{"id":447437,"date":"2026-02-26T22:43:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T22:43:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/447437\/"},"modified":"2026-02-26T22:43:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T22:43:11","slug":"how-to-be-less-miserable-a-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/447437\/","title":{"rendered":"“How to Be Less Miserable”: A Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nearly 75 years ago, in 1952, when positive psychology set off a wave of religiously inspired self-help<\/a> in the U.S. with the release of Norman Vincent Peale\u2019s popular bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking<\/a>, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich asked in war-torn Austria, in a now-famous exchange with his colleague Kurt Eissler, \u201cWhere does the misery come from?\u201d<\/p>\n

The timing in each case was not a coincidence. Frustrated by Freud\u2019s argument that psychical suffering was mostly due to internal warfare\u2014a despotic and implacable superego, ruled by unappeasable death instinct\u2014Reich wanted the focus turned outward, \u201cout where the people were,\u201d to take more of the war into account and somehow to treat social dynamics and oppression, tied to the poverty that was then regionwide.<\/p>\n

Rethinking the causes of misery appeared necessary in war-torn Europe. However, Reich\u2019s spin on one of Freud\u2019s last best models for our \u201cdiscontents\u201d oversimplified the type of internal divisiveness that was said to remain, leaving the superego more like a guardian to societal values than, per Freud\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

As relevant for the path taken: While Freudian<\/a> psychoanalysis<\/a> struggled to calibrate misery\u2019s internal and external causes, the religiously inspired self-belief<\/a> that Peale marketed across North America eventually hit a roadblock with self-doubt, failure, and self-sabotage<\/a>, 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 \u201can affront to God.\u201d \u201cNever entertain a failure thought,\u201d 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. \u201cYou\u2019re disintegrating. You\u2019re deteriorating. You\u2019re dying on the vine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where does the misery come from?<\/p>\n

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, \u201cthe brain wants us to suffer.\u201d With an in-built disposition to bias<\/a> and exaggerated threat\u2014likely a holdover from evolution\u2014we not only overcompensate for what are frequently distorted and misperceived threats, but also, as a species, have an in-built \u201ctendency for suffering\u201d that, with self-awareness, patience, and humor<\/a>, we can learn to counteract, to make our internal lives a lot more bearable.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe brain makes errors in judgment to protect us,\u201d Ma extrapolates from studies that repeatedly corroborate the overreaction as a type of emotional flooding tied to the rapid release of dopamine<\/a>. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ma\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

How to Be Less Miserable is especially relevant 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. \u201cSometimes,\u201d Ma writes of the stress<\/a> and endless chatter we internalize, \u201cit 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cultural mistranslation and bicultural fluency<\/p>\n

Ma\u2019s 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, and the family later 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.)<\/p>\n

My Hui cousins, in our homeland of Northwest China, don\u2019t slosh around in what could have been or ought to be. Instead, they frequently use the expression bai le (\u8d25\u4e86), a saying used to convey defeat, but in fact meaning much more than that. It\u2019s used to express, Let it go. Oh, well. That\u2019s too bad. He missed the train. Bai le. She didn\u2019t get the job. Bai le.<\/p>\n

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 \u201chardship is part of our everyday existence\u201d\u2014that we can find room for its ambiguities and uncertainties without being thrown by them.<\/p>\n

To Ma, bai le is in this respect a useful remedy to the U.S. cultural tendency to overdramatize and catastrophize<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

The beauty of Ma\u2019s 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\u2019s funny examples: Jane is feeling sorry for herself because she didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

The mind\u2019s tendency to hamstring us<\/p>\n

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 \u201calert to the mind\u2019s tendency to hamstring us. It is not designed to deal with discordance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coupled with her shared findings from neuroscience<\/a>, Ma\u2019s emphasis on cultural blindspots reframes compensatory behaviors and reactions that can spiral into substance abuse<\/a>. Related\u2014and as helpful\u2014is her warning that Westerners chasing \u201cextreme positivity\u201d are likely fighting a losing battle with hedonic adaptation<\/a>. They are \u201cworking too hard to find bliss.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brimming with insight and wisdom<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cLooking inward is what we need to be doing,\u201d Ma notes. \u201cHowever, we can\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nearly 75 years ago, in 1952, when positive psychology set off a wave of religiously inspired self-help in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":447438,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-447437","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/447438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}