Notes on a Nervous Planet

by Matt Haig

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

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 need

And all this is when I am feeling relatively okay. When I’m ill the catastrophizing goes into overdrive. In fact, now that I think about it, that is the chief characteristic of anxiety for me. The continual imagining of how things could get so much worse.

I am coming to realize how wrong many of my aspirations have been. How locked out of the present I have found myself. How I have always wanted more of whatever was in front of me. I need to find a way to stay still, in the present, and, as my nan used to say, be happy with what you have.

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.

It is like someone who is ill with a compulsive disorder continually underlining their fears—staying indoors, or washing their hands 200 times a day. They are actually doing more to hurt themselves, in the name of protecting themselves. But this time the disorder isn’t individual. It is social. It is global.

Change doesn’t just happen by focusing on the place you want to escape. It happens by focusing on where you want to reach. Boost the good guys, don’t just knock the bad guys. Find the hope that is already here and help it grow.

“When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence,” taught the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti.

And, in early 2018, Tim Cook—CEO of Apple—declared to a group of students in Essex, England, that he doesn’t think children (such as his nephew) should use a social network, or overuse technology at all, which shows that these aren’t simply “Luddite” concerns.

I think the world is always going to be a mess. And I am always going to be a mess. Maybe you’re a mess, too. But—and this bit is everything for me—I believe it’s possible to be a happy mess. Or, at least, a less miserable mess. A mess who can cope. “In all chaos there is a cosmos,” said Carl Jung, “in all disorder a secret order.”

The problem is not that the world is a mess, but that we expect it to be otherwise. We are given the idea that we have control. That we can go anywhere and be anything. That, because of free will in a world of choice, we should be able to choose not just where to go online or what to watch on TV or which recipe to follow of the billion online recipes, but also what to feel. And so when we don’t feel what we want or expect to feel, it becomes confusing and disheartening.

Don’t grab life by the throat. “Life should be touched, not strangled,” said the writer Ray Bradbury.

Breathe. Breathe deep and pure and smooth. Concentrate on it. Breathing is the pace you set your life at. It’s the rhythm of the song of you. It’s how to get back to the center of things. The center of yourself. When the world wants to take you in every other direction. It was the first thing you learned to do. The most essential and simple thing you do. To be aware of breath is to remember you are alive.

These deaths are so often preventable. This is why we must ignore the pleas to “man up” and find true strength instead. The strength for men and women to speak out.

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. Every time someone tells me I am brave I feel like I should be scared.

Never let other people make you feel it is a weakness or flaw inside you, if you have a mental health problem.

The more we want, the more we will drip ourselves away.

For instance, listen to Robert Rosenthal, author of Optimarketing: Marketing Optimization to Electrify Your Business. Back in 2014 he wrote in Fast Company magazine that to be successful, marketers need to think in terms of the benefits of the product rather than the product’s features. Sounds innocent enough, right? But he adds that benefits often have a “psychological component.” “Fear, uncertainty, and doubt, or FUD, is often used legitimately by businesses and organizations to make consumers stop, think, and change their behavior. FUD is so powerful that it’s capable of nuking the competition.”

Don’t let anyone or anything make you feel you aren’t enough. Don’t feel you have to achieve more just to be accepted. Be happy with your own self, minus upgrades. Stop dreaming of imaginary goals and finishing lines. Accept what marketing doesn’t want you to: you are fine. You lack nothing.

Set boundaries. Have times of the day and week that are work-free, email-free, hassle-free.

People are craving not just physical space but the space to be mentally free. A space from unwanted distracted thoughts that clutter our heads like pop-up advertising of the mind in an already frantic world. And that space is still there to be found. It’s just that we can’t rely on it. We have to consciously seek it out. We might have to set time to read or do some yoga or have a long bath or cook a favorite meal or go for a walk. We might have to switch our phone off. We might have to close the laptop. We might have to unplug ourselves, to find a kind of stripped-back acoustic version of us.

It’s just a shame, I suppose, that it takes such major events in our lives, or in the lives of the people we love, for perspective to arrive. Imagine if we could keep hold of that perspective. If we could always have our priorities right, even during the good and healthy times. Imagine if we could always think of our loved ones the way we think of them when they are in a critical condition. If we could always keep that love—love that is always there—so close to the surface. Imagine if we could keep the kindness and soft gratitude towards life itself.

Anxiety is self-perpetuating. When you have it in its illness form it is a feedback loop of despair. The only way out is to stop the metaworry, to stop worrying about the worrying, which is near impossible. Sometimes the trick is to find a reverse kind of loop. I do this by accepting that I am in this state of nonacceptance. By being comfortable with being uncomfortable. By accepting I don’t have control.

The world affects us, but it isn’t quite us. There is a space inside us that is independent to what we see and where we are. This means we can feel pain amid external beauty and peace. But the flipside is that we can feel calm in a world of fear.

we have to understand that however it might influence them, the world is not our feelings. We can feel calm in a hospital, or in pain on a Spanish clifftop.

Don’t fix yourself down. Don’t be blinded by the connotations of your name, gender, nationality, sexuality, or Facebook profile. Be more than data to be harvested. “When I let go of what I am,” said the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, “I become what I might be.”

Do not compare the worst bits of your life with the best bits of other people’s.

Value the things most that you’d miss the most if they weren’t there.

Don’t feel guilty. It is almost impossible, unless you are a sociopath, not to feel some guilt these days. We are cluttered with guilt. There is the guilt we learned at childhood mealtimes, the guilt of eating while knowing there are starving people in the world. The guilt of privilege. The eco-guilt of driving a car or flying in a plane or using plastic. The guilt of buying stuff that may be unethical in some way we can’t quite see. The guilt of unspoken or unfaithful desires. The guilt of not being the things other people wanted you to be. The guilt of taking up space. The guilt of not being able to do things other people can do. The guilt of being ill. The guilt of living. It’s useless, this guilt. It doesn’t help anyone. Try to do good right now, without drowning in whatever bad you might once have done.

Be unashamedly boring. Boring can be healthy. When life gets tough, aim for those beige emotions.

Eleanor Roosevelt said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

But somewhere along the way we have raised the threshold of what we need, or feel we need, to be happy. We are encouraged to buy stuff to make ourselves happy because companies are encouraged to make more money to make themselves more successful. It is also addictive. It isn’t addictive because it makes us happy. It is addictive because it doesn’t make us happy. We buy something and we enjoy it—we enjoy the newness of it—for a little while but then we get used to having it, we acclimatize, and so we need something else. We need to feel that sense of change, of variety. Something newer, something better, something upgraded. And the same thing happens again.

Less is more. An overloaded planet leads to an overloaded mind. It leads to late nights and light sleep. It leads to worrying about unanswered emails at three in the morning. In extreme cases, it leads to panic attacks in the cereal aisle. It’s not “Mo Money Mo Problems,” as the Notorious B.I.G. track once put it. It’s more everything, more problems. Simplify your life. Take away what doesn’t need to be there.

we don’t need to distract ourselves from ourselves.