How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use

by Randy J. Paterson

Part One: Adopting a Miserable Lifestyle Lesson 1: Avoid All Exercise Lesson 2: Eat What You’re Told Lesson 3: Don’t Waste Your Life in Bed Lesson 4: Live Better Through Chemistry Lesson 5: Maximize Your Screen Time Lesson 6: If You Want It, Buy It Lesson 7: Can’t Afford It? Get It Anyway! Lesson 8: Give 100 Percent to Your Work Lesson 9: Be Well Informed Lesson 10: Set VAPID Goals Part Two: How to Think Like an Unhappy Person Lesson 11: Rehearse the Regrettable Past Lesson 12: Blame Inward, Give Credit Outward Lesson 13: Practice the “Three Bad Things” Exercise Lesson 14: Construct Future Hells Lesson 15: Value Hope Over Action Lesson 16: Become a Toxic Optimist Lesson 17: Filter for the Negative Lesson 18: Cultivate Your Presence—Elsewhere Lesson 19: Insist on Perfection Lesson 20: Work Endlessly on Your Self-Esteem Part Three: Hell Is Other People Lesson 21: Become an Island unto Yourself Lesson 22: Give Them What They Want Lesson 23: Measure Up and Measure Down Lesson 24: Play to Win Lesson 25: Hold High Expectations of Others Lesson 26: Drop Your Boundaries Lesson 27: Bond with People’s Potential, Not Their Reality Lesson 28: Demand Loyalty Lesson 29: React to Their Motives, Not Their Messages Lesson 30: Cultivate and Treasure Toxic Relationships Part Four: Living a Life Without Meaning Lesson 31: Keep Your Eye on the Small Picture Lesson 32: Let Your Impulses Be Your Guide Lesson 33: Look Out for Number One Lesson 34: Duty First, Life Later Lesson 35: Live the Unlive...

Take some time to calculate your weekly leisure screen-time ratio. It’s easy to do. Simply add up your screen time (Television + Non-work Internet + Gaming), all divided by your hours of unpaid consciousness (168 hours in a week, minus the hours you spend in bed or at work). Let’s say you watch television 3 hours a day, surf 2.5 hours a day, spend 2 hours a week playing computer solitaire, lie in bed 8 hours a day, and work 40 hours a week. This amounts to ((3x7) + (2.5x7) + 2)/(168—((8x7) + 40)) = 40.5 hours of screen time / 72 non-work waking hours = 0.563, or 56.3 percent of leisure time spent on screens. Not bad, but this still leaves you with 31.5 hours a week of non-screen leisure. Bump up your television and Internet just to the US average, and this will get you to 62 hours, leaving virtually no time for anything at all that might inadvertently boost your mood. What could be easier?

“The best way to stop appreciating something is to buy it.”

One of the most potent strategies thus far studied is also an arrestingly simple one. Lying in bed, before going to sleep, you would call to mind three things about the day that you enjoyed or appreciated. These events can be worldly—perhaps, for example, a peace treaty appeared in the news or a friend received a promotion. But most of the events should be personal: a tasty bagel eaten at breakfast, a compliment received from a friend, a bookshelf newly dusted, a drive through morning rush hour that was easier than usual. Even on an otherwise terrible day, there are usually at least some positive elements: The admitting clerk at the root canal clinic smiled nicely at me. To get people to remain focused a bit longer on the exercise, Seligman advises them to write the events down in a bedside notebook and to contemplate how they came about—in effect, to make attributions for the events. They might credit the bagel to the skill of the baker, the compliment to a friend’s kindness, the clean bookshelf to their own efforts, the light traffic to people taking a long weekend. Some of these attributions might be internal, others external. The point is to occupy the mind with these positive events for at least a few minutes. The challenge that clinicians have in recommending this exercise is that it seems far too simple. People want to believe that changing how they feel is a complex, obstacle-strewn path filled with thorns and leg-hold traps. It turns out, however, that altering th...