How to make yourself miserable: Magnify the effort, ignore the reward

In August, 2020, there’s plenty to be miserable about (failing democracy, pandemic, racial inequity) and yet, amazingly, I’ve discovered some truly innovative ways to make myself even more miserable.

Today’s lesson on how to be miserable is simple: when given a thing to do, focus on how awful all the bad parts of doing that thing are and totally ignore any good reason you have for doing it.

Examples:

• Cooking dinner. Instead of: “It will be fun to cook and eat some homemade food,” try “oh my god how does cooking even happen? What will I make? Should I make something fancy? I’m not spending enough time honing my cooking skills during quarantine. I’ll have to get ingredients! That’s so hard. All of this is so hard. I might as well lay down in bed and just stare into space like a comatose hopeful.”
• Working out. Instead of: “I’m looking forward to doing something aside from sitting or standing and staring at a screen,” try “How have I ever worked out before, ever. It’s so hard. I might not be able to do it. Can I do even one squat? How do I even put on my workout clothes? Everything is so hard.”
• Going for a walk. Instead of: “I will find my shoes and go outside and enjoy the sunshine,” try, “What if there are bad things out there and I have to walk all the way downstairs and ugh everything is hard.”

You are probably sensing a theme here, that behind this misery is the feeling that everything is hard. I don’t have the brainwidth to pull this together into anything very enlightening right now, but (and I know this is a series on how to be miserable, so this is kind of anti that), I think the way out from this thinking is dramatically lowering your expectations.

If you think something’s going to be so hard, just try it for 5 minutes and see if it is, and then lower your expectations for what you think success is. Remember why you wanted to do something in the first place. And when it’s really tough, give yourself a break, and then try again sometime later.