, you must be able to dig out the often unconscious reasons and beliefs why you think you should feel bad about that thing.

Bruce created a system of questions he called the Option Method to help people systematically uncover the reasons why they think they should feel bad about something. Several of the solutions and insights on Clarity use the tenets of the Option Method to bring transformation.

For example, we have a free dedicated solution using the Option Method for anxiety but it can also be used for any negative emotion. If you’d like to access it, contact us or create an account (recommended), and access it directly.

It is often difficult to stop feeling bad about something until you uncover the often unconscious reasons why you think you should feel bad about it. When you do that work, an often instant transformation in thinking and being (your behaviors and how you respond to things) takes place.

We 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, a peace-stealing inner critic, people-pleasing, inferiority and superiority complexes, and the like.

Real-life examples of people eliminating negative emotions

It may help to see the application of this insight about feeling bad and the Option Method in action to make things more real.

• Real-life examples of individuals eliminating negative emotions

Those who would like more examples

• We have more counseling session recordings that will be available soon. If you’d like to be notified of their release, contact us or create an account. In these sessions, we explore topics like uncertainty, caring what others think, and the beliefs that give rise to issues people face regarding these things.
• 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 this post to others. He 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.

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

This question is addressed here.

Do you have to feel shame or can you know that you don’t like whatever you currently or would 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

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