Notes on a Nervous Planet: Matt Haig

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That never happened, but it’s continual not-happening-ness never stopped the possibility that it could happen. This first section of the book, with the musings on how capitalist society makes us feel perpetually unsatisfied and looking for the thrill of the new to sell more articles, made me think of Yuval Noah Harari his style of tackling big trends.

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? Thank you, as always, to Matt Haig, for being just the sort of authentic, honest, and open mental health advocate the world needs. The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. It sometimes feels as if we have temporarily solved the problem of scarcity and replaced it with the problem of excess.His memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive, details his struggle with depression and was a number-one Sunday Times best-seller in the United Kingdom. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. Haig is very honest about his own mental health and shares doable activities that might help anyone feeling less overwhelmed by the world: from watching the sea, the sky, walking in forests to yoga and focussing on breathing.

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. A prime reason why the previous book made an impact, is that it hewed more closely to Haig's personal history, as he shared autobiographical stories from which he gleaned his insights - here, there are far fewer such examples, so it just seems like a stream of platitudes - some of which are profound, some of which extract a feeling of . I found his last book actually had a story to it whereas this was just quoting other books and repeating what they said.

This book follows a similar format: short chapters, concisely written, with lots of numbered lists – just right for an audience whose attention, Haig argues, is being stretched painfully thin by 24-hour rolling news, smartphones, work and social media. With nice neighbours who invite you to barbecues on sunny Saturdays in July, with your children playing together in the warm breeze. The question this time was a broader one: how can we live in a mad world without ourselves going mad? Although I was suicidal when I was younger, and very nearly threw myself off a cliff, in more recent times my obsession with suicide became more a fear of doing it, rather than a will to do it.

The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock. And it doesn’t take too much looking to see the warning signs of a breakdown not just inside our selves, but in the wider world. In this illuminating follow-up to his memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive, novelist and children’s author Haig ( How to Stop Time, 2018, etc. This is a brilliantly efficient book, cherry picking the themes Matt explores in his fiction and condensing them into a less-than-300 page primer on mental health and how the world we live in today contributes to the widespread anxiety and depression on our 'nervous planet'. The growth in text speak and initialisms and acronyms and emojis and gifs as communication aids shows how technological advancements influence language (think also of how, many centuries ago, the printing press led to standardisations of spelling and grammar).Let’s look at what we can do together, as a society, to make the world a less stressful place for everyone.

The interesting thing about the survey was that it showed that how you feel about your looks is surprisingly far more determined by the nation in which you live than by, say, your gender. There's nothing much I can say that I haven't said before about this author's writing and sometimes you just want to read a book to kick start your soul again. With life-expectancy doubling over the past century, and time-saving technology at our disposal, we should have more of it than ever. Not to say that propagating a holistic approach to mental health, taking the environment and physical health into account, is not very important. This, of course, depends on the books we chose to read, but I appreciated Haig’s arguments on how they can open our minds.A follow-up to Matt Haig’s internationally bestselling memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive, a broader look at how modern life feeds our anxiety, and how to live a better life. The growth in mindfulness, meditation and minimal living is a visible response to an overloaded culture. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. When watching a viral clip of a human-sized back-flipping robot, it feels like reality has become science fiction. But then, in 1997, the greatest chess player in the world – Garry Kasparov – lost to IBM’s Deep Blue computer.