Why All Feelings Are Good

• There is no such thing as a bad feeling!
• Feelings help you to satisfy your needs, wants and desires.
• Don’t ignore your feelings, otherwise you ignore yourself!

Although there are many different types, feelings can broadly be divided into being either good or bad. In this article, we shall start looking at these feelings and discuss why they are important in your life.

Good Feelings

Good feelings come as a result of satisfying your needs, wants or desires and make you feel pleasure.

Pleasure is a general term used to describe anything that makes you feel happy, safe, satisfied, love or any other feeling that gives you a sense of well being.

Bad Feelings

Bad feelings come as a result of not satisfying your needs, wants or desires and make you feel pain.

Pain can mean physical or emotional pain, and describes any feeling that you find uncomfortable such as fear, anger, sadness or any other feeling you would rather not experience.

Why There Is No Such Thing As A Bad Feeling

As you can see from the brief descriptions above, we can quickly categorise feelings into those that make us feel pleasure (good feelings) and those that make us feel pain (bad feelings).

However whilst this may be a convenient way of looking at feelings using such labels can actually be very dangerous, because the underlying implication is that we should try and experience good feelings and avoid bad feelings.

Although at first glance this might seem to make a lot of sense, it actually doesn’t, and thinking about feelings in such a way can have a negative impact on your life.

The reality is that all feelings (whether they are pleasurable or painful) are good, because they serve as an internal source of motivation, which, if listened to, will allow you to satisfy your wants, needs and desires.

By ignoring certain feelings because you think they are “bad”, you will ignore the very things that could have given you a genuine sense of happiness and satisfaction in your life.

This is why there is no such thing as a bad feeling, as all feelings are beneficial to us in one way or another.

Why It Is Important To Listen To All Your Feelings

Feelings help you to achieve the things you want in your life by providing you with pleasure when you satisfy a need, or providing you with pain when you are not satisfying a need.

Since humans have a natural tendency to be attracted towards pleasure and away from pain, feelings can be of great assistance in helping us to live a more satisfying and fulfilling life.

However in order to understand how feelings do this, we first need to understand exactly what is meant by the terms needs, wants and desires.

Needs

Needs are the things you must have in order to be healthy and survive. Everyone has the same basic human needs, which include things such as the need for food, water, shelter and safety.

When these needs are met you feel safe, afterwhich you can turn your attention to other needs such as love, relationships and sex.

The satisfaction of human needs is therefore necessary for both your survival, and the survival of society as a whole.

Wants

Whilst we all have the same basic needs, the “wants” people have vary from culture to culture and from person to person.

Wants can also change throughout your lifetime as you age, so what you want now as an adult, may be completely different to what you wanted as a child.

For example, a child may want a new toy because they saw it on TV and it looked fun, whilst an adult may want a new car because it makes a statement about who they are.

Desires

A desire is something that is unique to you, and is usually driven by some experience you have had in the past which ignites a sense of passion/excitement within you.

For example, you may desire to buy a new Porsche because it reminds you of when you were a child and used to build model cars.

When you desire something you get a strong feeling that you need or want it, and so will work very hard to do whatever it takes to get it.

In this sense desires are similar to wants, except that there is a lot more emotion associated with them.

The Satisfaction Of Needs

Unless you are living in a poor country where you do not have access to secure housing, clean water and a regular food supply there is a good chance your basic human needs are being met.

In westernised countries where these needs are almost universally met, most of the bad feelings people experience therefore tend to come as a result of not adequately satisfying higher level needs, such as the need for self respect, relationships or level of personal achievement.

In addition to this, bad feelings can also come from not being able to satisfy your wants and desires. One of the main reasons for this is due to the media and advertising, which tend to associate products with certain needs.

If you can afford to buy these products you may be able to satisfy your wants and desires, but this satisfaction is usually short lived, as there will soon be another product which will make you feel unsatisfied again until you buy it.

As for those people who cannot afford to buy these products, their wants and desires will remain unfulfilled and they will spend the majority of their lives in a state of dissatisfaction.