Start with a basically neutral comment, question, or situation. Decide that it must be about you, and then rephrase everything into the negative. The more negative you can be, the better. Try to think of the worst possible way to interpret what happened. If you're having trouble with this, ruminate! As it reviews the event, your brain will actually CHANGE the memory to help you remember it in different, increasingly negative ways. Repeat the rumination process several times.
By this time, you should be at least disgruntled, and hopefully starting to feel the pangs of self pity. It is time to generalize these feelings to other areas of your life. It's basic multiplication - say you're feeling about -5 on the negativity scale (scale of -1 [aw, nuts] to -10 [apocalypse now]). If you can feel this way about 7 different areas of your life, you will have achieved a negativity score of -35. Do the math, and now the apocalypse is happening 3 1/2 times. This magnitude of negativity takes practice, but if you have very little faith in yourself, you should be just fine.
As the negativity spreads, you might feel the urge to do something about your situation. Under no circumstances should you talk to someone about the way that you feel. If you do fall into this trap, however, there's an easy way out. As you're talking to them, notice how they don't actually understand how you feel - how could they? Try to think about the ways that they have it easier than you do. If you can get yourself to this point, it will be easy to explode at them for even a gentle disagreement or difference in opinion.
Also to be avoided: gratitude lists, activities that you enjoy, daily responsibilities, friends, writing, and tears.
Bitterness is a paralytic, so it should be easy enough to manage the above list if you are pitying yourself to the proper extent.
By this point, you should be snipping at the people who love you (but really, does anyone love you? And if they do, they wouldn't love you if they actually knew who you were), feeling a tightness in your chest and throat, crippling at anything that reminds you that other people get to be happy, clenching your teeth, and burying yourself in your basement for an afternoon of your most dismal Pandora station.
If that doesn't do it for you, you could always toss a childish cry for help out on the internet. Typically, your friends don't take your shit, but thinking about the ways that you try to make them do just that will send you into another expertly-crafted negative spiral.
Thumbs up.
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