The significant person or people in the child’s life who are able to listen, comfort and talk about things not being right and acknowledge that they themselves have strong feelings and emotions too, can help the child to self- regulate and know that the feeling was normal and assist them with the tools to manage these emotions differently.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 The child displays certain behaviours given the feeling they are having at the time, recognizing that ‘bad’ feelings can sometimes have a consequence if the child becomes overwhelmed with the emotion.

The book takes the reader on a child’s journey through feelings, good and bad, and how the child responds to the feeling at a certain time.

The Good/Bad Feelings Diary read to a child from an early age allows parents to also receive a healthy message about the benefits of sharing and talking about feelings, whatever they may be. Good Reasons for Bad Feelings will fascinate anyone who wonders how our minds can be so powerful, yet so fragile, and how love and goodness came to exist in organisms shaped to maximize Darwinian fitness. Taken together, these insights and many more help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering, and show us new paths for relieving it. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environments and our ancient human past. Low mood prevents us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but it often escalates into pathological depression. Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. 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 excessive. Instead of asking why certain people suffer from mental illness, Nesse asks why natural selection has left us with fragile minds at all. Now he returns with a book that transforms our understanding of mental disorders by exploring a fundamentally new question.

With his classic book Why We Get Sick, Randolph Nesse established the field of evolutionary medicine.

Good reasons for bad feelings book