
If you would like to suffer more (sarcasm intended) and keep negative emotions around, here are the top ten ways to do it – in no particular order:
Think about how other people are causing your emotions and blame them for it.
Think about just how bad you feel, come up with elaborate labels and stories around your emotions. Tell your friends these stories – often.
Engage in addictions more. Addictions are great for more suffering because, in addition to resisting negative emotions by engaging in addictive behaviors, which makes the negativity persist, you add additional uncomfortable thoughts, emotions and sensations into the mix such as withdrawal, denial, guilt and shame.
Engage in spiritual and self-improvement practices which cultivate only positive emotions. This will surely solidify the experience that anything negative is REALLY BAD, which in turn will create more resistance to negativity. Negativity plus resistance equals more negativity.
Stay on Facebook for hours arguing with what everyone else is saying. Pay particular attention to the posts that piss you off. Respond to those the most, even if only in your own head. Make sure you compare yourself a lot to others who are posting pics of their happy and successful lives so that you feel appropriately deficient and unsatisfied with yourself.
When someone close to you passes, be strong. Do not cry. Don’t feel into your body. Avoid feeling the grief fully and consciously. This will keep you from wanting to feel completely connected and intimate with others in your life, for fear that you may lose them. This will also help keep the grief buried in your system for years, creating a host of other mental and emotional issues like fear of death, addiction and trauma.
When someone argues with you or criticizes you, insist that you are right. Fight to the death as you defend your position. This will keep you adequately out of your body and will solidify your ego, which always helps to keep suffering around.
Make sure that you believe that your religion or view of reality is the right and only view. Other people with other views and religions will appear threatening all of the time, which will increase anxiety.
Avoid any type of therapy that might help resolve past trauma. Perhaps the number one way to suffer your whole life is not to deal with traumatic events that helped shape you during childhood or earlier in life. This may result in addiction, which will compound the problem for years.
When you feel depressed, isolate yourself completely. Do not connect with others. Do not seek medical or therapeutic help. Do not begin a practice of mindfulness or anything which might dissolve the beliefs underlying the depression. Continue hovering in the belief that you are all alone in your pain and no one understands.