Notes on a Nervous Planet

by Matt Haig

How to get out of bed 1.Wake up. 2.Pick up phone. 3.Stare at phone for 72 minutes. 4.Sigh. 5.Get out of bed. Alternatively, once in a while, try skipping stages two to four.

– I believe it’s possible to be a happy mess. Or, at least, a less miserable mess. A mess who can cope.

I hope it all makes sense. Or if it doesn’t make sense, I hope it makes nonsense in ways that might get you thinking.

The problem is not that the world is a mess, but that we expect it to be otherwise.

Later, doctors would offer labels. ‘Panic disorder’, ‘generalised anxiety disorder’ and ‘depression’. These labels were worrying, but also important, because they gave me something to work with.

Keep allowing yourself the human privilege of mistakes.

Another lesson I am still coming to understand – and writing this book is helping me – is that distraction didn’t and doesn’t work.

I either needed a new me. Or a new planet. And I didn’t yet know how to find either. Which is why I felt suicidal.

A repetitive strain injury of the mind.

If you have a condition like anxiety, you know that it isn’t a weakness. Living with anxiety, turning up and doing stuff with anxiety takes a strength most will never know.

One which I have come to realise is at the heart of what my panic attacks have always been about. It is the one called, tellingly, derealisation. Within a feeling of derealisation, I still knew I was me. I just didn’t feel I was me.

An evening of heaven in a glass doesn’t outweigh a month of hell in a cage.

If the whole planet is having a kind of collective breakdown, then unhealthy behaviour fits right in.

They seem to encourage individualism while not encouraging us – actually forbidding us – to think as individuals.

Being kind to ourselves and being kind to the planet is, ultimately, the same thing.

we must never feel – personally or as a culture – that only one version of the future is inevitable. The future is ours to shape.

Her books were friends. The characters were friends. And real ones, too, because they helped me out.

And the stories they inhabited could be places I could hide inside. And feel safe.

Fiction felt not like an escape from truth but a release into it.

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.

To have a chance of lasting happiness, you have to calm down. You have to just be it as well as just do it.

Aim TO FEEL EVERY moment, to ignore tomorrow, to unlearn all the worries and regrets and fear caused by the concept of time. To be able to walk around and think of nothing but the walking. To lie in bed, not asleep, and not worry about sleep. But just be there, in sweet horizontal happiness, unflustered by past and future concerns.

The moon is a real flirt tonight behind a veil of bruise-blue cloud.

‘The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.’

The story is never just the words. It is also the reading of them. And that is the variable. That is where the magic lives.

EVERYTHING YOU ARE IS ENOUGH

Even if it isn’t okay, if it’s a thing you can’t control, don’t try to control it.

Never worry what the cool people think. Head for the warm people.

Add a comma to your day.

There is no future. Planning for the future is just planning for another present in which you will be planning for the future.

Try to do good right now, without drowning in whatever bad you might once have done.

Do what you need to do to get better. And have no shame about it.

With every achievement, acquisition or purchase the bar is raised.

There are seven billion versions of the world. The aim is to find the one that suits you best.

Know what works for you and accept what doesn’t. When you know the rain is rain, and not the end of the world, it makes things easier.