Notes on a Nervous Planet

by Matt Haig

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It sometimes feels as if we have temporarily solved the problem of scarcity and replaced it with the problem of excess.

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.

I want to work out if the speed of me relates to the speed of the world.

But while choice is infinite, our lives have time spans. We can’t live every life. We can’t watch every film or read every book or visit every single place on this sweet earth. Rather than being blocked by it, we need to edit the choice in front of us. We need to find out what is good for us, and leave the rest. We don’t need another world.

Everything we

need is here, if we give up thinking we n...

Because even when we sometimes feel we are worried for no reason, the reasons are there.

don’t simply worry. No. My worry has real ambition. My worry is limitless. My anxiety – even when I don’t have capital-A Anxiety – is big enough to go anywhere.

A world where, in the words of American sociologist Sherry Turkle, ‘we expect more from technology and less from each other’.

Then there are other serious psychological concerns. To be constantly presenting ourselves, and packaging ourselves, like potatoes pretending to be crisps. To be constantly seeing everyone else looking their best, doing fun things that we are not doing.

So, modern life is, basically, slowly killing the planet. Small wonder that such toxic societies can damage us, too.

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.

We are not encouraged to live in the present. We are trained to live somewhere else: the future.

we are being taught to think of a time different to the time we are in. Exam time. Job time. When-we-are-grown-up time.

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.

‘When people feel good about their bodies, they are more likely to

take better care of themselves rather than treating their bodies like an enemy, or even worse, an object.

being unhappy with our body doesn’t make us look any better. It just makes us feel a lot worse.

Do some knifeless mental surgery instead. Reframe your idea of beauty. Be a rebel against marketing. Look forward to being the 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.

Is the way to be free from fear to come to a new relationship with the tick-tock of minutes and hours and years?

having access to information gives you one kind of freedom at the expense of another.

We are too aware of numerical time and not aware enough of natural time.

The problem, clearly, isn’t that we have a shortage of time. It’s more that we have an overload of everything else.

Remember Feeling you have no time doesn’t mean you have no time. Feeling you are ugly doesn’t mean you are ugly. Feeling anxious doesn’t mean you need to be anxious. Feeling you haven’t achieved enough doesn’t mean you haven’t achieved enough. Feeling you lack things doesn’t make you less complete.

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.

The trouble is that if we are plugged in to a vast nervous system, our happiness – and misery – is more collective than ever. The group’s emotions become our own.

An ode to social media When anger trawls the internet, Looking for a hook; It’s time to disconnect, And go and read a book.

By the way, ‘touched a raw nerve’ is an irrelevant phrase if you have anxiety. Every nerve feels raw.

There is a permanent gap between the signifier and the thing signified.

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.

Accepting where you are in life makes it so much easier to be happy for other people without feeling terrible about yourself.

Cynicism was a luxury for the non-suicidal.

I have decided to change this. I am making an effort to get out and socialise with friends at least once a week and I am feeling better for it.

I realise that the scent-free, artificially illuminated, digitised, divisive, corporate-owned environment can’t fulfil all my needs, any more than takeaway meals can replace the sheer pleasure of eating in a lovely restaurant.

The more stimulation we have, the easier it is to feel bored.

She thought the cure to misery was to ‘decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone’.

Don’t feel you always have to be there. In the not-so olden days of letters and landlines, contacting someone was slow and unreliable and an effort.

Turn off notifications. This is essential. This keeps me (just about) sane. All of them. All notifications. You don’t need any of them. Take back control.

Have times of the day where you’re not beside your phone.

Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction cycle, rewarding the brain for losing focus.

The temptation to check your phone is down to uncertainty. That’s what makes it so addictive.

How many times do you touch your phone a day? Or look at it? It might be hard to keep count. The answer might be well in the hundreds. Imagine, I say to myself, if you just looked at your phone,say, five times a day. What catastrophe would occur?