Here’s How to Live the Absolute Worst Life Possible | No Nonsense November (21/26)

Discover the ultimate blueprint for self-destruction: neglect sleep, ignore health, and embrace chaos. Learn what not to do.

Mostly Media

24 Nov 2024 — 9 min read

This article flips good advice on its head to show you just how catastrophically wrong things can go when you neglect the basics. By presenting a step-by-step blueprint for failure, I’m laying bare the chaos that comes from ignoring sleep, nutrition, hydration, physical activity, and mental clarity. If you’ve ever wondered how far off course life can spiral without these pillars, read on — but be warned: the only way out of this disaster is to do the exact opposite.

No Nonsense November is a 26-day writing challenge where I strip away the fluff and dive straight into meaningful, actionable content designed to challenge conventional thinking. Each piece explores themes around self-improvement, personal growth, and navigating life’s complexities, offering clarity amidst the noise of today’s overwhelming advice culture.

This challenge is about cutting through the generic, one-size-fits-all solutions and instead presenting ideas that provoke thought and inspire intentional action.

Treat Sleep Like an Optional Luxury, Not a Necessity

Sleep is for the weak — or so you should believe if you want to completely undermine your physical and mental health. Who needs those precious eight hours when you can trade them for an endless cycle of stress, fatigue, and diminished cognitive function? Prioritize everything else — work, social media, or late-night binge-watching — over rest. Trust me, sleep is overrated.

• Start Your Day Exhausted, Every Day: Consistently deprive yourself of sleep, and you’ll experience a glorious cascade of effects. Chronic fatigue will become your new baseline, making even simple tasks feel like climbing Mount Everest. Why aim for productivity or energy when sluggishness and forgetfulness can define your days?

• Destroy Your Mood and Relationships: Sleep deprivation isn’t just a solo sport — it’s a team effort to alienate those around you. Irritability, mood swings, and emotional instability will guarantee friction in your closest relationships. Who wouldn’t want to snap at loved ones over trivial matters or cry during a routine email?

• Weaken Your Body from the Inside Out: Poor sleep is the gift that keeps on giving. Hormonal imbalances, compromised immune function, and slower recovery times ensure your body is operating at its absolute worst. Throw in a higher risk of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular issues, and you’ve got a winning strategy for long-term decline.

• Hinder Brain Function and Memory: Forgetting where you put your keys or struggling to recall basic information will become the norm. Sleep deprivation disrupts cognitive processes like learning and memory consolidation, turning your brain into a sluggish, unreliable mess. But hey, who needs focus or clarity?

• Set the Stage for Burnout: Chronic sleep deprivation is a direct route to emotional and physical burnout. Exhaustion will render you incapable of meeting life’s demands, ensuring you stay stuck in a perpetual state of overwhelm. Burnout isn’t failure — it’s a lifestyle!

• Shorten Your Lifespan for Maximum Inefficiency: Want to ensure you don’t stick around too long? Sleep deprivation has you covered. Increased mortality risk comes free with chronic neglect of rest, so you can leave the world early, thoroughly exhausted, and utterly unfulfilled.

Eat Whatever You Want, Whenever You Want

Who needs structure or mindfulness in their diet? Nutrition should be about indulging every craving, ignoring balance, and completely disregarding your body’s needs. Treat your stomach like a bottomless pit, your diet like a free-for-all, and your health as an afterthought. This approach guarantees not only immediate gratification but also long-term chaos for your body and mind.

• Prioritize Empty Calories Over Nutrients: Why bother with fruits, vegetables, or lean proteins when you can thrive on chips, soda, and fast food? These ultra-processed options will leave you nutrient-starved while packing on empty calories. Who doesn’t love feeling sluggish and bloated while their body cries out for basic vitamins?

• Eat Out of Boredom, Not Hunger: Boredom eating is the pinnacle of unhealthy habits. By ignoring your body’s actual hunger signals, you can steadily consume more calories than you need, ensuring weight gain, digestive discomfort, and a total disconnect from your body’s natural rhythms.

• Embrace the Yo-Yo Diet Life: Follow every fad diet with reckless enthusiasm, swinging wildly between extreme calorie restriction and binge eating. Crash dieting will not only tank your metabolism but also guarantee a cycle of frustration and self-loathing. Nothing says “health” like consistently sabotaging your body!

• Disregard Portion Control Entirely: Who needs moderation? Pile your plate high and ignore portion sizes, ensuring you’re eating two or three times more than your body needs at every meal. Bonus points if you skip meals entirely, then gorge yourself later — it’s the perfect recipe for indigestion and erratic energy levels.

• Drink Your Calories for Maximum Inefficiency: Sugary sodas, calorie-dense coffee drinks, and alcohol are your best friends. They’ll spike your blood sugar, leave you crashing later, and stealthily add hundreds of unnecessary calories to your day. Why feel full when you can feel jittery and bloated instead?

• Ignore Long-Term Health Risks: Consistently poor nutrition sets the stage for a host of chronic diseases, from obesity to diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer. But those are future problems, right? Live for today and let tomorrow’s self deal with the consequences of your reckless choices.

Stay Dehydrated: It’s the Trend of Champions

Hydration is overrated, right? Who needs water when you can thrive on coffee, soda, and energy drinks? Ignore the endless advice about drinking enough water — your body surely doesn’t need it. Chronic dehydration is the secret key to subpar performance, mental fog, and long-term health risks. Why strive for balance when you can teeter on the edge of dehydration-induced misery?

• Replace Water with Caffeine and Sugar: Start your day with coffee, follow it with more coffee, and round it out with a sugary energy drink or two. These will not only dehydrate you further but also create delightful side effects like jitters, crashes, and constant thirst you’ll ignore.

• Drink Only When You Feel Thirsty: Your thirst sensation is a great procrastinator — waiting until dehydration has already begun to sound the alarm. By drinking only when you’re parched, you can stay one step ahead of feeling constantly sluggish and underperforming.

• Ignore Electrolytes Completely: Why bother replenishing lost minerals like sodium, potassium, or magnesium? Let your body stumble along without the tools it needs to regulate fluid balance, muscle function, or even your heartbeat. Who needs optimal performance when cramps and fatigue can keep you company?

• Use Tiny Glasses for Maximum Inconvenience: Forget bottles or refillable water containers — sip water from the smallest glass possible. The inconvenience will ensure you don’t drink enough, allowing you to stay consistently dehydrated while convincing yourself you’re “trying.”

• Confuse Hunger with Thirst: Dehydration does a great job of mimicking hunger. By ignoring hydration, you can overeat regularly, pack on unwanted pounds, and still feel unsatisfied because what you really needed was a glass of water.

• Feel Free to Ignore the Long-Term Risks: Chronic dehydration is a gateway to kidney stones, urinary tract infections, and even cardiovascular strain. But hey, what’s a little organ damage in the grand scheme of your chaotic approach to health?

Skip Movement Altogether: Why Bother?

Physical health is a myth perpetuated by fitness fanatics. Why waste your energy on movement when you can settle into a cozy routine of doing nothing? Workouts, walks, or even light stretching — all overrated. Stay sedentary and let your body adapt to doing the bare minimum. After all, what’s the point of staying active when the couch is calling your name?

• Sitting Is the New Lifestyle Goal: Commit to sitting for hours on end. Whether you’re working, watching TV, or scrolling through your phone, let immobility become your default. This way, you can gradually weaken your muscles and joints, ensuring they’re ready to fail you when you need them most.

• Ignore the Benefits of Strength Training: Building muscle isn’t necessary — why invest in something that increases metabolism and reduces the risk of injury? Instead, allow your muscles to atrophy while you marvel at how weak and stiff you feel with each passing week.

• Forget About Cardiovascular Health: Who needs a strong heart or lungs? Avoid any activity that gets your heart rate up, and you can sidestep those pesky endorphins that improve mood and energy. Bonus: You’ll also increase your risk of heart disease and high blood pressure — lifelong companions for the sedentary.

• Avoid Fresh Air and Sunshine: Outdoor movement exposes you to nature, sunlight, and the horrifying concept of vitamin D. By staying indoors, you can maintain your pale, low-energy aesthetic while avoiding the benefits of improved mood and bone health.

• Make Physical Activity a Chore, Not a Joy: If you must exercise, make it as tedious as possible. Choose activities you hate and force yourself to stick with them until you inevitably quit. This ensures you associate movement with misery, effectively discouraging any long-term habit formation.

• Revel in the Consequences of Inactivity: Embrace weight gain, poor posture, reduced mobility, and the looming threat of chronic conditions like diabetes or osteoporosis. By avoiding physical health entirely, you can guarantee a future filled with preventable health issues and physical discomfort.

Ignore Your Mental Health: The Fastest Route to Self-Destruction

Why waste time on mental health? It’s intangible, unquantifiable, and frankly overrated. If your mind is screaming for help, why listen? Suppressing your emotions, avoiding self-reflection, and neglecting your mental well-being are all sure-fire ways to ensure that life’s stressors completely consume you. After all, isn’t it easier to let your mental health deteriorate than put in the effort to maintain it?

• Bury Your Emotions Deep: When stress or sadness creeps in, push it down. Ignore those feelings until they become too overwhelming to handle. After all, bottling things up and pretending they don’t exist is a great way to ensure that emotions explode when you least expect it, damaging your relationships and opportunities.

• Treat Stress Like a Badge of Honor: Stress is a sign of productivity, right? Instead of managing it, glorify your anxiety as proof of your commitment to the grind. Let it eat away at your sleep, concentration, and health while you convince yourself that burnout is just part of success.

• Avoid Talking About Problems: Sharing your thoughts or seeking support is overrated. Keep everything to yourself and let isolation be your constant companion. This way, you can nurture feelings of loneliness and push away anyone who might actually care about you.

• Distract, Distract, Distract: Why address issues when you can distract yourself with endless work, social media, or meaningless tasks? Avoid reflection or mindfulness at all costs — after all, self-awareness might force you to confront things you don’t like about yourself.

• Never Seek Professional Help: Therapy? Ridiculous. Medication? A sign of weakness. Instead of exploring solutions, convince yourself that struggling alone is noble. Ignore the fact that untreated mental health issues often snowball into severe anxiety, depression, or even worse outcomes.

• Fuel Your Mind With Negativity: Surround yourself with toxic environments, negative people, and constant doomscrolling. These habits ensure your mental health never improves while feeding the belief that life is inherently awful.

• Let Stress and Anxiety Steer Your Decisions: When faced with challenges, lean into panic and impulsivity. Avoid thinking things through — why bother with clarity when you can let fear dictate your actions?

• Embrace the Domino Effect of Neglect: Poor mental health doesn’t stay confined to your mind. It disrupts your sleep, derails your nutrition, cripples your energy for physical activity, and poisons your relationships. Ignore it long enough, and you’ll find every area of your life spiraling downward in unison.

Closing Thoughts

These are the inevitable repercussions of neglecting the foundational pillars of your health and well-being. The goal here was to shine a glaring light on how disastrous life becomes when you actively avoid giving these aspects the care and attention they deserve. By adopting a satirical tone, it becomes clear just how absurd and counterproductive such neglect truly is. It’s easy to list every wrong approach, but framing it as a guide to failure felt more provocative — a way to make you despise the very idea of abandoning self-care.

This article serves as a counterbalance to another No Nonsense November piece, where I explored the essential habits that can transform your health. If this breakdown of disastrous habits struck a nerve, take a moment to read its opposite:

Thank you for reading and, more importantly, for rejecting the “advice” in this article. By choosing the path of self-care and intention, you’re doing right by yourself and your future. Let’s keep this conversation going and continue building better habits together: