How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use – by Dr. Randy Paterson

What would you do if you wanted to make your life as miserable as possible? Maybe you’d ensure you are sleep-deprived; maybe you’d adjust your diet and exercise to make disease as likely as possible. Maybe you’d be a consumer of addictive substances. But these are easy, entry-level ways to be miserable—most people do them already!

Psychologist Dr. Paterson lays out advice to take things to the next level. After covering the above, he gives many more tips, ranging from rehearsing the regrettable past, to constructing future Hells. Engaging in toxic positivity to maximize the blows when bad things happen, and insisting on perfection (to make failure more likely, if not inevitable).

But still, one can do more. In fact, the author recommends giving 100% to one’s work (he neglected to advise giving 100% when giving blood, perhaps because that would become only a short-lived problem), dropping your boundaries, and at the same time having the highest expectations of others—all the better to feel worse when they turn out to be fallible humans merely doing their best.

Each of these wise pieces of advice and many more (there are 40 strategies, after all) get a short chapter to them, explained clearly so that the reader can easily apply them in life.

There’s also a small follow-up about what to do if, for whatever reason, you’ve decided you’ve had enough of your carefully-constructed miserable lifestyle, and would like to flip the tips to try a change of pace instead.

Bottom line: this is all very effective advice, and how you choose to put this information into practice is up to you!

Click here to check out How To Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use, and maximize your misery!