It's very suspect on the surface that you say people "don't want to do anything except stop the bad feeling" followed by (paraphrasing) "except when it's the exact opposite."

While it seems that people in persistent bad situations often get nothing out of their stress and suffering but additional health problems, I think we'd have even worse failure modes if we really only reacted emotionally to changes in circumstance, and were unable to sustain persistent (dis)satisfaction with our present state. I mean this as a statement about our possible evolutionary "design", not about what's theoretically possible.