This is a chapter out of a book called "How To Really Piss Yourself Off" written by the German Professor of Psychology Rainer Sachse

The original title is "Wie man sich schwarz rgert - aber richtig".

It was written by this professor because he found it difficult to teach his patients how to change their behaviour to improve their lives, so instead he wrote a "how-to" book of how to "screw up" your life to show his patients "what not to do" - and calls it a paradoxal advice book. I found it funny, and a good workbook for anyone who has a psychosomatic disease, like asthma. Remember this is all advice you are NOT supposed to follow.

If you wondering what a book on psychology is doing in a support group about asthma, that means that you have never heard of psychosomatic illnesses. Asthma is one of them, as you will read below. This book does NOT suggest that asthma is a figment of your imagination, nor in any way suggest that your disease is not physically real. But it does suggest or rather it tells what you can do to screw up your life, so that your asthma gets worse. Thats why its a paradox advice book. It helps you think about the things you should NOT do, and hopefully will help you reduce the severity of your asthma. Some of the things did help me reduce the severity of my asthma.

This book is not available in the English language. I translated it myself. Please let me know if you would like it as a PDF file.

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Introduction

A Satirical Advice Guide

There are dozens of "psychological advice books" available on the market - books about how to give up smoking, about how to find yourself, about how to become a better lover, and just all kinds of advice books. But this advice book is completely different: It tells the reader how he can make himself psychologically sick - in this case how to contract a psychosomatic illness.

This advice book is trying to tell its readers all about psychological relationships in an unusual and entertaining style. You get to decide for yourself whether you would like to become psychosomatically ill, or what you could do to prevent from becoming psychosomatically ill. You, my friend, have a choice, just like you do in any given everyday life situation. Maybe you have already developed advanced skills in getting a psychosomatic disturbance. In this case, keep up the good work, because you wouldn't want to be lousy at that too, now would you?

This book demonstrates how a person can rapidly and efficiently contract a psychosomatic illness. You could, of course, use this book to achieve quite the opposite results, and try to do exactly the opposite of what this book advises you to do. But then that would be boring, and would let you live an ordinary life just like any normal person would. That, of course, is pathetic compared to the challenge of fostering a true psychotic disturbance. This is something this book wants to help you achieve.

In the course of this book, some readers will be surprised at how much progress they have already made - but then these readers could make a fatal mistake that would interrupt the careful process of nurturing a psychosomatic illness - namely to start thinking about their own lives and their own needs. Many words of advice will sound familiar to the ears of our readers, and they will say to themselves: "Sure, that's just exactly what I would do". These readers should be reminded, however, that this advice should only be followed, when they intend to nurture and further their psychosomatic illnesses. If you do want to develop a psychosomatic illness (which I assume not, because you bought this book), then you should be careful about following the advice given here.

Psychosomatic illnesses are "in". They are up and coming in our society. In some companies it is considered virtuous to have a stomach ulcer. Those who do not have one can be considered lazy. You could almost say that this person does not strive hard enough; isn't working hard enough and isn't giving his very best. Generally speaking, today's society expects everyone to "function" uniformly; that no one complains - that you just do your job like you're paid to do. This also applies to mothers, who are not generally allowed to take any time-outs. This also applies for children who are expected to get good grades, regardless how good they feel or not. "Feeling good" isn't important - only results count.

Fortunately, scientists were able to collect loads of empirical data, which prove that certain factors influence psychosomatic illnesses. Today we are smarter because we know which risks to take and how psychosomatic illnesses can develop. This allows us to plot a course for contracting a disease using the latest scientific technology. If you follow this advice to the letter in this book, the probability that you will contract a psychosomatic condition is extremely high, unless you are as sensitive as a zombie and nothing can phase you - but be honest, who really as sensitive as a zombie? Fortunately you can see that even the most resolute, most disciplined, and even the toughest people can contract a psychosomatic illness if they work hard enough at it. Good news for you! Because sooner or later, youll get you hooked! But for now our advice for you is to follow this book to the letter!

What are Psychosomatic Disturbances?

Psychosomatic disturbances are physical illnesses, which are directly or indirectly caused by psychic processes. There are a number of such illnesses. The hit-list of diseases includes:

--> Colitis ulcerosa, a tumor type illness of the colon
--> Morbus Crohn, a colon infection, that attacks other parts of the digestive track, and can literally eat your stomach away
--> Angina pectoris; a heart disease, that causes poor blood circulation in the heart
--> Heart attacks; the flow of blood to the heart is cut off, which causes heart tissue to die and decay, which unavoidably leads to death
--> High blood pressure; chronic increase in the systolic blood pressure (blood pressure during the contraction of the heart), as well as the diastolic blood pressure (blood pressure during the phase in which the heart refills itself with blood)
--> ASTHMA BRONCHIALE; a lung disease, caused by the cramping of the lungs, and the inability of the lung tissue to relax and release air
--> Fibromyalgia and chronic back pain; inexplicable chronic pain, which will not get better no matter how much exercise, prescriptions, and message therapy are administered
--> Hives, eczema, and psoriasis; a scaly and inflammatory skin disease, which itch and fester
--> Migraines; chronic headaches
-->And lots of other diseases, conditions, and allergies

As you can see there is a large variety in the kind of psychosomatic disease you could contract. Unfortunately you will probably not be able to pick out the one that suits your lifestyle, because these diseases usually are selected according to your "genetic disposition".

That's because every person's system reacts differently depending on the pressure they are put under. The people with tough digestive systems usually have heart problems. You will probably contract your disease in the body system that reacts the most strongest when pressure is applied to it. So if you stick to the advice you read in this book, it shouldn't be too difficult for you to contract a psychosomatic disease. The only catch is that you won't have a choice what kind of disease you contract. This doesn't mean that you can't do something on your own to facilitate the one or the other particular disease. Just keep on reading well give you lots of neat hints of how to make yourself sick.

Are psychosomatic disturbances a sign for serious psychological impairment?

A popular myth is that psychosomatic disturbances are signs for serious psychological impairment (e.g. weirdos or psychos), or in other words, you have to lose your mind before you can contract a psychosomatic disturbance. This myth has often spread by psychoanalysts. But recent research has proved that this is not the case.

You don't have to be a weirdo to contract a psychosomatic disturbance!

In fact, most people who have psychosomatic disturbances don't actually have serious psychological problems.

Scientist used to believe that long-term diseases had to be caused by serious conditions. The chaos and system theories have demonstrated, however, that minimum causes can have huge effects on any given systems. These theories also apply for psychosomatic illnesses. The cause starts with some innocuous or minor disturbance, which negatively influences a person's relationship with the world or his interpretation of the world. Later other factors, such as long-term effects, swing a given situation back and forth to an ever-increasingly higher level until it develops into a major disturbance. And more important than that - no one considers it the least bit scandalous to contract this kind of illness - you're in good company! People from all walks of life have one of these problems - everybody from managers to teachers, lawyers - even psychologists and doctors have their own psychosomatic disturbances. So join the club, you're not alone!

Many people, who have psychosomatic diseases, don't want to admit that psychic factors playa role in their lives, because they're afraid other people will think they're "weirdos". For this reason, they usually spend lots of time and money going to doctors to help them find the "logical" reason why they are sick instead of consulting a psychologist. Hey you don't need to waste your time on psychologists! Just keep telling yourself that "psychological factors" simply mean that you have learned poor strategies for dealing with stress, challenges and life in general. You aren't psychologically sick; you're not "weird" and you're certainly not "crazy". It doesn't matter that a good psychologist might help you to find out where you are making mistakes in your life strategies and help you figure out how you could do to influence them! Hey, I know it's not a lot! But it works! So take my advice if you want to get sick and do not see a psychologist. Just keep going to a regular doctor, and someday you might find one that will finally find the "logical" reason why you're sick. If you wait long enough, they will even certify you as being chronically or terminally ill.

This advice book only works, because you do not need to be a serious psychological sicko to contract a psychosomatic illness. If it were necessary for you to be completely "wacko" to get a psychosomatic illness, I wouldn't have bothered to write this book! But since this book is all about learning how to adopt poor strategies in life, I hope I can give you some good advice at least in this direction.

Okay, the basis for a successful course has been outlined: just follow the tips, and in no time at all, you will begin to feel the physical effects on your own body, depending on your own personal constitution. If you are a health nut, of course, it could take you a little longer than the others, but don't worry, sooner or later, youll get sick too.


Starter Course

First Steps towards Development of Your Psychosomatic Disturbance

The following contains tips and advice that you should only follow, if you really want to become psychosomatically ill. Please do not omit any of the steps! The combination of all the following steps will help to ensure that you will make yourself sick in no time whatsoever. If you omit any of the steps mentioned below, you could delay or slow down the process of making yourself sick.

Appropriate Behaviour for Making Yourself Sick

Psychosomatic disturbances are usually contracted when a persons psychological circumstances make it easier. In this section you will learn what kinds of behaviour help induce psychosomatic diseases. Besides psychic factors, a number of environmental and attitude factors will help you contract a psychosomatic illness. For this reason we recommend that you do all of the following:

--> Eat as many fatty foods as you can. Triglycerides in your blood will help you to contract heart disease, so eat as much butter, fatty meat, sauce, and deep-fried food as you possibly can. The rule of thumb is: the more greasier it is, the better it tastes! So relax and indulge yourself!

--> Make sure you get lots of cholesterine: eat as many eggs (scrambled, boiled, mixed in processed foods, or noodles) as you can. Top it off with shrimp, crab, clams and lots of red meat. Cholestorine is great for blocking your arteries, which is important if you want to get a heart attack.

--> Smoke a lot: This is really important, because smoke not only causes lung and bladder cancer; it can also help to give you heart disease, strokes, etc. It is the best all-around method for making yourself sick. Dont miss this chance of a lifetime! If you dont already smoke, learn how to as soon as you can!

--> Drink lots of alcohol. Yes, you should never underestimate that wonderful toxic effect alcohol has on the human body. Large quantities of alcohol kill brain cells, destroy your liver, and eat your intestines. Alcohol is a miracle drug when it comes to making yourself sick.

--> Alcohol is particularly great for getting really special diseases. For example, large quantities of red wine can disturb your hearts rhythm. The hard stuffs great for causing oesophagus cancer. The negative effects of alcohol are shear endless. Dont let this great chance escape you!

--> Make sure you are always surrounded by as much noise as possible. A big help working in a very noisy place, where you get interrupted a lot. But you dont need to limit to just to work! You can sleep where its noisy; for example you could move or buy a house next to the railroad tracks, an airport or a freeway the louder, the better

--> Make sure you have lots of stress and responsibility. This of course is not essential for developing a psychosomatic illness, but sure helps, as you will see when we move on.

--> Make sure that your life is really screwed-up: drive an old, undependable car that continuously lets you down; continue being understanding and supportive to your stubborn, irresponsible drug-addict spouse, who refuses to clean up their act; live somewhere that is falling apart at the seams; buy a dog that refuses to be obedient; move to a high-crime neighbourhood; visit your mother-in-law as often as possible, especially if she hates you; have your whiney parents over for dinner as often as you can, so they can constantly remind you how much the worry about you, because you have such a screwed-up life. Be creative! The list of possibilities is endless.

--> At your job make sure you load up on as much stress as possible: take on assignments you can neither handle nor have time to complete (best is both); work as many overtime hours as you possibly can; accept the most impossible assignments that no one else would dream of doing; take as much work home with you as you possibly can; and work every weekend you possibly can!

--> Most of our clients find it impossible to say no. This works wonders for contracting a psychosomatic disease. Learn to say yes or at least okay for every single request from employers, colleagues, friends and relatives, no matter how absurd you find it. That way everybody will like you and nobody will ever fight with you.

--> Make sure you always have a chip on your shoulder at work: Pick fights with your colleagues; criticise them all the time and make sure you set yourself up to get on everyones shit list; gripe about your job all the time; lean to hate your job and do absolutely nothing to improve the situation, and for heavens sake dont ever try to get along with your colleagues.

--> One particular good way to annoy people at work is to be a notorious know-it-all. Never miss the opportunity to demonstrate how stupid and pathetic they are, and you know everything better.

--> Make sure you pick fights with your boss; especially if theyre a sensitive kind of person; criticise your boss a lot; dont finish your work, but if you have to, then at least dont finish it on time; dont do things the way they want you to do them; embarrass you boss in front of their subordinates; contradict him/her whenever you get the chance. If this is too hard for you, then do just the opposite; do everything your boss tells you to do, no matter little they appreciate you or abuse you; let him/her belittle you and put you down, especially in front of other people at work; allow your boss to harass you on the job; and be his/her slave, if not his/her sex slave.

--> Make sure you always cause a lot of unnecessary stress with your loved ones at home; fight with your spouse; bicker with your neighbours; do and say mean things to your in-laws; invite relatives or guests over for dinner you cant stand.

--> Make sure the stress doesnt decease during your recreational time; always combine business with golf; be aggressive and outgoing in your tennis club; prove to your friends that the only thing that counts is winning; participate in recreational activities you dont like, or do fun things together with people who bug the hell out of you.

Remember:

Never miss the opportunity to put as much stress on yourself as possible! Never attempt to avoid or escape a possible stress situation!

This way, you will always keep your body on the constant edge of alertness and anxiety (the flight or fight condition). You body can react very sensitively, if permanently kept in this edgy condition. Above all, make sure your stress load is kept at a maximum for as long as possible! Normally, the human body recovers after short periods of time, but prolonged stress periods can cause chronic stress-edge condition and negatively affect the vegetative nervous system. To get your psychic nervous system to completely breakdown, you have to make sure you never take any small breaks just keep the pressure up!

Psychic Factors

Now to psychic factors we shall stress, those particular attitudes, which have to be adopted and how particular situations should be interpreted by.

Deadline Pressure

A very important outside stress source is deadline pressure. Please make sure that you are constantly under deadline pressure! And while you are at it, dont make deadline pressure a once-in-a-while thing, but make sure you always are under deadline pressure.

Here are a few handy tips:

Never plan breaks between appointments, no matter what the circumstances may be; it would be the death of any psychosomatic illness to plan coffee-breaks or take time out to sort things out. Plan all of your appointments back to back if you can and you should especially avoided switching rooms or buildings; its better to ignore breaks all together and make your appointment calendar as full as you possibly can. Please ignore the fact you sometimes have make a couple phone calls in-between; and dont even think about taking a potty-break or eating lunch! This way youll constantly be confronted with new problems to solve and new challenges to meet. Even the simplest tasks, such as eating a sandwich, will prove to be stress problems. Rest assured youll be anything but bored!

What? You dont think thats possible? You better believe it! Take for example our client Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith came to us this morning complaining about stomach cramps, and said he doesnt really have that much stress at work. But after an analysis of his daily work routine, it turns out that Mr. Smith was attempting to get as much done in a day as humanly possible. His motto was, I can handle that. Thus, the following situation occurred: He began to notice when he got home from work every night his stomach hurt because he had not eaten anything all day. That was because he never took a lunch break.

If you have a job, make sure that you always set up your appointments up back-to-back. When you accept new work assignments, ignore the fact that you already have 10 uncompleted ones already on your desk. The strategy to finish even more assignments than you can already handle is the perfect way to expand your deadline pressure.

Of course, you will always be tempted to want to take time off a little free time to recuperate, or time to get back in touch with yourself. Resist the urge to take any free time for yourself! Breaks are a waste of time! Besides, you wouldnt know what to do with those holes in your day anyway. Be smart and fill them up with really important stuff right from the start!

Dont give yourself any time to get organised when you get up in the morning. Sleep in as long as possible, before you have to get up, and dash to work. Whats the point of wasting time sitting around drinking coffee at home in the morning? Wait until the last minute to drive to work. This way, every traffic jam you get in will only add to your high stress load.

If you have an external appointment, dont show up early, all relaxed and cool! You should be on a dead run from appointment to appointment. This way you will constantly be under pressure. Being constantly under pressure is not exactly the best way to contract a psychosomatic illness, but it sure helps a lot.

Anything that keeps your body in a permanent state of stress and alertness is advantageous.

Deadline pressure causes a permanent state of physiological excitement (fright or flight condition), which in turn leads to a permanent state of over-excitement or edginess. Stress hormones are released in the bodily fluids. The longer you keep the pressure up, the higher the chances are to damage one or more of your bodily function processes. Dont be hesitant! Finish what you started!

Getting Angry, Grumpy or Cranky

It is important that during the course of the day, you dont stay relaxed! If something goes wrong you should keep the following in mind:

--> Someone else is ruining your day
--> You want to get even because they are ruining your day
--> Youre not going to accept the fact someone else is ruining your day
--> Youre going to get pissed off because they are ruining your day
--> Youre going to take revenge on the person who is ruining your day!

Remember you should always act as annoyed and angry as you possibly can.

Here are two tips you can use:

Get livid, but dont let anyone notice just how mad you are! Boil over in your own burning anger, and allow yourself to get royally pissed off beyond belief. Fill yourself with hate and desire for retaliation and revenge, but make sure you dont make a public nuisance of yourself. This kind of behaviour is excellent for elevating your blood pressure. If this is the disease you want then get pissed off like this as often as you possibly can!

You should brood about the injustice, embarrassment, humiliation and all those other feelings that go with it for the longest period of time possible. Remind yourself of exactly how humiliating this feels as often as you can. The more you allow these feelings eat at you, the better it is for fostering your psychosomatic illness. Dont waste time making excuses for yourself grant your imaginary enemies no quarter!

If thats not your thing, then you should really get pissed off and blow up every chance you possibly can. Yell at your colleagues! You could even throw things at them in fits of anger. You should only try to calm down when its absolutely mandatory or you have to be subdued. This is the best-recommended method, if you are intent on dying from a heart attack (even though this is not a painless death).

It is especially recommended that you explode over petty things. For example, you should become livid and irate if your friend or spouse takes the trouble to bring you French fries, but forgets to bring you the special dip you wanted to go along with it. Dont forget! The fact you decided to not have them drawn and quartered for this trespass is a shear act of mercy on your part. This is a great way to make your everyday life a virtual circus of pure stress. This way you would actually look forward to these fantastic stress confrontation situations. Naturally, you should try to aggravate the situation whenever you can. Otherwise things could become more harmonious, and this would not help foster your psychosomatic disease.

High Psychic Pressure

If you have to take care of unpleasant tasks, please start them only when you are under enormous deadline pressure, and make sure to brood about things you dont like so you can procrastinate doing them for as long as you possible.

It is not enough to put yourself under high psychic pressure you must compel yourself suffer under high psychic pressure!

This isnt talking about the pressure that really exists; its about the pressure you have convinced yourself exists.

Heaven forbid you would even think about a practical solution to your problem, or even about what you could do to improve your current situation! Never think about solutions at all! That is the worst way to foster your illness!

You should, moreover, think about the following as often as possible:
--> How awful everything is
--> How much this depresses you
--> How helpless and hopeless you feel about your situation
--> How everything is getting worse all the time
--> How your future is doomed;
--> And to top it off, fantasize in detail how hopeless your life has become.

This line of thinking has its advantages: it allows you to put yourself under permanent stress, even though there isnt any apparent stress in your life at all. This form of self-indulgence fosters psychosomatic illness is an excellent way. Special tricks include:
--> Sitting by yourself in your backyard and worrying about life in general all day long on your day off
--> Lying awake in bed at night and wondering if you have wasted your entire life
--> Sitting in front of the television and thinking the victims in CSI have it better than you do
--> Talking with your best friends and wondering if they secretly hate you

Dont forget:
--> Next week it will all be getting worse
--> Youll be forced to do all those things you hate doing
--> You wont be able to cope with your work load because you know are totally incompetent
--> Everything that could go wrong will most definitely go wrong, especially if you dont get all the work done you let other people talk you into doing!

Piling up stress around the clock is great, because it fosters a very unhealthy form of psychosomatic illness.

But there are few things that you shouldnt forget, while youre at it: do not attempt to push these kinds of thoughts and feelings out of your head. Dont even think about practical solutions to your problems. Because then you might become aware that you have actually exaggerated most of your problems; that most of the things you feared might happen are just worst-case scenarios you have talked yourself into; and that there is no point in worrying about things that you cant do anything about at the moment, which will probably solve themselves anyway, in due time.

This, of course, would be poison for your developing psychosomatic illness. Take my advice and worry yourself sick all day on your day off about what might happen next week, otherwise you might be bored to death!

How to Utilise Your Free Time Effectively

Free time is really supposed to serve as a period of recuperation and rejuvenation. Your body relaxes and the physiological body processes slowly swing back into balance. The modern phrases chill out and power up colloquially refer to these processes. Besides, this is when you then have time to do things you like to do, or just have fun, kicking back or doing some thinking and let your own decisions mature.

Free time on your evenings, weekends or during your vacation helps your body recover from the physical effects caused by stress, and help protect and regenerate the human psyche.

This is why free time is absolutely fatal for your psychosomatic illness. You can really contract a serious psychosomatic illness if you diligently forego all of your free time.

Here are a few handy tips for you:

Consider free time a waste of time: you never get anything important done in your free time; most of the time youre bored stiff and you cant earn money with it, so what good is it? Make sure that you have as little free time as possible. Who needs boring old free time, anyway? Forget it and move on to something more important than your health! Who really wants to watch television, play with the kids, or have a nice dinner with their spouse? Who really wants to laze around in the backyard doing absolutely nothing, when you can get really important work done at your desk? Thats why you should work every single weekend you can, and if you cant then at least take your work home with you. Think of how efficient it is, writing business reports at home or balancing budgets at the poolside. This is great!

You can combine business with pleasure. Evening hours are excellent for getting work done, without anyone else bothering you. And what would you be doing at home otherwise anyway? Watching re-runs? What a waste of your precious time! You could better use your abilities by proving to the rest of the world how diligent you have convinced yourself you are! Thats the road to success! Thats what really important in life!

Make sure that your appointment calendar is always crammed full. Try to cram it full at least six months ahead of time or even longer if you can manage it! Make sure that you are always busy every waking moment giving the whole 100% is the key word here. In order to do this, you dont need to take two weeks off to go on some stupid self-indulgent vacation, where you wouldnt get anything important accomplished anyway. You are far too important at your job, that you could even allow yourself to be so selfish as to want a two-week vacation anyway. Besides, if you leave the office, you will forfeit the control you have over your own little world. Two weeks are way too much for your tough body anyway. If theres one thing youre known for, its the fact that you can handle any situation thrown your way.

This is a great way to develop a serious psychosomatic disturbance.
Not that I want to discourage you in your efforts, but I thought I should just let you know, that this is not everything you need to do to contract a very unhealthy psychosomatic illness. Unfortunately there are a whole number of things you still have to do, but dont worry, you can take it!