Shock may be an unpleasant thing for an individual or a society to experience, but it can be a useful political tool. Ask anyone who has ever had a full-blown panic attack and they will tell you that it makes you think about nothing else but the fear. If you are shocked you are confused. You aren’t thinking straight. You become passive. You go where the people tell you to go.

Naomi Klein coined the term the ‘shock doctrine’ to describe the cynical tactic of systematically using ‘the public’s disorientation following a collective shock’ for corporate or political gain. Oil companies exploiting the shock of war to make inroads into a new country, for instance, or an American president exploiting terrorism to push hard-line anti-immigration measures.

‘We don’t go into a state of shock when something big and bad happens,’ she says. ‘It has to be something big and bad that we do not yet understand.’

And the trouble is that now we have 24-hour news coverage, where events are continuously breaking but rarely absorbed. We are in a world of news, which by its very nature skims the new moment, garnished with headlines and sound bites, rarely giving us a calmer, more reflective understanding of the big picture.

Shock results in negative but understandable emotions. Fear, sadness, impotence, anger. The temptation to spend our lives tweeting rage at the injustices of the world is a human one, but it isn’t enough. Ultimately, it may simply be adding more wails to the collective wails of shock which aid those in power, or on the political extremes, who might want us distracted.

When an individual goes through panic disorder, the main response – amid the terror – is to feel cross and utterly fed up. But there comes a point where, in the process of recovery, you have to reach some kind of understanding and acceptance. Not because it isn’t that bad. But precisely because it is that bad.

I remember once, during depression, staring up at a clear sky of stars. The wonder of the universe.

At the bottom of the pit, I always had to force myself to find the beauty, the goodness, the love, however hard it was. It was hard to do. But I had to try. 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.

Imagine

IMAGINE IF WE had a day where we called human beings human beings. Not nationalities first. Not the religion they follow. Not British. Not American. Not French. Not German. Not Iranian. Not Chinese. Not Muslim. Not Sikh. Not Christian. Not Asian. Not black. Not white. Not man. Not woman. Not CEO of Coca-Cola. Not gang member. Not mother-of-three. Not historian. Not economist. Not BBC journalist. Not Twitter user. Not consumer. Not Star Trek fan. Not author. Not aged 17. Or 39. Or 83. Not conservative. Not liberal. Change it all to human. The way we see all turtles as turtles. Human, human, human. Make ourselves see what we pretend to know. Remind ourselves that we are an animal united as a species existing on this tender blue speck in space, the only planet that we know of containing life. Bathe in the corny sentimental miracle of that. Define ourselves by the freakish luck of not only being alive, but being aware of that. That we are here, right now, on the most beautiful planet we’ll ever know. A planet where we can breathe and live and fall in love and eat peanut butter on toast and say hello to dogs and dance to music and read Bonjour Tristesse and binge-watch TV dramas and notice the sunlight accentuated by hard shadow on a building and feel the wind and the rain on our tender skin and look after each other and lose ourselves in daydreams and night dreams and dissolve into the sweet mystery of ourselves. A day where we are, essentially, precisely as human as each other.

Six ways to keep up with the news and not lose your mind

1.Remember that how you react to the news isn’t just about what the news is, but how you get it. The internet and breaking news channels report news in ways that make us feel disorientated. It is easy to believe things are getting worse, when they might just make us feel worse. The medium isn’t just the message, it’s the emotional intensity of that message.

2.Limit the amount of times you look at the news. As my Facebook friend Debra Morse recently commented: ‘Remember that in 1973 we typically got our news twice a day: morning paper and evening TV broadcast. And we still got rid of Nixon.’

3.Realise the world is not as violent as it feels. Many writers on this subject – such as the famed cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker – have pointed out that, despite all its horrors, society is less violent than it used to be. ‘There is definitely still violence,’ says the historian Yuval Noah Harari. ‘I live in the Middle East so I know this perfectly well. But, comparatively, there is less violence than ever before in history. Today more people die from eating too much than from human violence, which is really an amazing achievement.’

4.Be near animals. Non-human animals are therapeutic for all kinds of reasons. One reason is that they don’t have news. Dogs and cats and goldfish and antelope literally don’t care. The things that are important to us – politics and economics and all of those fluctuating things – are not important to them. And their lives, like ours, still go on. As A.A. Milne wrote in Winnie-the-Pooh: ‘Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That’s the problem.’

5.Don’t worry about things you can’t control. The news is full of things you can’t do anything about. Do the things you can do stuff about – raise awareness of issues that concern you, give whatever you can to whichever cause you feel passionate about, and also accept the things you can’t do.

6.Remember, looking at bad news doesn’t mean good news isn’t happening. It’s happening everywhere. It’s happening right now. Around the world. In hospitals, at weddings, in schools and offices and maternity wards, at airport arrival gates, in bedrooms, in inboxes, out in the street, in the kind smile of a stranger. A billion unseen wonders of everyday life.

In praise of positivity

THE OLD ME, before I ever became ill, was cynical about positivity, about happy songs and pink sunsets and optimistic words of hope. But when I was ill – when I was in the thick of it – my life depended on abandoning that pessimistic side of myself. Cynicism was a luxury for the non-suicidal. I had to find hope. The thing with feathers. My life depended on it.

It might seem a stretch to tie psychological healing with social and political healing, but if the personal is political, the psychological is, too. The current political climate seems to be one of division – a division partly fuelled by the internet.

We need to rediscover our commonality as human beings. How does that happen? Well, an alien invasion would be one way, but we can’t rely on that.

The problem of politics is the problem of tribes. ‘When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence,’ taught the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti.

One thing mental illness taught me is that progress is a matter of acceptance. Only by accepting a situation can you change it. You have to learn not to be shocked by the shock. Not to be in a state of panic about the panic. To change what you can change and not get frustrated by what you can’t.

There is no panacea, or utopia, there is just love and kindness and trying, amid the chaos, to make things better where we can. And to keep our minds wide, wide open in a world that often wants to close them.

8

A SMALL SECTION ON SLEEP

The war on sleep

BEFORE 1879, WHEN Thomas Edison came up with the first practical incandescent light bulb, all lighting had been fuelled by gas and oil. The light bulb, heavily promoted via the Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company, literally set the world alight. The bulbs were practical – small and cheap and safe – and emitted just the right amount of light, and began to take off in homes and businesses throughout the world.

Human beings had, finally, conquered the night. The dark – the source of so many of our primal fears – could now be negated at the flick of a switch. And now, as our evenings could stay lighter for longer, people increasingly started going to bed later. This didn’t worry Edison at all. Indeed, he saw it as an unequivocally good thing. In 1914, Edison, by now a living global icon, declared that ‘there is really no reason why men should go to bed at all’. He went further: he actually believed sleep was bad for you, and too much was likely to make you lazy. He believed the light bulb was a kind of medicine, and that artificial light could cure ‘unhealthy and inefficient’ people.

Of course, he was wrong. Without sleep we don’t function properly.