11 Quiet Behaviors Of A Truly Miserable Person
Their misery tends to spread to every part of their lives.
MAYA LAB | Shutterstock When we're stuck in an emotionally low place, it's hard to pull ourselves up from the darkness and return to the light. For a miserable person, it can feel completely impossible to take even small steps to change how they feel. They say that misery loves company but, in reality, the quiet behaviors of a truly miserable person keep them at a distance from the people they love.
No feeling is permanent, even when it feels like pain and discomfort will last forever. A miserable person might struggle to shift their perspective all on their own, but if they're able to gather their courage and reach out for help, they'll find that they're not as alone as they think.
Here are 11 quiet behaviors of a truly miserable person
1. They berate themselves for being flawed
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For someone who is miserable, every flaw is a reminder of how worthless they are. They might not say anything out loud, but in the quiet depths of their mind, their inner critic is berating them, all the time. They have a harsh and unforgiving internal dialogue that they can't seem to turn off.
As experts from the CBT Psychology Team pointed out, self-critical people "evaluate themselves and their actions very harshly, focusing on their weaknesses, shortcomings, and mistakes." The damage of being self-critical is subtle but persistent, triggering negative feelings like shame, sadness, disappointment, and worthlessness.
Being self-critical makes it hard to manage self-doubt, which means that miserable people don't trust themselves to make positive changes. One step that a quietly miserable person can take to build up their confidence is to identify and remind themselves of their strengths.
Giving voice to the parts of themselves they're proud of creates the foundation for self-compassion. Even though it's hard, a truly miserable person is completely capable of replacing their critical thoughts, so they can discover self-love.
2. They think about things they can't change
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A truly miserable person often gets lost in their own mind, quietly mining the past for places they messed up and worrying about what's to come. Their inner life vacillates between regret for what's happened already and despair for a future that hasn't unfolded yet.
Rumination involves dwelling on the past and replaying your mistakes. As psychologist Nick Wignall described it, "Besides making you anxious and depressed, chronically ruminating over past mistakes and failures also trains your brain to believe that you're not trustworthy."
"Worrying about the future is the flip side of ruminating about the past," he continued. "The only thing worry leads to is stress and anxiety in the moment [and] low self-confidence and lack of trust in the long term."
Having some amount of regret is part of the human experience, but focusing on it so deeply that it keeps a person from living in the present is a recipe for being quietly miserable.
3. They repress their emotions
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Emotional repression is another indication of a truly miserable person. The swarm of their negative emotions is too overwhelming to sit with, and the only way they know how to manage their misery is to shut down completely. They exist as a bystander in their own life, because they're so deeply dissociated.
Disconnecting keeps them from feeling hard feelings, but it also makes it nearly impossible for them to access any positive emotions. And as one study from the International Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research found, repressing emotions can cause a person's mental and physical health to suffer, increasing the likelihood of depression, low self-esteem, increased aggression, and high blood pressure, among many others.
These people feel numb all the time, which is one reason why pushing down difficult feelings is so problematic: It doesn't actually help anyone feel better. People have to allow themselves to experience pain if they want to feel joy as well. The full range of human emotions are inexorably tied together, and shutting yourself off from one means you shut yourself off from all of them, whether you want to or not.
4. They always expect the worst
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Everyone worries about the future on some level, but a truly miserable person can't reign in their anxieties, so they always expect the worst. Sitting with the uncertainty of what might happen is extremely difficult for them, and they struggle to hold on to even the smallest amount of hope.
As Wignall explained, "Catastrophizing is the mental habit of imagining the worst... it makes the world look far scarier and bleak than it is." When catastrophizing becomes a constant habit, those negative ideas can get so ingrained in a person's thought process that they become a self-fulfiling prophecy.
"When you constantly tell yourself how everything is going to turn out terribly, don't be surprised if your brain starts telling you everything is terrible," Wignall noted. "If you're constantly catastrophizing, you won't have any attention left over for all the things in your life that are going well. And that's the real tragedy of this mental habit of catastrophizing: It robs you of all the joy and positivity that's already in your life."
5. They isolate themselves
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People who are miserable get so stuck in their loneliness that they don't see a way out, which just makes them push everyone out even more. They worry that their misery makes them a burden on the people they love, so they shut themselves away, losing their connection to their community.
No person is an island, and pretending that we are only heightens our sense of despair. Truly miserable people put up barricades and build a fortress around themselves because they mistakenly believe it will protect them from feeling pain, and protect others from who they are.
But part of loving another person is loving them through tough times. Letting others in can ease the deepest suffering, and it's the only way to save your own life.
6. They have a hard time finding direction in life
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A truly miserable person often feels like they lack agency in their own life, which makes it hard to find their true north. They tend to float along, letting decisions get made for them, instead of questioning how they actually want to live. As a result, they wind up with a job they don't really care about, but they don't care enough to find something new.
A truly miserable person takes things as they come, but they're never actually fulfilled. They're cut off from what they really want, which makes it hard to locate their passions. They feel like they're drifting through the world without a clear direction, but they don't know how to anchor themselves.
They avoid doing the difficult inner work involved in self-improvement. They don't question their values to discover what they really want, so they stay quietly miserable.
7. They're scared of failure
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A truly miserable individual is scared of doing anything wrong, because they don't have a strong enough sense of self-worth to differentiate between failing at a specific task and being a failure. They don't try new things, which means they live a narrowly-defined life.
Trying and failing is an act of bravery. Once a truly miserable person is able to reframe how they think about making mistakes, their whole life will open up, and they'll be transformed.
In her book "Don't Forget to Breathe," psychotherapist Shonda Moralis wrote, "It is infinitely more productive, motivating, and sanity-preserving to practice reframing the concepts of 'mistakes' and 'failures' as the potential learning opportunities they are."
"Sometimes the best you can do is breathe, put one foot in front of the other, refuse to let fear keep you down, and use what you've learned to wisely, kindly inform your next decision," she concluded.
8. They rely on instant gratification to feel happy
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It's easy to fall into the trap of instant gratification. The dopamine rush we get from getting what we want, the exact moment that we want it, makes us feel good, but the truth is, it's a hollow form of happiness, and it doesn't ever last as long as we want it to.
When people focus on delaying gratification, they lay a foundation for reaching their long-term goals and living out their dreams. The Great Lakes Psychology Group noted that "delayed gratification refers to the ability to resist the temptation of an immediate reward in favor of a more substantial reward at a potentially undetermined later date."
"Delayed gratification enables us to manage our emotions and our responses to those emotions," they explained. "It helps us to avoid quick fixes in our efforts to thwart or ignore uncomfortable feelings and encourages healthy engagement and processing of difficult emotions."
A truly miserable person might believe that instant gratification makes them less miserable, but in truth, it only compounds their misery.
9. They minimize their own success
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A truly miserable person struggles to let themselves shine, even when they completely deserve to stand in the spotlight. They quietly minimize their achievements and dismiss anyone who gives them praise.
They say things like, "Oh, it wasn't that hard," or, "It's not that special," when really, they did work hard, and what they accomplished as a result was incredibly special. They struggle to accept their own success and recognize their worthiness. They might not say it out loud, but they quietly operate under the belief that they're never good enough.
In her book "The Gifts of Imperfection," Brené Brown offered an antidote to that sneaking feeling of not being enough, writing, "No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It's going to bed at night thinking, yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn't change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging."
10. They cling to unrealistic expectations
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One of the quiet behaviors of a truly miserable person is that they set themselves up to fail by setting standards that are too high for them to ever actually reach. They're perfectionists at heart, and they use their unrealistic expectations to keep themselves trapped in their own misery.
Monica Ramunda, a licensed professional counselor and therapist, described the downfall of being a perfectionist, revealing how a perfectionist mentality holds people back. "Even your best could have been better," she explained. "You struggle with seeing anything you produce as good enough and you hold yourself to unrealistic standards."
She continued, "A growth mindset can encourage you to embrace that you're constantly improving and growing. Things don't have to be perfect to be and you can still enjoy yourself knowing that you're learning along the way."
When truly miserable people give themselves permission to stop aiming for the impossible, they learn how much they're actually capable of doing.
11. They don't ask for help
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Miserable people keep a long list of excuses about why they can't ask for support. They don't want to bother anyone. They don't think their problems are actually that bad. They don't want to seem weak. They don't want to open themselves up to the possibility of being rejected by people they love.
Their inability to ask for help keeps a truly miserable person in the muck and mire of their inner turmoil. Relying on other people doesn't mean they're weak or incapable. It just means they're human, like you, like me, like everyone who needs support to get by, which is all of us.
Alexandra Blogier, MFA, is a staff writer who covers psychology, social issues, relationships, self-help topics, and human interest stories.