10 Ways to Have a Bad Day

The Art of Creating Days that Suck

It is common today to read articles full of positivity, such as “10 Things That Successful People do Before Breakfast” and “How to Have a Good Day”.

However, there is a shocking lack of instruction and theory on how you can successfully achieve a bad day. This article is not meant to be comprehensive, but simply covers major factors that have been field tested and shown to be effective in even the most positive of people.

Bad days can take place at milestones in your life (such as the day you failed an exam, or the day a bird pooped on your head, or the day you got dumped), but these are difficult to regularly replicate. Through much field testing, I have discovered that there are other variables that can be tweaked every day in order to maximize the number of bad days you have in your life:

The Right Sort of Physiology

You must lay a foundation of unresourceful physiology if you’re hoping for a bad day to follow. Taking care of your body is a huge obstacle in creating bad days:

• Do your best to wake up hungover and sleep-deprived. And late for work, preferably for a meeting of some sort where you have to be in the office, at work, or at school for.
• In order to maximize the feelings of despair, you must leverage hunger. Skip lunch and stay hungry till dinner. Or, do the extreme opposite and eat fast food or something carb-heavy for lunch (alternatively, anything else that makes you struggle to stay awake during the afternoon will suffice as a substitute).
• Avoid water. Make sure that dehydration headache sinks in to your mind before gulping down large amounts. Get frustrated when it doesn’t disappear immediately.

The Right Sort of Routines

Although physiology is often enough to make a day mediocre, your work is far from complete. It’s important to create and perpetuate routines that make overwhelm your brain in order to prevent it from focusing or achieving something substantial:

• Check emails regularly. It’s crucial for you to make yourself responsible for taking care of menial tasks. Do not prioritize. Do not wait for other folks to sort themselves out. When not doing this, you should diligently check Facebook and Twitter and Reddit regularly before moving back to task at hand. You should optimally repeat this routine every 5 minutes.
• Commute during rush hour so that you know a 20-minute trip expands into 70. Ideally, you would be in a subway and have it break down on them, and groan along with the rest of the commuters (maximize emotional contagion). Alternatively, you could also be stuck in a car with only AM/FM radio. In either case, if you really want to make your day worse, you should drink heaping amounts of liquid before you begin the commute. (Warning: Reading books or listening to podcasts could ruin the effect of the commute.)
• Watch mind-numbing television when you get home because the day already took its toll. You should avoid positive or educational television shows, and stick to reality TV in order to perpetuate the cycle of negativity.
• Spend your willpower and decision energy on unimportant matters, such as what to wear. It is imperative for you to blow these minute decisions out of proportion. That way, you can maximize the probability that you’ll be upset or bitter when nobody notices the difference and you had spent 20 minutes carefully choosing.

The Right Sort of People

Finally, no bad day is complete without properly engaging your friends and family about how bad your day was. Complaining is the skill to master here:

• IM and text friends throughout the day. Make sure you reply immediately, so that you obligate them to do the same. Get upset if they don’t. Be annoyed if they have something more important to do than reply to your attempt at a joke.
• Complain to your significant other, your friends, or your pet. Slam doors so they give you attention. Then get upset at them for bugging you and trying to complain to you about their day. Get upset arguing about who had the worse day. Curse a lot.
• Don’t say hello to acquaintances or colleagues or friends. They might be so curious about you that they’ll want to extend it into an actual, awkward, conversation (or even worse, small talk). Just look at your phone and/or keep your headphones plugged in. Human contact and interaction is overrated. Don’t give them a chance to care.

You must engage not one, but at least five to six (sometimes seven or eight), of these major forces highlighted in this program in order to have a bad day. On your office wall or in your room, remind yourself of the 5 N’s which guarantee a bad day:

• Neglect physiology
• No routines that allow focus
• Never surround yourself with positive/cheerful people
• Neglect friends and acquaintances
• Nurse negativity

And you must — by all means — avoid the five B’s that could assure a good day:

• Be careful with your body and take care of it
• Break bad habits and create good ones
• Be around positive people
• Break inertia with friends and acquaintances
• Be grateful

Not only do they make your day less bad, engaging in even one of these might ruin all your hard work and change your day into a good one. Avoid them at all costs.

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Herbert Lui is an editor at Lantern and regularly writes for The Next Web andThe Huffington Post. His work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Fast Company, and Lifehacker.

Cover image by: Eflon