Categories | Social Sciences |
Author | Matt Haig |
Publisher | Penguin Life (January 29, 2019) |
Language | English |
Paperback | 304 pages |
Item Weight | 2.31 pounds |
Dimensions |
6.9 x 4.9 x 0.8 inches |
I. Book introduction
Notes on a Nervous Planet is a thought-provoking and insightful book written by Matt Haig. It delves into the tremendous impact that modern society, with its constant noise, pressure, and digital connectivity, has on our well-being and mental health. Haig explores the ways in which our nervous systems are constantly bombarded by information overload, leading to anxiety, stress, and a profound sense of unrest.
Looking at sleep, news, social media, addiction, work and play, Matt Haig invites us to feel calmer, happier and to question the habits of the digital age. This book might even change the way you spend your precious time on earth.
Editorial Reviews
- “A personal favourite and the best reminder during the summer season… or any season, as a matter of fact.” ―Meghan Markle, for British Vogue on “A Note from the Beach” from Notes On A Nervous Planet
- “A primer for how to live in the present moment, this book will find grateful readers everywhere.” —Nigella Lawson, author of How to Be a Domestic Goddess and Nigella Bites
- “Take Notes on a Nervous Planet twice daily, with or without food. Crammed with wisdom, insight, love and wit.” —Stephen Fry
- “Likable and thought-provoking . . . A wonderfully perceptive chronicle of life in the always-on social media age.” —The Guardian
- “Witty, honest, and engaging. Haig shows great skill in describing the ‘invisible cyclone’ of depression. . . A worthy successor to Reasons to Stay Alive.” —The Sunday Times
- “Notes on a Nervous Planet contains lists, imagined conversations, essays, and personal stories that critique the damage that worry—about the environment, politics, the news, and everything else that demands our attention on a daily basis—wreaks on our ability to live a full life. Haig artfully, powerfully counters these challenges with battle-tested advice from his own hard-won experience.” —Booklist
- “Readers who have experienced anxiety without a tangible cause will find comfort in Haig’s words and vulnerability. Haig articulates much of what isn’t working for humans in today’s world while refraining from being too cynical.” —Salon
- “If technology and social media make you anxious, you’re not alone. . . .Should you need a positive influence right now, Matt Haig has your back.” —HelloGiggles
- “In this illuminating follow-up to his memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive, novelist and children’s author Haig (How to Stop Time, 2018, etc.) continues to explore how the rapid pace of our modern world can adversely affect our psyche… In bite-sized chapters, the author considers the various issues that plague us, including our increasing addiction to smartphones and social media, the emotional impact of absorbing 24-hour cycles of often grueling international news events, and our collective lack of sleep…. [An] often wise and inspiring self-help title strengthened by the author’s very personal experiences and acquired insight.” —Kirkus
- “[Haig] is a smart operator who knows his readership and genuinely wants to help them . . . I reached the last page admiring the author’s inventive energy and insight.” —The Daily Mail
- “Warm and wise. If the modern world is making you anxious, this is the perfect book for you.” —Claudia Hammond, author of Time Warped
- “Beautiful, honest and wise.” —Fearne Cotton, BBC Radio
- “A convincing, wise, and reassuring book.” —The Irish Times
- “Is the modern world doing our heads in? Matt Haig shares our fears and gives answers to the question from many different angles. An enthralling book.” —Jo Brand, author of The More You Ignore Me
- “Warm and wise. If the modern world is making you anxious, this is the perfect book for you.” —Claudia Hammond, author of Time Warped
About the Author (Matt Haig)
Matt Haig is an author for children and adults. His memoir Reasons to Stay Alive was a number one bestseller, staying in the British top ten for 46 weeks. His children’s book A Boy Called Christmas was a runaway hit and is translated in over 40 languages. It is being made into a film starring Maggie Smith, Sally Hawkins and Jim Broadbent and The Guardian called it an ‘instant classic’. His novels for adults include the award-winning How To Stop Time, The Radleys, The Humans and the number one bestseller The Midnight Library.
Matt Haig was born on 3 July 1975 in Sheffield. He grew up in the Nottinghamshire town of Newark and later went on to study English and History at the University of Hull.
As of 2015, Haig is married to Andrea Semple, and they live in Brighton, Sussex, with their two children and a dog. The children were homeschooled.
Haig identifies as an atheist. He has said that books are his one true faith, and the library is his church.
Some of Haig’s work — especially part of the non-fiction books — is inspired by the mental breakdown he suffered from when he was 24-years-old. He still occasionally suffers from anxiety. He has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism.
II. Reviewer: Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig
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1. LIZ BARNSLEY reviews Notes on a Nervous Planet
I’m not really going to review this properly I bought it and read it just for me really. There’s nothing much I can say that I haven’t said before about this author’s writing and sometimes you just want to read a book to kick start your soul again.
Suffice to say that as ever after reading a Matt Haig book my faith in many many things is restored. Yes indeed.
2. NAT K reviews Notes on a Nervous Planet
”The paradox of modern life is this: we have never been more connected, and we have never been more alone.”
Another gem from one of my favourite writers, which makes me realise why I love reading his books so much. Matt Haig has the innate ability to get inside your core and peel back the layers.
He makes you feel. He makes you think.
Whenever I start one of his books, the rest of the world falls to a blur, in slow motion. I become so engrossed in what he has to say, it’s as if time stands still. He writes of truth and hurt and feelings, and the discord so many of us feel in our oh-so-busy modern lives.
Inadvertently, he has become somewhat of a modern day sage with his wise words and observations. By being so upfront with his own struggles with anxiety and depression (via his previous book “Reasons to Stay Alive”), this book continues on the theme of the pressures we place on ourselves in the modern world, and if it is indeed worth it. We are bombarded with information overload from the time we wake up to the moment our head hit the pillow. No wonder our inner circuitry often snaps.
There’s a beautiful snippet “A note from the beach” which is funny and cheeky at the same time. Effectively the beach has written an ode to us humans, about how we shouldn’t obsess about who’s “watching us” on the beach, about how we look, as no-one’s really interested. They’re all too worried about how they look.
“Reframe your idea of beauty. Be a rebel against marketing. Look forward to being a wise elder. Be the complex elegance of a melting candle. Be a map with 10,000 roads. Be the orange at sunset that outclasses the pink of sunrise. Be the self that dares to be true.”
Penelope beautifully summed up this book by saying “…his writing is like a cup of tea and a warm blanket making you feel that no matter how crazy the world can get everything is going to be ok.” I couldn’t agree more. And I really can’t say more.
Matt, you have such a positive influence on so many people. I truly hope you read your reviews, because you’ll see how much you mean to people, and just how many lives you’ve touched 💕
🌿 💚 🌿 💚 Just be. 🌿 💚 🌿 💚
3. TAMISHLY reviews Notes on a Nervous Planet
This is the book which will make you think about the most useless things that we invest most of our time in. And we say we need more time everyday to do things that matter.
“There is a cliché about reading. That there are as many books as there are readers.
Meaning every reader has their own take on a book.”
(Yes, this book too joins my best 2021 reads.)
The best non-fiction from the author and arguably my most favourite book of the new year, this one is life-changing.
We worry about a lot of things. Like constantly. About one thing or another. For nothing.
This book has so much power to bring you the arguments that you probably thought you would never need to make you see the inevitable ‘nothing’ in all the craze we are involved in everyday.
We want more. More social media engagement, more news updates, more and more for everything.
The book made me see how our lives are getting so chaotic day and night to the point of getting addicted to the screen which aggravates our ways of dealing with how we value ourselves with such unrealistic scales of likes, comments, following and such on social media.
I know it helps establish our jobs and it benefits us but the book argues if it’s worth the way it’s affecting our lives in a more negative manner most of the time.
This book will help you decide how to cut down all the useless competition and comparisons we are all so caught up in each day.
4. GABBY reviews Notes on a Nervous Planet
”How can we live in a mad world without ourselves going mad?
Matt Haig has such a way with worlds and he is so good at being able to explain the reasons people might feel anxiety and depression in the world we are living in today. This read couldn’t come at a more perfect time for me because the world is unimaginably horrific these days and I really needed this. I enjoyed this one even more than Reasons to Stay Alive, and I just really love his writing so much.
”The future isn’t real. The future is abstract. The now is all we know. One now after another now. The now is where we must live. There are billions of different versions of an older you. There is one version of the present you. Focus on that.”
I love the section about time in this book because a huge part of my anxiety is never feeling like I have enough time to do all the things I want to do, and never feeling present in the moment because I’m always planning things for the future and thinking about the future. This quote really speaks to me:
“To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can’t. To not crave parallel lives. To find a smaller mathematics. To be a proud and singular one. An indivisible prime.”
I just love Matt Haig’s writing, and he makes me feel so understood and normal with my anxiety about life and the future and the world. I really needed this book right now and I’m so glad it was everything I was hoping it would be.
5. FLORA WANG reviews Notes on a Nervous Planet
Calming and thought provoking at the same time!
Love all Matt Haig’s books! (And personally think his nonfictions are better than his fictions, despite him being known for the Midnight Library). Unlike his other books which focuses on depression, Notes on a Nervous Planet ties several societal issues into the narrative and provides a deep thoughtful discussion on how certain aspects of today’s society shape our perception and contribute to mental health issues. It also provides several insights on how we can shield ourselves from things that trigger anxiety and unhappiness and offers a means to relieve us from the pain. The book doesn’t really have a defined structure but has gems scattered throughout. Like most of Haig’s other books, this one is just calming and enlightening.
6. T IN CA reviews Notes on a Nervous Planet
What we all know and yet…
Easy to sort through, this easy-read features common sense observations on ourchanging world’s current social environment. I actually like this book much better than the popular Midnight Library. The message is crystal clear; take back your mindfulness, people. We are not robots! I knew all this, but how refreshing having someone else simply state it all with grace. I would hand this book to anyone to perk them up and remind them to focus less on their screens and more on ‘the roses.’ For me, the book was a little padded towards the end. It could have been even more short and sweet! K. That is all. Off to sit in the sun 🙂
7. DIANA-T reviews Notes on a Nervous Planet
A clear direction through anxiety
Matt Haig captures this reader’s attention from page 1 to the finish. He reports his life experiences without self pity or self egrandisement and I can identify with his struggles (I’ve not had his experiences but like everyone else had big problems to resolve) his inner search and determination, and his inspiring recovery from adversity. This book entertains, informs, and encourages any reader who faces anxiety in this challenging world. It shows how to find a calm, confident approach to life.
8. JOESIXPACK reviews Notes on a Nervous Planet
Mandatory reading for everyone
While this collection of short essays and random yet compelling commentaries on our culture is marketed towards “those who suffer from anxiety and depression” – that’s ALL of us to one degree or another.
Such “ailments” are at epidemic levels in our culture (no, not our country, or our society – but by our entire western world CULTURE.
Why? Because inherently we KNOW that we’re on an unsustainable path, and that science and technology will NOT save us from ourselves.
But Haig’s common sense essays remind us that WE’RE not crazy – that the world IS crazy – and our reaction to that (anxiety) is NORMAL – but that doesn’t mean we have to be sucked down into insanity with it. Just that very notion that WE are in charge of how we think about ourselves, and the world, provides the calming sanity in which one can recognize that anxiety happens when we reject what we inherently know to be true.
Just because we live in a crazy culture doesn’t mean we need to accept it – or medicate ourselves be it with anti depressants, anti-anxiety meds – or of course the numerous other drugs including alcohol we use to dull our senses enough to accept a crazy world. We can recognize that our culture is crazy and make the choice stand outside of it even as we are forced to live within it – and work to create a new culture that embraces simplicity and sustainability. We can minimize those things like cellphones constant intrusion into our lives – and recognize that we have NO idea what we’re doing to a generation of kids being brought up to view the world through their cellphone cameras at best.
Haig touches on SO many topics – and while his chapters might be 1 or 2 pages long in a book that can be read in a weekend, it SHOULD foster a lifetime of contemplation of recognizing that we’re not quite as evolved as we think we are as a species – but that we ARE experiencing an awakening that can restore sanity and sustainability into an anxiety cultivating culture.
Bravo Matt Haig & thank you!
9. PENELOPE reviews Notes on a Nervous Planet
A truly timely and important book that everyone living on this nervous planet should read. Matt’s honest and personal experiences shine through on every page and his writing is like a cup of tea and a warm blanket making you feel that no matter how crazy the world can get everything is going to be ok. I loved this book and have no hesitation recommending it to absolutely everyone, no one will finish this book without learning at least one important lesson or taking away one piece of advice that will make life just that little bit better. Thanks Matt!
10. REGINA reviews Notes on a Nervous Planet
An ode to social media (by Matt Haig):
When anger trolls the internet
looking for a hook
it’s time to disconnect
and go and read a book
Can I get an amen on that?! Surely my lit-loving peeps felt that in the feels as much as I did.
My 2021 mission to conquer Matt Haig’s backlist led me to his second nonfiction book that deals with his mental illnesses (anxiety, depression, and panic disorders). Notes on a Nervous Planet was written in 2019, and if the planet was nervous then it must be rocking back and forth in the fetal position now. More than ever, we need books like this to remind us that we’re not alone in dealing with the stresses of modern life. Read a healing sentence – breath in – read an insightful sentence – breath out. Repeat.
Try it again. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. If you feel just a wee bit better now, then I have no doubt you’ll feel a whole lot better after reading this book.
4.5 stars
III. Notes on a Nervous Planet Quotes by Matt Haig
The best book quotes from Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig
“The whole of consumerism is based on us wanting the next thing rather than the present thing we already have. This is an almost perfect recipe for unhappiness.”
“Maybe the point of life is to give up certainty and to embrace life’s beautiful uncertainty.”
“It’s not that there are more things to be anxious about, it’s just that we’re more aware of them.”
“We’re so focused on capturing moments that we forget to actually experience them.”
“Reading isn’t important because it helps to get you a job. It’s important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you’re given. It is how humans merge. How minds connect. Dreams. Empathy. Understanding. Escape. Reading is love in action.”
“Never be cool. Never try to be cool. Never worry what the cool people think. Head for the warm people. Life is warmth. You’ll be cool when you’re dead.”
“Remember no one really cares what you look like. They care what they look like. You are the only person in the world to have worried about your face.”
“The more connected we are online, the more disconnected we become in reality.”
“We need to create moments of stillness in our lives, to truly connect with ourselves and others.”
“And besides, libraries aren’t just about books. They are one of the few public spaces we have left which don’t like our wallets more than us.”
“Happiness is not good for the economy.
We are encouraged, continually, to be a little bit dissatisfied with ourselves.”“We often find ourselves wishing for more hours in the day, but that wouldn’t help anything. The problem, clearly, isn’t that we have a shortage of time. It’s more that we have an overload of everything else.”
“I sometimes feel like my head is a computer with too many windows open. Too much clutter on the desktop. There is a metaphorical spinning rainbow wheel inside me. Disabling me. And if only I could find a way to switch off some of the frames, if only I could drag some of the clutter into the trash, then I would be fine. But which frame would I choose, when they all seem so essential? How can I stop my mind being overloaded when the world is overloaded? We can think about anything. And so it makes sense that we end up thinking about everything. We might have to, sometimes, be brave enough to switch the screens off in order to switch ourselves back on. To disconnect in order to reconnect.”
“find a good book. And sit down and read it. There will be times in your life when you’ll feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. I want you to remember that. The more you read, the more you will know how to find your way through those difficult times.”
“To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can’t. To not crave parallel lives. To find a smaller mathematics. To be a proud and singular one. An indivisible prime.”
“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.’ —Sylvia Plath”
“Living with anxiety, turning up, and doing stuff with anxiety takes a strength most people will never know.”
“You are not defined by your productivity. Your value lies in being, not constantly doing.”
“Be a mystery, not a demographic. Be someone a computer could never quite know.”
“Don’t let the fear of missing out control your life. Embrace the joy of missing out on unnecessary distractions.”
“The sky, like the sea, can anchor us. It says: hey, it’s okay, there is something bigger than your life that you are part of, and it’s – literally – cosmic.”
“I feel we need to stop seeing mental and physical health as either/or and more as a both/and situation. There is no difference. We are mental. We are physical. We are not split up into unrelated sections. We are not an existential department store. We are everything at once.”
“To see the act of learning as something not for its own sake but because of what it will get you reduces the wonder of humanity. We are thinking, feeling, art-making, knowledge-hungry, marvellous animals, who understand ourselves and our world through the act of learning. It is an end in itself. It has far more to offer than the things it lets us write on application forms. It is a way to love living right now.”
“And all this talk, over and over, of bravery: it would be nice one day if a public figure could talk about having depression without the media using words like ‘incredible courage’ and ‘coming out’. Sure, it is well intentioned. But you shouldn’t need to confess to having, say, anxiety. You should just be able to tell people. It’s an illness. Like asthma or measles or meningitis. It’s not a guilty secret. The shame people feel exacerbates symptoms. Yes, absolutely, people are often brave. But the bravery is in living with it, it shouldn’t be in talking about it.”
“The problem is not that the world is a mess, but that we expect it to be otherwise.”
“When anger trawls the internet, Looking for a hook; It’s time to disconnect, And go and read a book.”
“Don’t compare your actual self to a hypothetical self. Don’t drown in a sea of ‘what ifs’. Don’t clutter your mind by imagining other versions of you, in parallel universes where you made different decisions.”
“It sometimes feels as if we have temporarily solved the problem of scarcity and replaced it with the problem of excess.”
“Accept feelings and accept that they are just that: feelings.”
“The world exists in you. Your experience of the world isn’t this objective unchangeable thing called ‘The World’. No. Your experience of the world is your interaction with it, your interpretation of it. To a certain degree we all make our own worlds. We read it in our own way. But also: we can, to a degree, choose what to read. We have to work out what about the world makes us feel sad or scared or confused or ill or calm or happy.”
“How much extra happiness am I acquiring? Why am I wanting so much more than I need? Wouldn’t I be happier learning to appreciate what I already have?”
“All a writer can do is provide a match, and hopefully a dry one. The reader has to strike the flame into being.”
“Don’t compare your actual self to a hypothetical self. Don’t drown in a sea of “what if” s. Don’t clutter your mind by imagining other versions of you, in parallel universes, where you made different decisions. The internet age encourages choice and comparison, but don’t do this to yourself. “Comparison is the thief of joy,” said Theodore Roosevelt. You are you. The past is the past. The only way to make a better life is from inside the present. To focus on regret does nothing but turn that very present into another thing you will wish you did differently. Accept your own reality. Be human enough to make mistakes. Be human enough not to dread the future. Be human enough to be, well, enough. Accepting where you are in life makes it so much easier to be happy for other people without feeling terrible about yourself.”
“Aim not to get more stuff done. Aim to have less stuff to do. Be a work minimalist. Minimalism is about doing more with less. So much of working life seems to be about doing less with more. Activity isn’t always the same as achievement.”
“There is no panacea, or utopia, there is just love and kindness and trying, amid the chaos, to make things better where we can.”
“Understand people are more than a social media post. Think how many conflicting thoughts you have in a day. Think of the different contradictory positions you have held in your life. Respond to online opinions but never let one rushed opinion define a whole human being. “Every one of us,” said the physicist Carl Sagan, “is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
“Comparison is the thief of joy,’ said Theodore Roosevelt. You are you. The past is the past. The only way to make a better life is from inside the present. To focus on regret does nothing but turn that very present into another thing you will wish you did differently. Accept your own reality. Be human enough to make mistakes. Be human enough not to dread the future. Be human enough to be, well, enough. Accepting where you are in life makes it so much easier to be happy for other people without feeling terrible about yourself.”
Excerpted from Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig
A STRESSED-OUT MIND IN A STRESSED-OUT WORLD
A conversation, about a year ago
I was stressed out.
I was walking around in circles, trying to win an argument on the internet. And Andrea was looking at me. Or I think Andrea was looking at me. It was hard to tell, as I was looking at my phone.
“Matt? Matt?”
“Uh. Yeah?”
“What’s up?” she asked, in the kind of despairing voice that develops with marriage. Or marriage to me.
“Nothing.”
“You haven’t looked up from your phone in over an hour. You’re just walking around, banging into furniture.”
My heart was racing. There was a tightness in my chest. Fight or flight. I felt cornered and threatened by someone on the internet who lived over 8,000 miles away from me and who I would never meet, but who was still managing to ruin my weekend. “I’m just getting back to something.”
“Matt, get off there.”
“I just-”
The thing with mental turmoil is that so many things that make you feel better in the short term make you feel worse in the long term. You distract yourself, when what you really need is to know yourself.
“Matt!”
An hour later, in the car, Andrea glanced at me in the passenger seat. I wasn’t on my phone, but I had a tight hold of it, for security, like a nun clutching her rosary.
“Matt, are you okay?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“You look lost. You look like you used to look, when . . .”
She stopped herself saying “when you had depression” but I knew what she meant. And besides, I could feel anxiety and depression around me. Not actually there but close. The memory of it something I could almost touch in the stifling air of the car.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “I’m fine, I’m fine . . .”
Within a week I was lying on my sofa, falling into my eleventh bout of anxiety.
A life edit
I was scared. I couldn’t not be. Being scared is what anxiety is all about.
The bouts were becoming closer and closer. I was worried where I was heading. It seemed there was no upper limit to despair.
I tried to distract myself out of it. However, I knew from past experience alcohol was off limits. So I did the things that had helped before to climb out of a hole. The things I forget to do in day-to-day life. I was careful about what I ate. I did yoga. I tried to meditate. I lay on the floor and placed my hand on my stomach and inhaled deeply-in, out, in, out-and noticed the stuttery rhythm of my breath.
But everything was difficult. Even choosing what to wear in the morning could make me cry. It didn’t matter that I had felt like this before. A sore throat doesn’t become less sore simply because you’ve felt it before.
I tried to read, but found it hard to concentrate.
I listened to podcasts.
I watched new Netflix shows.
I went on social media.
I tried to get on top of my work by replying to all my emails.
I woke up and clasped my phone, and prayed that whatever I could find there could take me out of myself.
But-spoiler alert-it didn’t work.
I began to feel worse. And many of the “distractions” were doing nothing but driving me further to distraction. In T. S. Eliot’s phrase from his Four Quartets, I was “distracted from distraction by distraction.”
I would stare at an unanswered email, with a feeling of dread, and not be able to answer it. Then, on Twitter, my go-to digital distraction of choice, I noticed my anxiety intensify. Even just passively scrolling my timeline felt like an exposure of a wound.
I read news websites-another distraction-and my mind couldn’t take it. The knowledge of so much suffering in the world didn’t help put my pain in perspective. It just made me feel powerless. And pathetic that my invisible woes were so paralyzing when there were so many visible woes in the world. My despair intensified.
So I decided to do something.
I disconnected.
I chose not to look at social media for a few days. I put an auto-response on my emails, too. I stopped watching or reading the news. I didn’t watch TV. I didn’t watch any music videos. Even magazines I avoided. (During my initial breakdown, years before, the bright imagery of magazines always used to linger and clog my mind with feverish racing images as I tried to sleep.)
I left my phone downstairs when I went to bed. I tried to get outside more. My bedside table was cluttered with a chaos of wires and technology and books I wasn’t really reading. So I tidied up and took them away, too.
In the house, I tried to lie in darkness as much as possible, the way you might deal with a migraine. I had always, since I was first suicidally ill in my twenties, understood that getting better involved a kind of life edit.
A taking away.
As the minimalism advocate Fumio Sasaki puts it: “there’s a happiness in having less.” In the early days of my first experience of panic the only things I had taken away were booze and cigarettes and strong coffees. Now, though, years later, I realized that a more general overload was the problem.
A life overload.
And certainly a technology overload. The only real technology I interacted with during this present recovery-aside from the car and the cooker-were yoga videos on YouTube, which I watched with the brightness turned low.
The anxiety didn’t miraculously disappear. Of course not.
Unlike my smartphone, there is no “slide to power off” function for anxiety.
But I stopped feeling worse. I plateaued. And after a few days, things began to calm.
The familiar path of recovery arrived sooner rather than later. And abstaining from stimulants-not just alcohol and caffeine, but these other things-was part of the process.
I began, in short, to feel free again.
How this book came about
Most people know the modern world can have physical effects. That, despite advances, aspects of modern life are dangerous for our bodies. Car accidents, smoking, air pollution, a sofa-dwelling lifestyle, takeout pizza, radiation, that fourth glass of Merlot.
Even being at a laptop can pose physical dangers. Sitting down all day, getting an RSI. Once I was even told by an optician that my eye infection and blocked tear ducts were caused by staring at a screen. We blink less, apparently, when working on a computer.
So, as physical health and mental health are intertwined, couldn’t the same be said about the modern world and our mental states? Couldn’t aspects of how we live in the modern world be responsible for how we feel in the modern world?
Not just in terms of the stuff of modern life, but its values, too. The values that cause us to want more than we have. To worship work above play. To compare the worst bits of ourselves with the best bits of other people. To feel like we always lack something.
And as I grew better, by the day, I began to have an idea about a book-this book right here.
I had already written about my mental health in Reasons to Stay Alive. But the question now was not: why should I stay alive? The question this time was a broader one: how can we live in a mad world without ourselves going mad?
News from a nervous planet
As I began researching I quickly found some attention- grabbing headlines for an attention-grabbing age. Of course, news is almost designed to stress us out. If it was designed to keep us calm it wouldn’t be news. It would be yoga. Or a puppy. So there is an irony about news companies reporting on anxiety while also making us anxious.
Anyway, here are some of those headlines:
stress and social media fuel mental health crisis among girls (The Guardian)
chronic loneliness is a modern-day epidemic (Forbes)
facebook “may make you miserable,” says facebook (Sky News)
“steep rise” in self-harm among teenagers (BBC)
workplace stress affects 73 percent of employees (The Australian)
stark rise in eating disorders blamed on overexposure to celebrities’ bodies (The Guardian)
suicide on campus and the pressure of perfection (The New York Times)
workplace stress rising sharply (Radio New Zealand)
will robots take our children’s jobs? (The New York Times)
stress, hostility rising in american high schools in trump era (The Washington Post)
children in hong kong are raised to excel, not to be happy (South China Morning Post)
high anxiety: more and more people are today turning to drugs to deal with stress (El Pa’s)
army of therapists to be sent into schools to tackle anxiety epidemic (The Telegraph)
is the internet giving us all adhd? (The Washington Post)
“our minds can be hijacked”: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia (The Guardian)
teenagers are growing more anxious and depressed (The Economist)
instagram worst social media app for young people’s mental health (CNN)
why are rates of suicide soaring across the planet? (Alternet)
As I said, it is ironic that reading the news about how things are making us anxious and depressed actually can make us anxious, and that tells us as much as the headlines themselves.
The aim in this book isn’t to say that everything is a disaster and we’re all screwed, because we already have Twitter for that. No. The aim isn’t even to say that the modern world has uniformly worse problems than before. In some specific ways it is getting measurably better. In figures from the World Bank, the number of people worldwide living in severe economic hardship is falling radically, with over one billion people moving out of extreme poverty in the last thirty years. And think of all the millions of children’s lives around the globe saved by vaccinations. As Nicholas Kristof pointed out in a 2017 New York Times article, “if just about the worst thing that can happen is for a parent to lose a child, that’s about half as likely as it was in 1990.” So for all the ongoing violence and intolerance and economic injustice prevalent in our species, there are-on the most global of scales-also reasons for pride and hope.
The problem is that each age poses a unique and complex set of challenges. And while many things have improved, not all things have. Inequalities still remain. And some new problems have arisen. People often live in fear, or feel inadequate, or even suicidal, when they have- materially-more than ever.
And I am keenly aware that the oft-used approach of pointing out a list of advantages of modern life, such as health and education and average income, does not help. It is like a wagging finger telling a depressed person to count her blessings because no one has died. This book seeks to recognize that what we feel is just as important as what we have. That mental well-being counts as much as physical well-being-indeed, that it is part of physical well-being. And that, on these terms, something is going wrong.
If the modern world is making us feel bad, then it doesn’t matter what else we have going for us, because feeling bad sucks. And feeling bad when we are told there is no reason to, well, that sucks even more.
I want this book to put these stressed-out headlines in context, and to look at how to protect ourselves in a world of potential panic. Because, whatever else we have going for ourselves, our minds are still vulnerable. Many mental health problems are quantifiably rising, and-if we believe our mental well-being is important-we need, quite desperately, to look at what might be behind these changes.
Mental health problems are not:
A bandwagon.
Fashionable.
A fad.
A celebrity trend.
A result of a growing awareness of mental health problems.
Always easy to talk about.
The same as they always were.
Yin to the yang
So, it is a tale of two realities.
Many of us, it is true, have a lot to be grateful for in the developed world. The rise in life expectancy, the decline in infant mortality, the availability of food and shelter, the absence of major all-encompassing world wars. We have addressed many of our basic physical needs. So many of us live in relative day-to-day safety, with roofs over our heads and food on the table. But after solving some problems, are we left with others? Have some social advances brought new problems? Of course.
It sometimes feels as if we have temporarily solved the problem of scarcity and replaced it with the problem of excess.
Everywhere we look, people are seeking ways to change their lifestyles, by taking things away. Diets are the obvious example of this passion for restriction, but think also of the trend for dedicating whole months in the calendar to veganism or sobriety, and the growing desire for “digital detoxes.” The growth in mindfulness, meditation and minimal living is a visible response to an overloaded culture. A yin to the frantic yang of 21st-century life.
….
Note: Above are quotes and excerpts from the book “Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig”. If you find it interesting and useful, don’t forget to buy paper books to support the Author and Publisher!
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