Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #188 BITESIZE | How to Reduce Anxiety and Improve Mental Health | Matt Haig

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

Rates of stress and anxiety are increasing and it’s estimated that 1 in 4 of us will experience mental health problems at some point in our lives.   Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests.   Today’s clip is from episode 61 of the podcast with best-selling author, and one of the most prominent voices in the mental health arena, Matt Haig   As someone who has suffered from depression and anxiety, Matt shares his personal journey and explains what has helped him find optimism. We explore how modern life is affecting our mental health, and Matt gives some great tips on how we can all improve the way we feel.   Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/61 Thanks to our sponsor http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore   Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. 

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10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More. Bite size your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 61 of the podcast with best-selling author and one of the most prominent voices in the mental health arena, Mr. Matt Haig. Matt's someone who has suffered from depression and anxiety and in this clip he shares his personal journey and explains what has helped him to find optimism. We also explore how modern life is affecting our mental health

and Matt gives some great tips on how we can all improve the way that we feel. Where does your drive to talk about mental health come from? Well, I first became ill or actually recognized I was ill when I was 24 years old. I had, I know it's not a medical term, but I had a full blown breakdown led into panic disorder, depression, anxiety, whole smorgasbord of mental health issues. And I was lucky in that I had a partner I was close to who I could talk to. And my parents were quite open-minded and liberal on such issues. And I could talk to them.

But beyond that, really for over a decade, I didn't talk about it at all. You know, I didn't talk about it to my friends. I'd actually, I ended up losing some friends for a while, not because they were stigmatizing me, but because I just wasn't explaining things. So I would cancel going to the pub or not be able to do things because of depression or anxiety and I just ridiculously couldn't say that so I think it's once the floodgates opened and once I was feeling

in a better place and had come to terms with who I was and what happened to me and that it wasn't a judgment on me it was just an experience that. I wrote about it on the internet. I wrote a blog called Reasons to Stay Alive, which eventually, after some prompting, became a e-book. And yeah, it just felt like a release. It felt like such a nice thing. And all the things I'd been worried about in terms of sharing personal stuff about those sort of feelings I didn't feel any kind of stigma I just felt a sort of warmth and support coming towards me which made me feel less alone yeah I'll tell you as a doctor one thing I've learned over you know almost 20 years of seeing patients now is that often, even if you can't help someone, just listen to them, first of all, makes a big difference.

But then when you tell someone that actually they're not alone, that you've seen other patients just like that this morning or earlier this week, I learned that patients love it. They just love the fact, not that someone else is suffering. They just love the fact that not that someone else is suffering. They just love the fact, no, it's not just them. I think manning up may be one of the most toxic phrases that we've currently got. I don't know. I mean, what do you think?

Yeah, no, totally. And I think man up often just means shut up and it means get on with it. And it means, it essentially means if you don't man up, if you do talk about it, then there's something wrong with you the toughest times of my life the times i had to be strongest were actually when i was looking the weakest like the thing i'm most proud of doing in my whole life was walking to the corner shop

from my parents house when i was ill and agoraphobic on my own to get a pint of milk and some marmite which was a distance of less than 500 meters and that's still you know I've traveled the world done various things had various life experiences and that was still the toughest thing I ever did so this idea that manning up means always you know doing the most heroic action or anything is fundamentally wrong anyway. You know, because you're going through anxiety doesn't mean that you yourself are a weak person. Anxiety to the level I experienced it actually made me a stronger person. it actually made me a stronger person because to get over the anxiety I was experiencing and the agoraphobia I was experiencing with panic attacks, I had to sort of go through that. So you're having to face that fear continually every day beyond what most people would ever naturally experience, fortunately. So this idea that somehow admitting an illness or

even experiencing an illness is the opposite of strength, I think is fundamentally wrong. Yeah. You have obviously made immense progress yourself. You have learned, no doubt, a lot about yourself through the things that you've been through. And you've very openly shared them in your books, which is incredible. And I think very inspiring for a lot of people. What can people learn from your journey? You know, what have you learned on that journey that maybe can inspire others, do you think? I think the simple idea of change.

You know, I felt stuck. I felt literally stuck. I mean, my depression lasted longer than average. You know, I had three years of really being stuck in a place. And it's not like after those three years, I was totally better. I've had lots of lapses, lots of sort of areas on the dial somewhere between. But what I didn't believe then, areas on my dial somewhere between but what i didn't believe then i didn't believe in the possibility of change i didn't understand the fluctuations that even if you have a condition like anxiety and you you're always got it to a degree that it's going to change it's going to shift your relationship to your condition even if it's a permanent condition if it's a chronic condition your relationship to it is something that can change and something that does naturally change

over time. You know, the one thing that for me was bigger than depression was time. And even if bad things do happen, you don't know the person you will be when you experience them. Our minds change, you know, neuroplasticity, all that stuff. Our brain literally changes with experience and what we do and when we age. And you will become someone else to who you are at that lowest point. And that, you know, the bottom of the valley, as I say in the book, gives you the worst view. But, you know, it can be very hard to get that message in there.

Yeah. What is a nervous planet? Well, nervous in the sense that I think a lot of us are feeling stressed out because of the 21st century pace of living and this kind of overloaded culture of everything, which is often kind of paralyzing. But also nervous in the sense that

of a nervous system, as sort of like we're connected in ways that we're we've never been connected before so we're our emotions and our psychology influence each other and we've got that's a wider influence than it used to be when we used to live in a hunter-gatherer communities of at most 100 people now we can encounter 100 new people before getting out of bed we are saturated with everything and it's you know it's parallel i think a lot of the inverted commas craziness of the world to our own mental states and we're not making that connection yeah absolutely i mean there's so much in this

book, Notes on a Nervous Planet. You've got the section on time. We need the time we already have. I really loved it because you finish it off saying, we often find ourselves wishing for more hours in the day, but that wouldn't help anything. the problem clearly isn't that we have a shortage of time it's more that we have an overload of everything else i think that just sums up so beautifully um is this something you've been sitting with a lot you know in terms of when you were writing this i mean yeah and i you know something you know maybe hitting your 40s you and having kids grow older you're aware of the passing of time. But I feel like we all say it, don't we? We all say, if only I had the time, I'd read more,

or I'd do this more, or I'd travel more. And we're all feeling that absence of time. But in real terms, we've got as much time, if not more, than any humans have ever had. And yet, so something else is at play and i think there's two things one we've got more literal demands on our time and also we we have kind of conditioned ourselves to live somewhere else than the present so you know i'm a great fan of the education system i'm from a family of teachers but I sometimes think the whole education system

is a kind of reverse mindfulness where you're continually thinking about the future. So you're learning not for its own sake, but you're learning for grades, for exams, for the job. At the end of it, then you go to university or not. And then you're thinking about the career path you take. And so from a young age, we're trained to always have that sort of forward thinking,

that forward momentum and it carries on into the workplace in our careers and it doesn't encourage we're not encouraged to just be grateful in the moment for what we have or know how to appreciate what we have and i feel like continually where it's always about accumulating something now for instance my latest technological obsession is my pacer app on my phone to see how many steps i've done now it's always about accumulating something now for instance my latest technological obsession is my pacer app on my phone to see how many steps i've done now it's a good thing to encourage people to to walk more and i'm a great fan of walking more but the fact that we turn everything into a number means that we're constantly trying to accumulate so i'm always worried now if i've done my 10 000

steps and it doesn't matter the quality of those steps where i'm walking i just want to reach for 10 000 number and whether it's our income bracket whether it's you know our grades at school whether it's like you know a measurement we want to our bodies to be or whatever it is we were conditioned i feel to feel like we're not quite enough in the present moment and we've always got to become the after picture we've got to become the next version of ourselves and it it's easy to forget that we're actually everything we need is really already there but we just sort of pile too much stuff on it and we sometimes lose ourselves yeah I think this is probably one of the biggest problems in this nervous planet in which we're currently living in is that it's never enough. There's always something else to do. There's always somebody else doing something that is perceived to be better that you think, oh, you know, I will be happy when I do this. And then you achieve it and you're like, oh, it's not really made much difference to how I feel about myself. to how I feel about myself.

It sounds like the ultimate of first world problems, but all you do at each successful stage you reach in life is that becomes your new normal. So you've raised the bar of your own happiness. So you feel like you need to do more, you need to do more, and it becomes, you know, this ridiculous thing. I say it a lot, but I honestly have known more happiness,

more sense of gratitude and everything this side of a line of illness than i ever did before so it's a it's a very complex picture i wouldn't want to go and relive this three years of utter hell in panic disorder and deep depression but at the same point i wouldn't press that magic button to have not experienced any of that because i'm now in a position because of it where i can appreciate things more I understand myself better I'm not in a I resist saying I'm in a place of 100% full mental health just as I you know no one is necessarily in 100% full physical health and it's something that I have to sort of monitor and manage and look after and be quite acutely aware of sometimes but yeah i i'm

i'm a happier person for having known the deep despair and pessimism of you know the opposite place so in some ways it's actually i guess i mean obviously it's in many ways it's made you the person you are today. But I guess it must have taught you so much about yourself and what you want to change. What is changeable? What isn't changeable? I feel that your experience, both as someone who's suffered from mental health problems or still continues to, you've had so many interactions with the public. You've written so many great books. I wonder, have you got any sort of short and sweet sort of top tips that you can share with people, three or four things that maybe they can think about doing in their own life that might improve the way that they feel?

I think often it's about slowing down in some way. So for me personally, I know you're a great believer in it too, but you know, I believe physical health and mental health are so interlinked. So one of the things that helped me early on and really helped me get over panic attacks was just going running. And I know not everyone can do it or wants to do it, but for me, having that space away from people, from my work, from everything else, just getting out, going running was a massive help and i know it sounds funny but there's a kind of truth to it when when i was running i knew that was a place i couldn't have a panic attack because the symptoms of running other symptoms of a panic attack you've got the breathlessness you've got the racing heart you're sweating but you know why you are

and it's kind of a pain that you can control over so i found it very empowering not just on the endorphin level and the feeling of accomplishment but actually it gave you that sense of sort of control which panic took away and you know i'm great so running and yoga are my things i love doing yoga yoga came later i actually started doing yoga for my back rather than for my anxiety but i noticed that it was having a knock-on effect and whether that was simply just taking that time for myself slowing my breathing down which is something i still watch but i think essentially it's about creating a space however whatever it is whether it's doing yoga whether it's reading a book whether it's going for a run where we're just unplugged we're just

ourselves we're not working we're not worried about the money that we're not making or whatever and we can just be rather than you know the reverse of the nike slogan just do it you know where we can just actually be just almost disconnecting in order to reconnect. Absolutely. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Please do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the full conversation with my guest.

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