Maximize Your Misery! (7 Great Methods)

Let’s imagine that instead of being healthily fulfilled in life, you wanted to spend your days as miserable as possible. What should you do?

Here are a few pointers:

Stay still

Avoid physical activity and/or outdoor exposure, to avoid any mood-lifting neurochemicals. In fact, remain indoors as much as possible, preferably in the same room.

If you want to absolutely maximize your misery, make your bedroom the sole space for all activities that it’s possible to do there.

Disrupt your sleep

Keep an irregular sleep schedule by varying your bedtime and wake-up times frequently. Sleep in as much as possible, and make up for it by staying up late to ensure ongoing exhaustion.

Maximize screentime

Use digital entertainment as much as possible to distract you from meaningful activities and rest—as a bonus, this will also help you to avoid self-reflection.

Begin and end your day with a device in hand.

Fuel negative emotions

If you’re going to focus on something, focus on problems you cannot control, to stoke the fires of anger and angst.

A good way of doing this is by staying informed about distressing events, while avoiding meaningful actions to address them. Contribute only in token gestures, and then lament the lack of change.

Follow your impulses

Act on short-term desires without considering long-term consequences, while avoiding behaviors that you know might improve your mood or wellbeing.

Trust that doing the same things that have not previously resulted in happiness, will continue to reliably deliver unhappiness.

Set goals to miss

It’s important that your goals should be vague, and overly ambitious in their scope and/or deliverability. Ideally you should also disregard any preparatory work that a person would normally do before embarking on such a project.

Bonus tip: you can further sabotage any chances of progress, by waiting for motivation to strike before you take any action.

Pursue happiness

Focus on chasing happiness itself, instead of improving your situation or skills. Treat happiness as an end goal, instead of a by-product of worthwhile activities.

Want to learn more?

If you’d like to know many more ways to be miserable, we featured these 7 from this book of 40, which we haven’t reviewed yet, but probably will one of these days:

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

Alternatively…

If for some strange reason you’d rather not do those things, you might consider a previous article of ours:

How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)

Enjoy!