How to cope with happiness

If, like me, you are afflicted with mood swings that range from such extremes as quietly happy to exuberantly content, you will know the terrible reality of the accompanying invigorating feelings that make your life so completely bearable as to require drastic measures to resolve.

The first and most important thing to understand is that you are not alone with your disorder.  Many people across the world share your unfortunately positive outlook on life and collectively the miserably challenged amongst us have devised a number of ways to reverse this unwanted euphoria which threatens to brighten your days.  This hub serves as a collection of the common methods you can use to inject some much needed despondency into your life.  I only hope it hinders you emotionally as much as it has helped to encumber me.

Many of us suffer from seasonal happiness during the long summer months. The infectious sunshine can bring with it unwanted feelings of carefree abandon along with a tendency to bronze into a healthy glow which will only feed those pesky feelings of bliss. To combat this unwanted state of affairs, consider moving to a colder country. Your goal should be to move as far away from the warm glow of the equator as humanly possible. Think about relocating to one of the Scandinavian countries which, while distressingly beautiful, have the advantage of winter polar nights which can stretch to more than twenty four hours of abject darkness - now you’re showing that bothersome sun who’s boss! Before you know it you’ll be rocking in wretched misery on the front porch of a freezing chalet, icicles forming on the end of your nose, with happy memories becoming a rapidly fading thing of the past.

Deciding to keep fit is a great way to undermine your previously unassailable positive mental attitude.  Set yourself a target goal which on the surface sounds realistic, but deep down you know you will never reach.  Start exercising daily and always keep in mind that skipping even a single day means you have completely failed as a human being.  Join a gym and make sure to exercise near very fit individuals who not only look gorgeous in their tight gym shirts (or at least when compared to your sad little figure) but can bench press more in a single sitting than you will realistically achieve in a year.  Stare in bemused horror at weird resistance machines that you’re convinced should really belong in a medieval torture chamber, before attempting (and inevitably failing in a tangle of limbs and metal) to work out how to use one.  For maximum misery, try to spend too long on a weight machine until you’re abruptly moved along by some buff gym demi-god sneering the words, “you’re not just wasting your time, you’re wasting my time too”.

Although it might seem that having a few drinks will temporarily increase the feelings of euphoria you are currently plagued with, fear not!  That demon drink will soon have you feeling anxious, down in the dumps and positively aggressive towards your fellow human beings.  The more moonshine you consume over long periods of time, the more likely it is your brain activity will slow down leaving you with diminished reflexes, a distorted judgement and a lethargy of spirit not usually seen outside of the Big Brother house.  As a side benefit, each morning you awaken after a heavily intoxicated night will leave you with a dehydrated body, a splitting headache and an irrational urge to kill anyone who speaks in tones louder than a whisper.  As you lie in a pool of your own vomit, curled around the base of a public toilet singing snatches of long forgotten eighties songs between the crashing waves of nausea that threaten to overwhelm you, it will be easy to forget those happy thoughts that have thus far tormented your life. 

Nothing will keep away those irritating highs quicker than a millstone of debt around your neck.  Attempt to achieve a ridiculously high spend on credit cards and loans, while accumulating nothing actually tangible to show for it other than the less than amorous attentions of large humourless men, skilled in the art of knee-cap disassembly.   Surprisingly high levels of debt are actually incredibly easy to achieve, meaning this route to unhappiness should be a favourite in your toolbox of gloom.  Consider getting yourself further in hock through the use of online gambling sites.  While there is admittedly a slight risk you might win, in the long term you will undoubtedly have lost a considerable amount of cash and potentially gained yourself a brand new psychosis in the helpfully dispiriting form of a gambling addiction.  Having no money will guarantee to keep happiness at bay as you struggle from day to day without any money to pay your bills or enjoy any of life’s other little luxuries, like clothes, shelter and food.

If you’re still looking for ways to pierce the bubble of elation smothering you, then another great trick guaranteed to wipe that smile from your face is to engage your built in relationship self-destruct mode.  Don’t worry if you’re not entirely sure how to do this, you’ll probably work it out eventually anyway (most people naturally do).  The crushingly devastating blow of splitting up with your significant other can help magnify those lost feelings of despondency and misery that appear to be missing from your life.  It’s surprisingly easy to wreck a seemingly rock solid partnership and don’t feel restricted to destroying your chances with just one potential life partner either.  With a string of failed romances littering your past like dismal grey confetti, you’ll soon find yourself wondering how happiness ever had you in its clutches.  Before you know it, you’ll be watching the person of your dreams waltz up the aisle with an alternative Mr or Mrs Right while you sit at home with a big tub of ice cream watching a depressing and seemingly infinite loop of Friends and ER.

If you still haven’t quite sucked in all the blues you require, maybe it’s time to think about a career change.  If you’re finding too much enjoyment and unnecessary job satisfaction in your current role, then this could easily be a contributory factor to your current unwanted state of exultation.  Working in a job that you don't like with people that you positively loathe can often bring you back to a much needed state of rage.  Jobs like a portable toilet cleaner (especially at a large festival), a cat food quality controller or perhaps even a flatulence analyst will soon have you seething in frustration and shaking an unhappy fist at the world once more.  Consider evening classes too, although be careful to pick something you have no interest in and preferably a class that is far too cerebral for you to ever truly grasp.  Perhaps advanced mathematics taught in Urdu, or nuclear physics with a side order of statistics would help repel those happy thoughts far from your brain.  At the very least, try to understand what it is that is making you so annoyingly happy in your current role in an attempt to ensure your next job holds none of the same irritatingly positive qualities.

Hopefully you can now leave this hub a much more jaded and downtrodden individual than the bright positive spark that initially begun the menial trudge through these pages. In case you have concerns regarding the authenticity of these approaches, I can personally vouch for most of them, having applied them rigorously to my own life and noting on your behalf the happiness draining qualities inherent in each. Clearly other ways exist to deflate your over excitable personality, but the methods I have painstakingly described here are a good starting position for anyone who wishes to stop being so outrageously happy and instead join the rest of the human race in abject misery. Of course, there are some that might argue that being a happy, convivial and altruistic individual brings a much needed breath of fresh air to an otherwise cynical, depressing and malevolent world and therefore is something we should all strive to achieve with every fibre of our being. As those people are almost definitely wrong however, I would not hesitate to recommend every method described in this hub instead. Well, nearly every method. Being a flatulence analyst really blows.