Feeling Good

Book excerpt: Every day, people make life choices that, ideally, increase their evolutionary fitness the chances of survival and successful reproduction and lead to positive feelings of fulfilment, accomplishment, and happiness. Sometimes, however, individuals experience quite the opposite: feelings of sadness caused by fitness-decreasing choices. Fortunately, many advancements in evolutionary theory and evolutionary psychology have increased humans' capacity as a species to address the question of how to live a life characterized by more positive than negative feelings.Feeling Good reveals anyone can learn how to trigger mechanisms that generate positive feelings and increase positive fitness levels. The key is to employ an evolutionary perspective on how mental mechanisms generate feelings in relation to our life choices.From an insightfully evolutionary perspective, Feeling Good examines how to find and keep a mate, make good career decisions, build a solid social network, deal with death and negative influences, and make life choices in general that can lead to better and more sustainable mental and physical health. Menelaos Apostolou deepens our understanding of human nature by exploring what is good and evil in an evolutionary sense as well as in relation to religious dogmas; and whether making fitness-increasing life choices can lead to more good or more evil acts.