8 Ways to Maximise Misery

A Neuroscientist's Field Guide to Self-Sabotage

Most people stumble into misery by accident. They get a few things wrong and wonder why they feel bad.

This is inefficient.

If you’re going to be miserable, you should at least be strategic about it. Here are eight techniques that work together to guarantee you feel as awful as possible, as often as possible.

1. Destroy Your Sleep Cycle

Your body runs on a master clock in the brain. It uses consistent timing and light exposure to coordinate everything: when to wake you up, when to make you sleepy, when you should feel alert, when to wind down.

This system is fragile. It takes three consistent days to establish a rhythm - and one night to shatter it.

So stay up until 3 AM on weekends. Sleep until noon to compensate. Vary your bedtime by several hours throughout the week.

Your body will think it’s crossing time zones while going nowhere. You’re essentially giving yourself jet lag without leaving your bedroom.

This guarantees you feel terrible no matter how many hours you log.

2. Never Be Bored

To keep misery flowing, you must never be alone with your thoughts.

Boredom is dangerous. It might drive you to do something - take a walk, call a friend, start a project. You cannot allow this.

Let a screen entertain you constantly.

Fall asleep with your phone in your hand. Put your eyes back on it the moment you wake. Fill every gap - waiting in line, riding the bus, eating lunch - with content.

The smartest engineers and algorithms in the world are working to hold your attention. Surrender to them. Let them think for you.

The goal is simple: never be alone in your own head. Avoid the discomfort of an empty moment. Avoid the possibility that silence might reveal something worth doing.

3. Curate Your Outrage

Source: xkcd comic

While you’re on that screen, use it strategically.

Your brain is wired to obsess over social information - status, conflict, who’s with us and who’s against.

So feed your anxiety by focusing on things over which you have no control or influence. Global disasters, political scandals, strangers arguing on the internet - immerse yourself in problems you cannot solve.

The goal is to remain well-informed while doing nothing.

Let each headline pull you to the next. Build a nice reservoir of resentment and despair. After forty minutes, try to recall a single thing you learned.

You can’t. But you feel worse, and that’s what matters.

Repeat daily.

4. Compare Relentlessly

Your brain has a built-in status meter. It evolved in small tribes where your relative position mattered - for resources, for mates, for survival. This system never switched off.

So use it against yourself.

Compare your beginning to someone else’s middle. Compare your behind-the-scenes to their highlight reel. Compare your salary to your richest friend, your body to the fittest person at the gym, your career to the prodigy who started at nineteen.

Social media makes this effortless. You can now compare yourself to millions of people, filtered and curated, in seconds. No generation in history has had this power.

The key is to compare selectively. Only compare upward. Never sideways, never back at how far you've come. Find people who have what you want and study the gap.

Then remind yourself that the gap is evidence of your inadequacy, not their head start, their luck, or their different priorities.

This guarantees that no achievement will ever feel like enough. You could objectively improve your life in every measurable way and still feel like you’re losing.

5. Set Impossible Goals

Occasionally, the productive part of your brain will rebel. It wants to improve your life.

You can neutralise this impulse by setting vapid goals: objectives that are vague, irrelevant, or impossible.

• Don’t say: “I will wash this pile of dishes.”
  Say: “I should really clean the whole house.”

• Don’t say: “I’ll go for a walk today.”
  Say: “I need to get in shape.”

• Don’t say: “I’ll text one friend this week.”
  Say: “I need to be better at staying in touch.”

Because these goals are either unmeasurable or endless, you guarantee failure before you start. There is always more house to clean, more shape to be in, more touch to stay in.

This turns your brain into a critic. Instead of helping, it berates you for failing to achieve the impossible.

6. Stay Still

Your brain evolved to move.

So stay still. Remain horizontal as long as possible. Move from bed to chair to couch and back again. Become the human equivalent of a pile of laundry - inert, draped over whatever surface you landed on.

Here's why this works: for hundreds of thousands of years, movement meant survival. Your nervous system still uses physical activity as a signal that things are going well. When you stop moving, you cut off that signal - and the less you move, the less you want to.

This is the most reliable way to feel exhausted while doing nothing.

7. Eat Badly

Your brain is expensive. It consumes about 20% of your daily energy despite being 2% of your body weight. It demands a constant supply of nutrients to build neurotransmitters, repair cells, and maintain focus.

So starve it of quality inputs.

Eat mostly ultra-processed food - whatever requires the least effort. If it comes in a wrapper, even better. If it can be made in under two minutes or ordered from your couch, perfect. Let convenience be your only criteria.

If anyone suggests that what you eat might be affecting how you feel, remind them you lived on ramen noodles and energy drinks at university fifteen years ago and felt fine.

8. Isolate Yourself

Humans are social animals. Your nervous system uses other people to regulate itself - their presence, their eye contact, their voice. And isolation triggers the same stress response as physical danger.

So withdraw.

Cancel plans at the last minute. Let friendships decay through neglect. Tell yourself you’ll reach out “when you’re feeling better” - knowing that feeling better requires the connection you’re avoiding.

Replace real relationships with parasocial ones. Follow strangers online. Watch people live their lives instead of living yours. This creates the illusion of connection without any of the vulnerability.

Soon, you’ll feel lonely in a crowd and exhausted by solitude. This is the goal.

The Bottom Line

If this list felt like an attack, it wasn’t meant to be.

These aren’t moral failures. They’re path-of-least-resistance defaults in a world designed to exploit your vulnerabilities. You didn’t build the algorithms. You didn’t design the food. You didn’t choose to inherit a brain that runs on circuits built for a different era.

But you’re the one living in your body. Which means you’re the only one who can steer it somewhere better.

Start small. Start today. Start with one thing.

That’s enough.

Enjoyed this? Like, restack, or share! These articles take considerable research, and your support keeps me going. (Coffee tips always welcome below ☕)

This piece was inspired by work from [Randy J. Paterson] and [CGP Grey].