When I feel bad this is because there are heuristic algorithms in my brain which have computed this feeling as their output. The bad feeling will disappear once I processed this output correctly. The purpose of these feelings is to steer your cognition towards important problems. A bad feeling is processed correctly by letting the feeling guide a search process for the problem the feeling claims to detect.
There are two possible outcomes of a successful search:
A heuristic has fired incorrectly: I feel bad but actually there is no problem. In this case the search process reveals that there is no problem. At this point the bad feeling fades away.
A heuristic fires and there is an underlying problem: The search process will yield information about what the actual problem is that makes me feel bad. This information usually immediately changes my policy. Often I want to immediately fix the problem.
Example of (2):
I program for many hours and notice that I have been increasingly feeling bad. I try to understand why. I guess that it is because that these things I am programming are not actually high value. But that doesn't feel right. I think that maybe the actual problem is that in all these hours I didn't actually even engage in the process of thinking about what would be most valuable to do for me. That then feels right. I stop programming and start to think about what the highest value thing is that I could do. I notice that during these hours I already thought multiple times that the problem is that when working on this I am not working on alignment, but I somehow managed to completely dismiss this thought every time, and have it not shift my policy at all. That feels right. I think that the real problem might be that I am doing something for a significant amount of time without having a story for how this relates back to alignment. This feels right. I am now confused because I remember that I did actually write extensively about how this relates to alignment but that was weeks ago. I realize that I started doing something that takes so long that I forgot what the goal of doing it even was. I notice that there is some version of the project that is actually high value to do, but I mostly failed to do the high value things in the past week, because I forgot what even the purpose of the project was. Now that I remember my brain immediately suggests some next steps for developing this project that are obviously alignment relevant.
Processing this feeling as it arises is much harder to suppress it with superstimuli like watching youtube, videogames, ice cream, pornography, etc. A superstimulus puts you into a state of mind where the bad feeling simply can't arise, so it is effective at making you not feel bad anymore. However this is a dysfunctional solution in that for many instances where you feel bad there is an underlying problem, and suppressing the emotion makes you not even realize that this problem exists.
Note: It is possible to feel bad while there is no problem in the sense I am pointing at. But if you are in good mental and physical health I expect that most of the time you feel bad, this applies.