Top 5 Ways to Make Life Miserable
In the world we live in today, there’s so much that someone can be happy about. Friends, family, fellow students and coworkers; everyone in today’s society are surrounded by people they care about. With all these distractions in life, you might be thinking that you’re too happy and need to tone it down a bit. If that’s the case, then you’re in luck! Here are the top 5 ways to make life worse than it already is.
Stay Inside
You might not realize it now, but a lot of the joy in life comes from going outside and interacting with the world around you. Sunlight, fresh air, and the vibrant colors seen outside help stimulate our minds and make us happier. Obviously, this must be avoided to minimize happiness and make your life more miserable. For best results, confine yourself to as small an are as possible. Staying in your dorm or house 24/7 is a good first step, but your end goal should be to lock yourself in your room and only leave for absolute necessities. This also helps accomplish the next goal in your 5 step program to making life suck:
2) Limit Physical Activity
Be it sports, exercise, or just walking around, you should try to keep all physical activity to a minimum. Running and playing games releases adrenaline in your body and leads to a more enjoyable lifestyle. Walking or hiking usually implies going outside, and goes against the first tip for making more misery for yourself. While you might think the negative environment of a gym might be discouraging and add to your anguish, the effects of regular exercise far outweighs this. Not only is exercise physical activity, but it often tied in with reaching goals and feeling accomplished as well. For these reasons, exercise should be avoided like the plague with all other forms of physical activity.
3) Break your Sleep Schedule
Going to sleep and waking up at regular intervals can be difficult, so just avoid it! Break out of your normal sleep schedule by going to bed and waking up at strange times. An effective strategy for starting this is to stay up late, then sleep more the next night to ‘catch up’. Eventually, you should be going to sleep and waking up at a different time each day, changing how long you spend sleeping each night. Punctuate this with long and irregular naps and you’re one step closer to making more despair for yourself!
4) Avoid Meaningful Interaction
If you’re ever sad, your first reaction might be to talk to a friend or family member about it. This risks the person you’re talking to attempting to cheer you up, so just don’t do it! Stop talking to people about your interests, beliefs, opinions, and anything else with real meaning behind it. All conversations should contain no depth and be as uninteresting as possible. My personal favorite way to accomplish this is by responding to messages with ‘k’ and ‘oh’. Fill the gaping lack of social interaction with social media instead. Since people are always trying to make themselves look good on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, you’ll feel worse in comparison. It is important to note that meaningful interaction can occur on these platforms as well, however. You must keep an eye out and avoid these interactions just like you avoid the ones in person. This will serve to make you overall a more depressed and miserable person!
5) Think negative thoughts
We always hear that thinking positively and smiling more can help make a person happier. It turns out that these tactics work in reverse as well. Self-deprecation is an easy way to start this off, but that alone won’t bring you to the desired level of sorrow. To take the next step, mentally insult those around you and blame them for all of your problems. A healthy balance between considering yourself as the human equivalent to a pile of dirty laundry, while holding everyone else accountable for every minor mistake is vital for taking your life to the next level of misery
The subject of this article was inspired by the works of Dr. Randy Patterson, specifically his book How to be Miserable: 40 Strategies you Already Use. The theme of the book is to inspire the reader to accomplish their goals by thinking about the extreme alternative. Hopefully, this would cause people to be more productive because they fear what might happen if they aren’t. If you’re ever feeling down and want to change your life around but don’t know where to start, try taking these points and flipping them around. They might just make you a happier and more productive person.
