How to cope with the stresses of modern life

What does your ‘psychogram’ score need to be to help you cope with the stresses of modern life? Matt Haig’s new book has the answers ...
Katie Law @jkatielaw14 June 2018

Along with feminism, dystopian fiction and doctors’ memoirs, mental health has become one of the biggest publishing trends of the moment. Penguin Random House has devoted an entire imprint, Penguin Life, to books about “new personal development and healthy living”, while last year we saw an explosion in the shops of happiness manuals, extolling everything from the power of Danish “hygge” and Norwegian extreme silence to the therapeutic benefits of dim colouring-in books.

There has been a glut of books about the dangers of spending too much time online, on social media or in the workplace versus the perils of not getting enough sleep, while sales of depression memoirs are soaring, thanks in part to Prince Harry speaking so frankly last year about how he sought therapy for his anxiety and anger issues.

The most influential author in this arena, however, has been Matt Haig, whose 2015 memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive, chronicling his anxiety, depression and breakdown, became that year’s surprise publishing sensation. When it came out in paperback the following year it outsold all but one other non-fiction title, turning Haig into a spokesman on mental health issues ever since.

Next month Canongate publishes his follow-up, Notes on a Nervous Planet, carefully packaged to resemble the original,with a black instead of a white jacket, over a jazzy, rainbow-coloured hard cover. In essence, it’s more of the same: a self-help manual-cum-memoir, composed of short chapters, sometimes rambling on for several pages, sometimes just a paragraph. The tone is chatty and self-deprecating. There’s no obvious order to them and you could easily dip in anywhere. Haig, who is 43 and based in Brighton, decided to write it because the question he asked himself was “how can we live in a mad world without ourselves going mad?” Mental problems are “quantifiably rising” and “the growth in mindfulness, meditation and minimal living is a visible response to an overloaded culture”. By “overloaded”, he means we have too much, too fast, from mail, news and world population growth to the thoughts in our heads.

He catastrophises and he worries. He worries about everything, his worry is limitless, his worry has real ambition, he adds, gilding the lily just a little. He worries about human rights abuses, about his carbon footprint, about other species becoming extinct, about prejudice, politics and pollution, about people being in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. And so on, and on; but at least he also has the grace to worry about how wrapped up in himself he is.

Like many addicts (he has battled not just depression but alcohol too) he is partial to making lists. The first is a list of what mental health problems are not, which includes being a bandwagon, fashionable, a fad, a celebrity trend, a result of a growing awareness of mental health problems, always easy to talk about, and the same as they always were.

Another is for an imaginary psychological measure he calls a “psychogram” (pg), which works like a calorie-counter weighing up doing things that make us feel bad. He suggests that once we’ve exceeded our daily “pg” allowance we have to stop.

For Haig, making a speech comes in at a crippling 1,328pg, while fear of missing out on a party you see on social media is a mere 62pg. Visiting a shopping centre tots up 1,298pg, while your tweet that no one likes is only 98pg. Mine or yours might look very different but you get his drift - and it’s not entirely barmy.

In his chapter on how to own a smartphone and still

be a functioning human being, he lists obvious rules such as turning off notifications and not keeping the phone by his bedside, but admits it’s excruciatingly hard.

He knows using a laptop in bed at night is a no-no but does it anyway while deploring the fact that neither smartphone nor social media addiction are officially recognised psychological disorders. He is an avid tweeter, with 216,000 followers, and a random few hours on Twitter shows him tweeting and retweeting every few minutes.

His solutions for a happier existence tread the line between common sense, such as “never miss breakfast” and “shop less”, to the marginally loony “don’t seek to filter out your human nature” or “breathe”. But perhaps his most pertinent is this: “Remember that many people feel like you.” He’s dead right, they do, and that’s precisely why in these obsessively social media-angst-ridden times, he’s bound to have another hit on his hands.

Notes on a Nervous Planet is published on July 5. Matt Haig will launch the book at the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, SE1, on July 3.

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