Notes on a Nervous Planet(2)

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)

WHY ARE RATES OF SUICIDE SOARING ACROSS THE PLANET? (Alternet)

As I said, it is ironic that reading the news about how things are making us anxious and depressed actually can make us anxious, and that tells us as much as the headlines themselves.

The aim in this book isn’t to say that everything is a disaster and we’re all screwed, because we already have Twitter for that. No. The aim isn’t even to say that the modern world has uniformly worse problems than before. In some specific ways it is getting measurably better. In figures from the World Bank, the number of people worldwide living in severe economic hardship is falling radically, with over one billion people moving out of extreme poverty in the last thirty years. And think of all the millions of children’s lives around the globe saved by vaccinations. As Nicholas Kristof pointed out in a 2017 New York Times article, ‘if just about the worst thing that can happen is for a parent to lose a child, that’s about half as likely as it was in 1990.’ So for all the ongoing violence and intolerance and economic injustice prevalent in our species, there are – on the most global of scales – also reasons for pride and hope.

The problem is that each age poses a unique and complex set of challenges. And while many things have improved, not all things have. Inequalities still remain. And some new problems have arisen. People often live in fear, or feel inadequate, or even suicidal, when they have – materially – more than ever.

And I am keenly aware that the oft-used approach of pointing out a list of advantages of modern life, such as health and education and average income, does not help. It is like a wagging finger telling a depressed person to count her blessings because no one has died. This book seeks to recognise that what we feel is just as important as what we have. That mental wellbeing counts as much as physical wellbeing – indeed, that it is part of physical wellbeing. And that, on these terms, something is going wrong.