If one is in a continuing bad situation, a persistent bad feeling encourages one to search for the persistent factor.
Really? Has it been your experience that persistent bad feelings actually motivate you to change something? In my experience, and in the experience of my clients, a persistent bad feeling is usually an alternative to actually doing something about a problem. You want to talk about anosognosiac self-deception? Try bad feelings. It’s very easy to deceive yourself into thinking that, say, worrying about work somehow counts the same as working.
People who feel bad don’t want to do anything except stop the bad feeling (or in some cases, wallow in it), and the most expedient ways to stop most bad feelings usually do nothing to resolve the problem that created the bad feeling in the first place.
In short, bad feelings do not prime constructive behaviors. Good feelings do.
It’s very suspect on the surface that you say people “don’t want to do anything except stop the bad feeling” followed by (paraphrasing) “except when it’s the exact opposite.”
While it seems that people in persistent bad situations often get nothing out of their stress and suffering but additional health problems, I think we’d have even worse failure modes if we really only reacted emotionally to changes in circumstance, and were unable to sustain persistent (dis)satisfaction with our present state. I mean this as a statement about our possible evolutionary “design”, not about what’s theoretically possible.
Really? Has it been your experience that persistent bad feelings actually motivate you to change something? In my experience, and in the experience of my clients, a persistent bad feeling is usually an alternative to actually doing something about a problem. You want to talk about anosognosiac self-deception? Try bad feelings. It’s very easy to deceive yourself into thinking that, say, worrying about work somehow counts the same as working.
People who feel bad don’t want to do anything except stop the bad feeling (or in some cases, wallow in it), and the most expedient ways to stop most bad feelings usually do nothing to resolve the problem that created the bad feeling in the first place.
In short, bad feelings do not prime constructive behaviors. Good feelings do.
It’s very suspect on the surface that you say people “don’t want to do anything except stop the bad feeling” followed by (paraphrasing) “except when it’s the exact opposite.”
While it seems that people in persistent bad situations often get nothing out of their stress and suffering but additional health problems, I think we’d have even worse failure modes if we really only reacted emotionally to changes in circumstance, and were unable to sustain persistent (dis)satisfaction with our present state. I mean this as a statement about our possible evolutionary “design”, not about what’s theoretically possible.