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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 climb out of a hole. The things I forget to do in day-to-day life. 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.

But everything was difficult. Even choosing what to wear in the morning could make me cry. It didn’t matter that I had felt like this before. A sore throat doesn’t become less sore simply because you’ve felt it before.

I tried to read, but found it hard to concentrate.

I listened to podcasts.

I watched new Netflix shows.

I went on social media.

I tried to get on top of my work by replying to all my emails.

I woke up and clasped my phone, and prayed that whatever I could find there could take me out of myself.

But – spoiler alert – it didn’t work.

I began to feel worse. And many of the ‘distractions’ were doing nothing but driving me further to distraction. In T.S. Eliot’s phrase from his Four Quartets, I was ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’.

I would stare at an unanswered email, with a feeling of dread, and not be able to answer it. Then, on Twitter, my go-to digital distraction of choice, I noticed my anxiety intensify. Even just passively scrolling my timeline felt like an exposure of a wound.

I read news websites – another distraction – and my mind couldn’t take it. The knowledge of so much suffering in the world didn’t help put my pain in perspective. It just made me feel powerless. And pathetic that my invisible woes were so paralysing when there were so many visible woes in the world. My despair intensified.

So I decided to do something.

I disconnected.

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.

In the house, I tried to lie in darkness as much as possible, the way you might deal with a migraine. I had always, since I was first suicidally ill in my twenties, understood that getting better involved a kind of life edit.

A taking away.

As the minimalism advocate Fumio Sasaki puts it: ‘there’s a happiness in having less’. In the early days of my first experience of panic the only things I had taken away were booze and cigarettes and strong coffees. Now, though, years later, I realised that a more general overload was the problem.

A life overload.

And certainly a technology overload. 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.

The anxiety didn’t miraculously disappear. Of course not.

Unlike my smartphone, there is no ‘slide to power off’ function for anxiety.

But I stopped feeling worse. I plateaued. And after a few days, things began to calm.

The familiar path of recovery arrived sooner rather than later. And 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.

How this book came about

MOST PEOPLE KNOW the modern world can have physical effects. That, despite advances, aspects of modern life are dangerous for our bodies. Car accidents, smoking, air pollution, a sofa-dwelling lifestyle, takeaway pizza, radiation, that fourth glass of Merlot.

Even being at a laptop can pose physical dangers. Sitting down all day, getting an RSI. Once I was even told by an optician that my eye infection and blocked tear ducts were caused by staring at a screen. We blink less, apparently, when working on a computer.

So, as physical health and mental health are intertwined, couldn’t the same be said about the modern world and our mental states? Couldn’t aspects of how we live in the modern world be responsible for how we feel in the modern world?

Not just in terms of the stuff of modern life, but its values, too. The values that cause us to want more than we have. To worship work above play. To compare the worst bits of ourselves with the best bits of other people. To feel like we always lack something.

And as I grew better, by the day, I began to have an idea about a book – this book right here.

I had already written about my mental health in Reasons to Stay Alive. But the question now was not: why should I stay alive? The question this time was a broader one: how can we live in a mad world without ourselves going mad?

News from a nervous planet

AS I BEGAN researching I quickly found some attention-grabbing headlines for an attention-grabbing age. Of course, news is almost designed to stress us out. If it was designed to keep us calm it wouldn’t be news. It would be yoga. Or a puppy. So there is an irony about news companies reporting on anxiety while also making us anxious.

Anyway, here are some of those headlines:

STRESS AND SOCIAL MEDIA FUEL MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS AMONG GIRLS (The Guardian)

CHRONIC LONELINESS IS A MODERN-DAY EPIDEMIC (Forbes)

FACEBOOK ‘MAY MAKE YOU MISERABLE’, SAYS FACEBOOK (Sky News)

‘STEEP RISE’ IN SELF-HARM AMONG TEENAGERS (BBC)

WORKPLACE STRESS AFFECTS 73 PER CENT OF EMPLOYEES (The Australian)

STARK RISE IN EATING DISORDERS BLAMED ON OVEREXPOSURE TO CELEBRITIES’ BODIES (The Guardian)

SUICIDE ON CAMPUS AND THE PRESSURE OF PERFECTION (The New York Times)

WORKPLACE STRESS RISING SHARPLY (Radio New Zealand)

WILL ROBOTS TAKE OUR CHILDREN’S JOBS? (The New York Times)

STRESS, HOSTILITY RISING IN AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOLS IN TRUMP ERA (The Washington Post)

CHILDREN IN HONG KONG ARE RAISED TO EXCEL, NOT TO BE HAPPY (South China Morning Post)

HIGH ANXIETY: MORE AND MORE PEOPLE ARE TODAY TURNING TO DRUGS TO DEAL WITH STRESS (El País)

ARMY OF THERAPISTS TO BE SENT INTO SCHOOLS TO TACKLE ANXIETY EPIDEMIC (The Telegraph)

IS THE INTERNET GIVING US ALL ADHD? (The Washington Post)

‘OUR MINDS CAN BE HIJACKED’: THE TECH INSIDERS WHO FEAR A SMARTPHONE DYSTOPIA (The Guardian)

TEENAGERS ARE GROWING MORE ANXIOUS AND DEPRESSED (The Economist)

INSTAGRAM WORST SOCIAL MEDIA APP FOR YOUNG PEOPLE’S MENTAL HEALTH (CNN)