Notes on a Nervous Planet

by Matt Haig

  632pg

  An awkward date

  317pg

  Paying utility bills on credit cards

  815pg

  The realisation that it is Monday and you have to work

  701pg

  Having your job replaced by a robot

  2,156pg

  The things you haven’t done but wish you had

  1,293pg

  Note: psychological weight fluctuates greatly. Psychograms are a subjective measurement.

  13

  THE END OF REALITY

  ‘. . . this collision between one’s image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish.’

  —James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

  I am what I am what I am

  YOU SOMETIMES NEED to go back to move forward. You need to face the pain. The deepest pain. And I’ve recently felt ready.

  I need to go back.

  To before the shopping centre. To a room of surgical whiteness.

  ‘Who am I?’ I asked, in the Spanish medical centre, during the beginning phase of my first mental collapse.

  Of course, when I am well and calm, the question isn’t that scary. Who am I? There is no I. There is no you. Or rather, there are a million Is. A million yous. ‘I’ is the largest word in the English language.

  Behind every you there is another you, and another you and another you, like a Russian doll. Is there a base you? A base me? Or are our identities not Russian dolls but just spirals with no end? Is identity a universe you can never reach the end of but which might lead you back to where you started?

  Being relatively well, I enjoy the pointless philosophising of such questions. Because there is, I suppose, a clear self doing the asking. But when I was ill these weren’t simply abstract concerns. These were desperate mysteries to solve, as though my life depended on it. Because my life did depend on it. The feeling of me-ness had gone – it had been crowded out – and I felt like I could become trapped in the infinite I, silently floating in panic, with nowhere to land.

  Reality versus supermarkets

  PANIC ATTACKS OFTEN happen in supermarkets.

  I know someone who has had only one panic attack in her life. It happened in a supermarket.

  When I used to trawl early noughties message boards for tips on dealing with anxiety, the panic-attack-in-thesupermarket concept came up more than almost any other. I am looking at one thread now that starts: ‘WHY DO PANIC ATTACKS STRIKE YOU WHILE SHOPPING IN A SUPERMARKET?’

  Panic is there to help us. As it is for many other animals, panic is our mind and body telling us to do something. Fight or flight. Run from the predator or fight the predator. But a supermarket is not a bear or a wolf or a cave-dwelling warrior. You can’t fight a supermarket. You can definitely run from one, but that will only increase your chance of having a panic attack the next time you have to go there. It might not just be that supermarket either. If you start playing the avoidance game, it might soon be all supermarkets that become triggers. Then all shops. Then the outside world.

  People who have never had a period of living with anxiety and panic don’t understand that the realness of you is an actual feeling that you can lose. People take it for granted. You don’t get up in the morning and think, as you spread peanut butter onto your toast, ‘Ah, good, my sense of self is still intact, and the world is still real, I can now get on with my day.’ It’s just there. Until it isn’t. Until you are in the cereal aisle, feeling inexplicable terror.

  When trying to express what a panic attack feels like it’s easy to talk about the obvious symptoms: the racing thoughts, the palpitations, the tightness of the chest, the breathlessness, the nausea, the tingling sensations inside your skull or your arms and legs. But there is another more complicated symptom I used to get. 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. It is a feeling of disintegration. Like a sand sculpture crumbling away.

  And there is a paradox about this sensation. Because it feels like both an extreme intensity of self and a nothingness of self. A feeling of no return, as if you have suddenly lost something that you didn’t know you had to look after, and that the thing you had to look after was you.

  And I think the reason supermarkets are such triggers for this is because they are already derealised. Supermarkets, like shopping centres, are wholly unnatural places. They might seem old-fashioned now, almost quaint, in this era of online shopping, but they are far more modern than our biology.

  The light is not natural light. The humming noise of refrigerators sounds like the ominous soundtrack of an artsy horror movie. The abundance of choice is more than we are naturally built to cope with. The crowds and the shelves are hyperstimulating. And so many of the products themselves aren’t natural. I don’t just mean because most of them have chemical additives, though that as well. I mean, they have been tampered with. The tins of fish, the bags of salad, the boxes of sweetened puffed rice, the breaded chicken goujons, the processed meat, the vitamin pills, the jars of pre-chopped garlic, the packets of chilliflavoured sweet potato crisps. They are not natural. And in unnatural settings, when your anxiety is raw enough, you can feel unnatural, too. You can feel as removed from yourself as a packet of toilet roll is removed from a tree. To me, during my panic attacks in supermarkets, the objects on the shelves took on a sinister quality. They seemed alien. And, in a way, they were and are alien. They have been taken from where they belong. I related to that. And that is the root of it, I suppose. I didn’t feel like I belonged. I found it impossible to find a place in such an unnatural and overloaded place. The only thing I knew about myself was the fear. And all the repeated objects in the supermarket were making me worse.

  ‘Objects should not touch because they are not alive,’ said Sartre, in Nausea, while clearly having a bit of a bad week. ‘But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.’

  Objects in a supermarket aren’t normal objects either. They are branded objects. While products live in a world of physical space, brands seek out mental space. They seek to get into our heads. In many cases companies employ marketing psychologists to do just that. To manipulate us into buying. To toy with our minds.

  Caveperson

  IMAGINE A CAVEPERSON was frozen for 50,000 years.

  Let’s call her Su.

  Imagine the block of ice she was frozen in suddenly melting in front of your local supermarket.

  The caveperson – Su – steps inside. The automatic doors magically close behind her. The light and colours and crowds frighten her. Shopping trolleys appear like strange metallic beasts, domesticated by the humans that push them along. The shining shelves of plastic packaged goods bewilder her. The self-service checkouts are mystifying. The carrier bags look like sacks of strange white skin.

  ‘Unexpected item in bagging area,’ the robotic voice says. ‘Unexpected item in bagging area . . . Unexpected item in bagging area . . .’

  Su begins to panic. She runs towards the window and bangs into the glass.

  Su begins to wail. ‘Owagh! Agh! Ug-aggh!’

  More noises.

  The twist at the end of the story arrives.

  (Drumroll.)

  Su is effectively Us.

  (Ironic gasp.)

  Su is all of us. It’s just that we are a bit more used to supermarkets.

  We haven’t biologically changed for 50,000 years.

  But society has, massively. And we are expected to be grateful for all this change. After all, if she hadn’t been frozen Su would probably have been killed by a stampede of wild boars a
t the age of 22 or by a sacrificial ritual at the age of 16. And we are lucky. Nothing is luckier than being a living 21st-century human compared to being a Neolithic dead one.

  But because of that luck, we need to cherish this life we have. And if we can not only feel lucky but also other things – calm, happy, healthy – then why not? Why not know what the world can do to us? Because that knowledge can help us.

  It helps me, now, in a supermarket. In shopping centres. In IKEA. On the computer. On a crowded street. In an empty hotel room. Wherever. It helps to know I am just a caveman in a world that has arrived faster than our minds and bodies expected.

  Blur

  TWO DAYS AGO, I wobbled. I felt the strange psychological pain of grey skies. Picking up my daughter from her dance class, I felt as if I was sinking into the pavement. I began compulsively swallowing, and started to feel the old agoraphobia pitch for an unwanted sequel.

  But now I have a little more awareness than I used to have. I could see I hadn’t been sleeping well. I’d been working too hard. I’d been worrying too hard about this book. I’d been worried about a million stupid little things. So, I stopped obsessing about emails and stepped away from this Word document and did a moderate ‘Yoga for Sleep’ video and ate healthily and tried to disconnect. I took the dog for a long walk by the sea.

  And I realised: it doesn’t matter. Stop being neurotic.

  Nothing I was worried about would fundamentally change anything. I would still be able to walk the dog. I would still be able to look at the sea. I would still be able to spend time with the people I love.

  The anxiety retreated, like a criminal under the spotlight of an investigation.

  14

  WANTING

  ‘Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.’

  —Sylvia Plath

  Wishing well

  TYPING ‘HOW CAN I become’ into Google, as I write this, the top five consequent autofill suggestions are:

  –rich

  –famous

  –a model

  –a pilot

  –an actor

  Transcendence

  WE ARE BEING sold unhappiness, because unhappiness is where the money is.

  Much of what is sold to us is the idea that we could be better than who we are if we tried to become something else.

  Think about fashion magazines.

  Lucinda Chambers served as fashion director of British Vogue for 25 years. Shortly after leaving her job, she gave a damning verdict on the industry she had left behind. She declared that, despite their talk of empowerment, few fashion magazines actually make anyone feel empowered. ‘Most leave you totally anxiety ridden,’ she said in an interview with the fashion journal Vestoj that soon went viral, ‘for not having the right kind of dinner party, setting the table in the right kind of way or meeting the right kind of people.’ In addition, the way fashion magazines focus on unattainably expensive (for most readers) clothes just exacerbates the misery, by making people feel poor.

  ‘In fashion we are always trying to make people buy something they don’t need,’ said Chambers. ‘We don’t need any more bags, shirts or shoes. So we cajole, bully or encourage people into continuing to buy.’

  Fashion magazines and websites and social media accounts sell a kind of transcendence. A way out. A way to escape. But it is often unhealthy, because to make people want to transcend themselves you first have to make them unhappy with themselves.

  Yes, people might end up buying a diet book to get the body of a model who endorses it, or a perfume to be more like the image of a celebrity whose name is on the bottle, but that all comes at a cost that is more than financial. People might feel better in the instant hit of the purchase, but in the long term it just feeds a craving to be someone else: someone more glamorous, more attractive, more famous. We are encouraged out of ourselves, to want to have other lives. Lives that are no more real than pots of gold at the end of rainbows.

  Maybe the beauty secret no magazine wants to tell us is that the best way to be happy with our looks is to accept the way we already look. We are in an age of Photoshop and cosmetic surgery and soon to be in an age of designer robots. It is probably the perfect time to accept our human quirks rather than trying to aim for the blank perfection of an android.

  We might think: oh, I need to look a certain way to attract people. Or we could think: actually, there is no better way of filtering out the people who will be no good for me than by looking and being myself.

  Being unhappy about your looks is not about your looks: when fashion models develop eating disorders it isn’t because they are ugly or overweight. Of course not.

  There are various indicators worldwide that eating disorders are on the rise. The non-profit group Eating Disorder Hope reported in 2017 that eating disorders around the world have tended to rise in line with westernisation and industrialisation, and looked at a comprehensive overview of international research. In Asia, for instance, places like Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore have far higher rates than the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam, though those latter countries have rapidly rising rates as these countries ‘advance’ and ‘westernise’.

  Another telling case is Fiji. Research there has found that eating disorders began to rise in the mid-nineties, just as TV was introduced to the South Pacific island state for the first time. The New York Times first reported back in 1999 how eating disorders in Fiji had been virtually unheard of, before TV gave them the slender role models of global hits such as Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210. Indeed, ‘you’ve gained weight’ used to be a common flattering compliment in Fiji, before American television gave girls and young women other body ideals.

  In the UK, figures from NHS Digital in 2018 showed that hospital admissions from eating disorders had almost doubled within less than a decade, with girls and twenty-something women most at risk. Caroline Price, from the UK’s leading eating disorder charity Beat, told The Guardian at the time the figures were published that although eating disorders are ‘complex’ and down to ‘many factors’, modern culture has a lot to answer for.

  ‘Eating disorders are on the rise partly because of the challenges of today’s society,’ she said. ‘This includes social media and exam pressure.’

  Although these things don’t entirely cause the problem, as experts like Price acknowledge, they compound it for those personalities predisposed to eating disorders. According to the UK’s National Centre for Eating Disorders (NCED), causal factors include genetics, parents with food issues, fat-teasing, childhood abuse or neglect, childhood trauma, family relationships, having a friend with an eating disorder, and, last but not least, the ‘culture’. Particularly problematic is a culture where there is always a new diet to try, and where, according to the NCED website, ‘a vulnerable individual internalises the impossibly ideal images they see on TV or in magazines, and continually compares herself unfavourably to those images’.

  The website also adds that ‘people who can admire a beautiful model but say “I could never look like her but it doesn’t bother me too much” are the people who are least likely to fall victim to problems with food’. Maybe there is a lesson for all of us here: in that disconnect between the images we see and the selves we are. We need to build a kind of immune system of the mind, where we can absorb but not get infected by the world around us.

  How to be kinder to yourself about yourself

  1.Think of people you have loved. Think of the deepest relationships you have ever had. Think of the joy you felt when seeing those people. Think of how that joy had nothing to do with their looks except that they looked like themselves and you were pleased to see them. Be your own friend. Be pleased to recognise the person behind your face.

  2.Change your perspective of how you view photos of yourself. Every photo you look at and think, Oh, I look old, will one day be a photo you look back on and think, Oh, I looked young. Instead of feeling old from the per
spective of your younger self, try feeling young from the perspective of your older self.

  3.Love imperfections. Accentuate them. They are what will make you different from androids and robots. ‘If you look for perfection, you will never be content,’ says Lvov’s wife, Natalie, in Anna Karenina.

  4.Don’t try to be like someone who already exists. Enjoy your difference.

  5.Don’t worry when people don’t like you. Not everyone will like you. Better to be disliked for being you, than being liked for being someone else. Life isn’t a play. Don’t rehearse yourself. Be yourself.

  6.Project your thoughts outwards. Think of nature. Google pictures of Amazonian glass frogs. Place yourself in the natural order. There are 9 million known species and that is estimated as 20 per cent of the animals out there. Appreciate that life is beautiful. And you are, quite literally, alive. Ignore idiots with narrow definitions of beauty. They are blind to life's imperfect wonder.

  7.Never let a stranger’s negative opinion of you become your own negative opinion of you.

  8.If you’re feeling bad about yourself, stay away from Instagram.

  9.Remember no one else is ever worried about what your face looks like.

  10.Do something somewhere in the day that isn’t work or duty or the internet. Dance. Kick a ball. Make burritos. Play some music. Play Pac-Man. Stroke a dog. Learn an instrument. Call a friend. Get into a child’s pose. Get outside. Go for a walk. Feel the wind on your face. Or lie on the floor and put your feet up against a wall and just breathe.

  A note on wanting

  IT IS ALL right to want something – fame, the semblance of youth, 10,000 likes, hard abs, doughnuts – but wanting is also lacking. That is what ‘want’ means. So we have to be careful of our wants and watch that they don’t cause too many holes inside us, otherwise happiness will drip through us like water through a leaky bucket. The moment we want is the moment we are dissatisfied. The more we want, the more we will drip ourselves away.