Matt Haig

Notes on a Nervous Planet


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      ALSO BY MATT HAIG

       The Last Family in England

       The Dead Fathers Club

       The Possession of Mr Cave

       The Radleys

       The Humans

       Humans: An A–Z

       Reasons to Stay Alive

       How to Stop Time

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      Published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,

      14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

       canongate.co.uk

      This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books

      Copyright © Matt Haig, 2018

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      Excerpt from ‘The Waste Land’, The Poems of T.S. Eliot Volume I, Collected and Uncollected Poems © Estate of T.S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Excerpt from The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940–1956 © Estate of Sylvia Plath. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Excerpt from The Wizard of Oz granted courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

      Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 78689 269 0

      eISBN 978 1 78689 268 3

      For Andrea

      Contents

       1A stressed-out mind in a stressed-out world

       2The big picture

       3A feeling is not your face

       4Notes on time

       5Life overload

       6Internet anxieties

       7Shock of the news

       8A small section on sleep

       9Priorities

       10Phone fears

       11The detective of despair

       12The thinking body

       13The end of reality

       14Wanting

       15Two lists about work

       16Shaping the future

       17The song of you

       18Everything you are is enough

       People I’d like to thank

       Also by Matt Haig

       ‘Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.’

      —Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz

      1

      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