Misery—like disappointment—has different cultural causes, meanings, and traditions.

A new book on reducing misery looks at neuroscientific research on comparison-making and self-destructiveness.

"How to Be Miserable" urges greater tolerance for discordance, detachment, and self-acceptance.

More than a half-century ago, in 1952, when positive psychology set off a wave of religiously inspired self-help in the U.S. with the release of Norman Vincent Peale’s popular bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich asked in war-torn Austria, in a now-famous exchange with his colleague Kurt Eissler, “Where does the misery come from?”

The timing in each case was not a coincidence. Frustrated by Freud’s argument that psychical suffering was mostly due to internal warfare—a despotic and implacable superego, ruled by unappeasable death instinct—Reich wanted the focus turned outward, “out where the people were,” to take more of the war into account and somehow to treat social dynamics and oppression, tied to the poverty that was then regionwide.

Rethinking the causes of misery appeared necessary in war-torn Europe. However, Reich’s spin on one of Freud’s last best models for our “discontents” oversimplified the type of internal divisiveness that was said to remain, leaving the superego more like a guardian to societal values than, per Freud’s late work, the vehicle for an almost insurmountable hostility, redirected at us without filter or mercy, making us far more miserable than is necessary or useful.

As relevant for the path taken: While Freudian psychoanalysis struggled to calibrate misery’s internal and external causes, the religiously inspired self-belief that Peale marketed across North America eventually hit a roadblock with self-doubt, failure, and self-sabotage, as Freud predicted. By 1957, Peale made the pressure for self-affirmation so unrelenting that he began to view a low opinion of oneself as “an affront to God.” “Never entertain a failure thought,” he admonished fellow Americans, cheering presumptions of their exceptionalism while channeling Alfred Adler on their inferiority complexes, as if imitating a superego the country had lost. “You’re disintegrating. You’re deteriorating. You’re dying on the vine.”

Where does the misery come from?

The 20th-century debate over the origins and implications of our misery has an important update. In How to Be Less Miserable: End the Negative Mind Loops and Find Joy, a new book by author-editor Lybi Ma, the debate is recast to incorporate neuroscientific findings showing that, under pressure, “the brain wants us to suffer.” With an in-built disposition to bias and exaggerated threat—likely a holdover from evolution—we not only overcompensate for what are frequently distorted and misperceived threats, but also, as a species, have an in-built “tendency for suffering” that, with self-awareness, patience, and humor, we can learn to counteract, to make our internal lives a lot more bearable.

“The brain makes errors in judgment to protect us,” Ma extrapolates from studies that repeatedly corroborate the overreaction as a type of emotional flooding tied to the rapid release of dopamine. “It wants to protect us from unknown certainties, but it does too good a job sometimes, and this results in our daily lives being hijacked by unhappy thoughts.”

Ma’s more-benign, less-tragic emphasis on patterns of overreaction, rather than on deficits and failures, shifts the ground for recovery, from treating and mistreating individualized disorders to engaging more with ill-considered behaviors, including self-destructive ones, that are often exaggerated by cultural biases and blindspots requiring a different approach. This, in turn, modifies how we think about the problem and how we can resolve it.

How to Be Less Miserable is especially adept for those of us prone to overthink casual and throwaway remarks, not to indulge them as part of an arsenal of disappointments and regrets, but to reset them as part of a broader challenge of engaging socially and professionally, of dealing with a world that can have very sharp elbows. “Sometimes,” Ma writes of the stress and endless chatter we internalize, “it gets so noisy that it spirals in a perpetual loop, which can drive anyone out of their mind. We wind up rolling around in our thoughts, finding ourselves in limitless unease.”

Cultural mistranslation and bicultural fluency

Ma’s story—her family is Hui (Chinese Muslims) from the Tibetan-Qinghai plateau in Northwest China; her parents and older siblings fled the Cultural Revolution for Hong Kong, where she was born. The family emigrated to the United States. Ultimately, she took up long-term tenure (almost 26 years) as executive editor of Psychology Today, a periodical that focuses on bringing the behavioral sciences to a large public. This is especially well-suited to her argument and her approach. (Full disclosure: Ma has been my main editor at this publication since 2009.)

My Hui cousins, in our homeland of Northwest China, don’t slosh around in what could have been or ought to be. Instead, they frequently use the expression bai le (败了), a saying used to convey defeat, but in fact meaning much more than that. It’s used to express, Let it go. Oh, well. That’s too bad. He missed the train. Bai le. She didn’t get the job. Bai le.

My Hui cousins, in our homeland of Northwest China, don’t slosh around in what could have been or ought to be. Instead, they frequently use the expression bai le (败了), a saying used to convey defeat, but in fact meaning much more than that. It’s used to express, Let it go. Oh, well. That’s too bad. He missed the train. Bai le. She didn’t get the job. Bai le.

The saying applies to both minor and major events. And rather than endorsing flippancy or fatalism, it allows a person to detach from the problem, to accept that “hardship is part of our everyday existence”—that we can find room for its ambiguities and uncertainties without being thrown by them.

To Ma, bai le is in this respect a useful remedy to the U.S. cultural tendency to overdramatize and catastrophize, to personalize and polarize, and to indulge too much in all-or-nothing thinking. (Why does life suck? Why do I always mess up? Why does everybody hate me?) A tolerable life in a complex and dynamic society requires large doses of self-compassion and a willingness to accept multiple shades of gray.

The beauty of Ma’s approach is that it restores movement to relationships that have become paralyzed by dysfunction. It starts by putting the self at a distance, either by writing or third-person speech (Ma’s funny examples: Jane is feeling sorry for herself because she didn’t get that party invitation; The shop clerk was not kind to Auntie Lin) to reframe what can seem tragically inevitable as what is mostly learned but a rote reaction.

The mind’s tendency to hamstring us

Rather than accepting we must be our own worst enemy, with self-sabotaging behaviors and negative states of mind that lead to rumination and paralysis, Ma builds insight and compassion into self-examination to help show thoughts and actions in a different light. A key step is becoming “alert to the mind’s tendency to hamstring us. It is not designed to deal with discordance.”

Coupled with her shared findings from neuroscience, Ma’s emphasis on cultural blindspots reframes compensatory behaviors and reactions that can spiral into substance abuse. Related—and as helpful—is her warning that Westerners chasing “extreme positivity” are likely fighting a losing battle with hedonic adaptation. They are “working too hard to find bliss.”

Brimming with insight and wisdom, How to Be Less Miserable is succinct, readable, and pragmatic. It offers a way to change perspective that can recast the problem entirely. Its goal is appealing and irresistible: to replace fruitless self-berating with greater acceptance, self-compassion, and trying not to fight with oneself, with others, and with life.

“Looking inward is what we need to be doing,” Ma notes. “However, we can’t do that when we suffer a disingenuous relationship with ourselves. Not being ourselves is problematic because we must live with ourselves all our lives. No one else can do it for us.”

Ma, Lybi. 2025. How to Be Less Miserable: End the Negative Mind Loops and Find Joy. Blackstone Publishing.

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