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Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
| Title | Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry |
| Writer | |
| Date | 2024-10-14 15:22:12 |
| Type | |
| Link | Listen Read |
Desciption
A founder of the field of evolutionary medicine uses his decades of experience as a psychiatrist to provide a much-needed new framework for making sense of mental illness.Why do I feel bad? There is real power in understanding our bad feelings. With his classic Why We Get Sick, Dr. Randolph Nesse helped to establish the field of evolutionary medicine. Now he returns with a book that transforms our understanding of mental disorders by exploring a fundamentally new question. Instead of asking why certain people suffer from mental illness, Nesse asks why natural selection has left us all with fragile minds. Drawing on revealing stories from his own clinical practice and insights from evolutionary biology, Nesse shows how negative emotions are useful in certain situations, yet can become overwhelming. Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Low moods prevent us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but they often escalate into pathological depression. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environment and our ancient human past. And there are good evolutionary reasons for sexual disorders and for why genes for schizophrenia persist. Taken together, these and many more insights help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering, and show us new paths for relieving it by understanding individuals as individuals. Read more
Review
For years and years, I have studied the area of human “operations” and written full time about what works in life. AND... I loved this book, perhaps even better than some of the other seminal books in psychology, like those by Kahneman and Seligman.The technical and explanatory level is excellent and convincing AND the stories are very interesting and well-written, even entertaining in many ways.It is relatively easy to read even though it does go deep, with 77 pages of notes. And I would estimate that, for anyone who read it and thought about it, it would start a cascade of observations and adjustments in how one thought of reality, one’s beliefs, and one’s behaviors. Reading the book will likely cause certain unperceived realities to become blatantly and blaringly obvious, in flashing neon lights. Life will never be the same after it, if you apply it, of course.I would place it in the “necessary for reading” list for those who want a better life. And, different than many books that one reads to “grow”, this has massive substance in relatively little space. (See also Shermer’s The Believing Brain, which is a great complement to this book, helping to shatter false beliefs that lead us into less than great lives...)Its worth a read, with lots of highlighting, and then a review and then a plan to implant it. I will be making a summary table of the key realities and how we can adjust to make our lives work better by refining where evolution has left us (with a number of things that do not work in this modern environment). From this we can fashion our own adaptation, but much quicker than the slow, limited process of evolution.After all, the key trait of man that caused his survival is “adaptation”, so doing our own intention caused adaptation seems an appropriate thing to do in this world if we truly want to be happy....
