Randolph M. Nesse Quotes



Best 9 Good Reasons for Bad Feelings Quotes by Randolph M. Nesse

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings Quotes

“All organisms are shaped to behave in ways that increase fitness even if that decreases health and happiness. Did you ever desperately want to have sex with someone even though you knew that could lead to disaster? Most people have, with sometimes dire consequences. Then there are the rest of our desires and the inevitable suffering because they cannot all be fulfilled. We want so badly to be important, rich, loved, admired, attractive, and powerful. For what? the good feelings from succeeding are just about balanced by the bad feelings from failure. Our emotions benefit our genes far more than they do us.”

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings

“Caffeine seems innocuous, but a single coffee bean can kill a mouse.”

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings

“Like fever and pain, anxiety and low mood are useful normal responses to some situations.”

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings

“Most behavior is in pursuit of a goal. Some efforts are attempts to get something, others to escape or prevent something. Either way, an individual is usually trying to make progress toward some goal. High and low moods are aroused by situations that arise during goal pursuit. What situations? A generic but useful answer is: high and low moods were shaped to cope with propitious and unpropitious situations.”

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings

“Selection shapes brains that maximize the number of offspring who survive to reproduce themselves. This is very different from maximizing health or longevity. It is also different from maximizing matings. That is why organisms do things other than having sex. Especially humans. Having the most offspring requires allocating plenty of thought and action to getting resources other than mates and matings, especially social resources, such as friends and status. Everyone else is doing the same thing, creating constant conflict, cooperation, and vast social complexity whose comprehension requires a huge brain.”

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings

“Some clinicians skip asking about personal details. They check symptoms on a list, put patients into diagnostic categories, and then recommend whatever treatment has been shown to help patients with that diagnosis. This nomothetic approach saves time, effort, and the emotional entanglements that ensue from creating relationships with individuals. Fewer midnight phone calls.”

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings

“Strong selection for extreme mental capacities may have given us all minds like the legs of racehorses, fast but vulnerable to catastrophic failures.”

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings

“The greatest boon of modern life is also the greatest villain: the availability of plentiful food.”

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings

“The mechanisms our minds use to anticipate the results of our actions are inadequate for coping with modern media.”

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings

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“I'm not perfect... But I'm enough.”


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