OK. It's time for a little light-hearted humor, and we have just the ticket - a little book by Dan Greenburg and Marcia Jacobs called "How to Make Yourself Miserable for the Rest of the Century: A Vital Training Manual." For a few lessons in self-torment and despair, consider these selected first-class anxiety-producing situations.:
1. Basic worries about minor infractions of the law."Each time you do something illegal - like running a red light or dropping litter on the street or jaywalking or sneaking into a show or double-parking or not using your seat belt - think as follows:"
- Everybody knows. Everybody is looking at me.
- I'll be caught. Millions of people do it all the time, but me they'll catch.
- The story will be in all the papers and will go into the permanent computer files they keep on everybody, and every prospective employer or credit manager or policeman in the world will know me on sight the rest of my life.
2. Basic worries about vacations.
- Picture the faucet you probably forgot to turn off and the water as it cascades over the sides of the sink or tub, seeping out into the rest of the house, drowning your carpets, then your furniture, then your clothes, and finally bursting out of your windows and onto the street.
- Picture the lights or the stove you probably forgot to turn off, the overheating of electrical circuits or the build-up of gas, and the inevitable flaming holocaust and explosion.
- Picture your doorstep as the milk delivery you probably forgot to cancel accumulates and quietly curdles into 14 quarts of warm cottage cheese.
3. Basic worries about waiting.
- I'm waiting in the wrong place.
- An emergency came up at the last minute, they can't make it, and they don't know how to reach me.
- They probably aren't coming. They probably never intended to come.
- Everyone who passes by knows how long I've been waiting and is laughing at me.
4. Basic worries about noises in the night.
- A hideous-looking ghoul, vampire, zombie or creature from another planet is going to rape and kill me.
- A hideous-looking man from the Bureau of Internal Revenue is going to find discrepancies in my tax return.
5. Basic worries about exercise and dieting.
Try worrying about exercise, which "can be quite healthy, provided: you don't neglect to cool down after strenuous exercise and cause your blood to pool below your waist and drain from your heart and brain and cause cardiac arrest; you don't drop a dumbbell on your foot and crush it; you don't catch athlete's foot in the gym locker room."
Worrying about "diet can be terribly important, too. You will certainly want to cut out hamburgers, hot dogs, roast beef, steaks, lamb, pork, bacon, sausage, eggs, olives, peanut butter, anything made with white flower, anything made with white rice, anything made with butter, anything made with salt, and anything made with refined sugar, like cake, ice cream, cookies, candy, Fudgesicles, Devil Dogs, or Hostess Twinkies."
The reason for Hostess Twinkies is that a man named Dan White went berserk after eating Twinkies and killed San Francisco's mayor and his associate. Thus, "the probability is high that in most public places you visit, someone nearby has recently ingested at least one Twinkie and could go berserk and kill you."
If you're totally serious about making yourself miserable, there is no more fertile ground than brooding over the past. Say Greenburg and Jacobs: "The secret of being truly miserable about the past lies in being able to regret everything you ever did and everything you ever failed to do, from the moment you were born right up to five minutes ago."
For instance: "I should have studied more in college and frolicked less" or "I should have studied less in college and frolicked more." "I shouldn't have let them put whipped cream on my Jell-O." "I should have waited until it went on sale."
For the misery of it, these authors throw in 26 masochistic activities for the beginner, of which these are a sample:
- Make a list of all the people you know who are younger than you and more successful.
- Write a letter to somebody, mail it and then figure out which part could be most easily misunderstood.
- Buy a stock, check the market quotation every day in the paper, and every time it goes down figure out exactly how much money you lost.
- Get yourself a medical book, copy down the symptoms of 10 fatal diseases, and see how many you already have.
- Go to the beach and compare your body with anyone who has a very good build.
- After leaving a room full of people, try to imagine what they might be saying about you.
- Worry that you could choke to death in a little out of-the-way restaurant where no one knows the Heimlich maneuver.
If you are exposed to such classic misery-making situations as the above, and armed with the misery-making techniques included in their training manual, Greenburg and Jacobs assure that you can create your own subjective, personalized worries and suffer deeper-level pain than was ever possible before. In fact, these authors observe, with the aid of the strategies outlined in this book, you can achieve Total Personal Misery.
- Dr. Larsen is a therapist practicing in Salt Lake City.