The Wellness Scoop - Matt Haig on Mental Health

Episode Date: October 16, 2018

We're joined by bestselling author Matt Haig who shares an intimate account of his own struggle with mental health, why he believes that mental health should be given just as much importance as physical health and a fascinating look at the impact of technology, social media and the business of the world today on our mental wellbeing. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Delicela podcast with me, Matthew Mills, and my wife and business partner, Ella Mills. Hi, everyone. So today, I'm very excited about our guest today. I've been a huge, huge fan of his writing. We have Matt Haig here today. For anyone who's not familiar with his work, he is a brilliant author, but I'm particularly a massive, massive fan on his work on mental health. I first read his book, Reasons to Stay Alive, actually while we were on our honeymoon, and I've just found it incredibly powerful. And his new book, Notes on a Nervous Planet, has become my absolute go-to. So we're going to talk a little bit about kind of general mental health today, the stigma around mental health, dealing with it, but also looking really at the kind of connection

between the modern world, technology, social media, the kind of busyness, the stress of life today and how that's starting to impact on us and what we can do about it. So thank you so much for coming in today. Thanks guys. Thank you for having me. So Matt, for anyone who's not familiar with your work, can you just give a bit of background on your story and how the books came about? Yeah, well, in terms of mental health stuff, I mean, I'd written novels before. So when I wrote Reasons to Stay Alive, I'd done about 10 books before that. But I'd been building up to sort of writing about my experience of mental health for years

and never knew how to do it. And I basically had a full-blown breakdown. Even though breakdown is not a medical term, that's still how I see it at the age of 24. I mean, technically it was panic disorder, depression, anxiety, a whole smorgasbord of mental stuff. And there was a particular event that caused it, or was it...? No, well, you know, at the time,

I didn't think or know any of the causes, and that's why I became suicidal quite quickly, because I had no idea how I'd got into the situation, so I had no idea how to get out of a situation. So I hadn't been living physically healthily, I'd been sleeping badly. We'd been in a bifa being sort of young clubbing, partying people. But I hadn't been into drugs.

I'd been drinking too much. I'd been sleeping badly. And I was about to come home and sort of get back into the real world with working in London and stuff. And I think it was a kind of quarter-life crisis catching up with me combined with not being physically healthy combined with just life stresses and i think i'd had low-level depression for years i hadn't been aware of so i was doing that sort of typical young man thing of you know i said, actually, the week before I had a breakdown,

that I was a fun-loving person, that I was a happy person, that there were no problems, but I would have been wrong, and I just wasn't very in tune with myself. And it's taken me a long time. And in both Reasons to Stay Alive and Notes on a Nervous Planet, I think my motivation for writing them was to actually explore things, to help people obviously but for me selfishly to just explore the connections between

how I was feeling and how I was living amazing yeah there was a quote that I thought was really powerful notes on a nervous planet where you said um in the lowest moments you thought you'd never be able to enjoy music again or food or books or conversation or sunlight or holiday or anything. I was rotten to my core like a diseased tree every day. And that pit was hell, which is quite. Yeah, I know. I put it all out there. I don't.

Yeah, I was in a really bad way. And how long were you in such a bad way for? Well, I was properly ill, as in, if you count being too ill to leave a house on my own, I was ill for about three years. When I was living in Spain, we went straight away. Andrea, my partner, she sort of forced me straight away to go to the Spanish medical centre. I got some pills, and it was the Valium, the diazepam, that didn't work. Then when I was back in the UK, I had a couple of sort of bad or mediocre experiences with the GPs. I did every single thing my mum was telling me to do, like go to homeopaths,

all kinds of stuff. I was literally trying everything everything and nothing seemed to sort of work and then after that I kind of gave up because the actual sort of looking was making me sort of more stressed out so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but in my situation that's what I was doing and also combined with the fact that I was agoraphobic the fact that sort of doing anything was making me have a panic attack even watching tv was sort of like too much for me at that point. It sounds so strange and pathetic, but that's the sort of situation I was in. I did eventually get better,

and I think one of the things I, you know, I say relatively better. I'm not 100% physically or mentally. I mean, I don't think any of us are, but, you know, I gave up sort of believing in total 100 percent betterness because that was one of the things that kept me in the bad place because um every time i thought i was 100 better and then i'd have a dip or a panic attack or something then it would all come crashing down so i stopped believing that all or nothing and realizing it was just something i have to sort

of constantly um keep on top of but having that, all the doom and gloom stuff, I've known more happiness in my life this side of that breakdown. I've known more sort of good things, more good things have come out of it. I wouldn't want to go through it again. But in terms of regretting stuff, obviously I missed a lot of time in my 20s, but I like to believe that if you know an experience of that sort of intense pain, it sort of broadens you afterwards for intense pleasure or at least intense gratitude, sort of the normal neutrality of just living. And what tools have you used to create that greater sense of happiness? again, being that sort of typical young person, often wanting the most intense experiences.

And I used to have to have the most intense experiences to be happy. And since illness, I've been able to just be, you know, I haven't sort of craved getting out of my head. I haven't craved sort of always having to have the loudest music or most intense experiences. And that appreciation of just sort of like looking at the sky. Just smaller things. Yeah, smaller things.

You know, live by the sea, just sort of like going for a run by the sea. You know, just life stuff, just being appreciative. One of the other things you talk about, which I really like as well, is in that sense of appreciation is also just appreciating where you are today and that we have this tendency nowadays. And I think we all recognize it in ourselves of the kind of what ifs when I you know when I achieve this I will be happy when I look like this I will be happy if I lose weight I will be happy if I can run a marathon I will be happy and it's like you can't be happy now because you're imagining this parallel life this sense of you know I'm not good enough today

I might be good enough in the future. And if I'm good enough in the future, I'll be happy. And we're all encouraged to do that. I can remember thinking, oh, I will be eternally happy forever and ever if I got my sort of first book published, if I just got my name on a book. It doesn't have to be out on a table in a bookshop.

It just had a name on a book. And obviously that lasts for about two weeks. And then you're wanting the next thing. And then you're comparing yourself to other published people and stuff. Whatever it is, whatever your walk of life, you do that. But it's being a bit more mindful of it. Because I've got a theory that we're kind of encouraged subconsciously to be anxious, to feel a bit unfulfilled.

I feel like a lot of the economy and certainly like branding and marketing is run on that. It's run on sort of creating problems or highlighting problems and then providing solutions. Because I mean, most of us are lucky enough in the developed world to have essentially the things we need, the things that our sort of like cave person, Neolithic ancestors would have struggled for. We've solved the essential problems of being a human. So we've sort of created and manufactured lots of other stuff and we've still got the same anxiety in our head.

So I think fear is used a lot in marketing. There's even an acronym FUD, which is fear, uncertainty and doubt, which they like to sort of instill in um brands i suppose the obvious one would be something like a anti-aging moisturizer or something where you're fighting the inevitable yeah yeah obviously we're all worried naturally about aging but you know the exploitation of our natural sort of It's presence, isn't it? I mean, I think the key to happiness, I think if I look at my happiest moments in life

and other people I love and know well their happiest moments in life, it's just when they've been completely and utterly present and you're not worried about the future or the past. You're just focused on the moment you're in. I think there was a really interesting study with graduates at Harvard and high depression rates within them where they had always been successful.

And because they'd only ever got straight A's and then got into the best university and then were chasing the best summer internships and the best jobs, that was what they expected to do. So they never took a moment to stop and celebrate and be present in the success and joy of doing something so great. And it was this constant chase of something more, more, more that caused the anxiety and the stress on them rather than just actually appreciating and being so grateful and joyful about just the thing that you've just achieved and celebrating that and internalizing it and being present with that moment on that one things as well that I wanted to touch on is that idea um that you talk about kind of collective emotion the fact that because

we're now so connected that you're constantly and you have a page where you list like a brilliant thing of all these really depressing headlines about how anxious we are how depressed we are how unhappy we are and the fact that we. And the fact that we're constantly, it's like we're constantly being kind of reinforced by that. And there's, there was a brilliant quote, actually, a completely connected world has the potential to go mad all at once, which I really liked and wanted to kind of touch on that sense that because we're all so connected today, it's almost like we feel each other's pain kind of so deeply.

Yeah, I think that's why I called it Nervous Planet, because not only are we all sort of well a lot of us get stressed out quite easily but also um nervous in the sense of a nervous system it's like we're all part of this global um nervous system now of the internet and um there is such a thing as collective psychology you know and there's lots of positive and negative examples of it in the past whether it's witch trials or beetle mania or whatever it is we we sort of like have contagious emotions and if if we're all connected in a sort of digital sense now then our psychologies are connected so like for instance i've overused twitter and you see a lot of heated political or whatever arguments

over on twitter. And it's very easy to believe you're sort of arguing with someone who's the opposite of you, because they're politically different. But you're actually doing exactly the same thing, because you're sort of like, in a sort of keyboard warriors, trying to win an argument that you're never going to convince the other person of your own point of view, feeling that sort of anxiety or anger in your chest. And yeah, from the sort of aliens perspective in the cosmos, they're looking down and just seeing this hot technological rage going on. And so on that kind of technological point and the internet, because I think you kind of can't escape that we do live in the world of social media and kind of connectivity. And I know we touched on it just before we started recording, like, you know, I do think

social media can be amazing. It can bring people together. It can normalize things because you can understand you're not on your own on something. You can get ideas. You know, we can do something like this podcast where we can hopefully share inspiring information. But at the same time, there are negative sides to it. And it definitely, you kind of can't get away from the fact that it can have a negative impact. You're massive on social media. So have you found that it's, do you have to be careful about how much you sort of scroll through comments and things like that? 100%. We were literally talking about this last night. I mean, for me, the channel, and I know it's your mostly channel that I don't really use because i know for me it's kind of doesn't work as twitter because twitter

has such a sense of kind of anonymity and it's pretty so totally and i find that you'll do i don't know a segment on this morning or whatever it is and just so many people will come on and it's like it feels like the ultimate place for a keyboard warrior and for me it's i i can't help but kind of sometimes get sucked into it and then really get nervous about it or and I think what you're just saying resonates as well like sometimes you'll you'll see a negative comment and it's kind of hostile towards you and as a result you kind of take on this hostile emotion and you didn't feel hostile at all before you read it and you started replying to it but one thing Matt always says to me

sometimes you're looking at 500 comments, there's 499 really lovely comments and there's one negative comment. And yet you're drawn to it and he'll go through, he'll sometimes call me up and he's like, why have you only responded to that one negative one? And it's so true. Like it's such a reflection on how easy it can be

sometimes to get sucked into the space. And it's also going back to that thing of always, you know, never being happy. It's like you literally can have thousands of people probably in your case saying lovely things and it will be that 0.001 percent yeah that is absorbing like 99 of your mental energy because you're sort of focused on that i look at some i'm a complete sports nut and so i follow lots of footballers and stuff on instagram you know you see the comments on some of the comments on their pages it's horrendous oh my god i mean they just get absolutely torn apart and um with instagram

you know to your point with social media we talk about this a lot with with what we do is that instagram really is we think anyway a place for inspiration and it's something where you know if the picture's not great the algorithm gets it it doesn't you don't it doesn't get engaged people people i feel like you know when i switch between instagram and twitter there's almost a psychological switch goes on you're sort of like almost putting on your boxing gloves on twitter and with Instagram you feel like oh you just said yeah yeah but it's it's also a place where you have to be you have to be try and be honest um but getting that right balance between providing real inspiration but showing people that this is just a highlight reel it's not the complete reality you know our bedroom's still messy or it's still

stressed about something at work but engaging people because we're trying to inspire them to eat more plant-based food is you know getting that balance of of the the dream and the reality is is really difficult to do yeah and on a rainy tuesday morning in mark people forget sometimes that they're looking at someone's best bits if they're looking at someone leaning against a palm tree in bali you know exactly they're going getting on the bus to their job in croydon but i do think this um having access and it's not just social media it's the internet in general that sense of kind of 24 7 connectivity does now invite in a world of comparison and i think that all these things are what's making it really hard to be present because you're always aware of what someone else is doing what someone else is potentially achieving that you feel you're not achieving as you say in your book comparison is the thief of joy

which is which is which is so true yeah and I think it's hard you know like you don't realize until you've achieved at least some of your dreams that it doesn't stop yeah exactly there's not an end point to that you think oh and actually you can actually get into a crisis when you actually get the thing you want because you suddenly realize oh that wasn't the problem you know it's very easy to think oh i'm unhappy because i haven't got x y or z then you get x y or z and think oh i'm still feeling that way then you have a crisis so either the other thing I wanted to touch on as well is, we're looking at this in this kind of sense of the fact that there's always so many things going on. You have these constant tools around you,

constant ways of being able to connect. And one of the other things you mentioned, which I thought was really interesting, and it wasn't something I'd ever thought about before, was breaking news. And about the fact you used to get news morning and evening. And let's be honest, the news can be pretty depressing and at the moment it is incredibly depressing it feels though brexit trump they are they aren't bad themes but it feels as though at the moment like

every time you look at your phone a news alert pops up and it's breaking news and something terrible's happened and you just have this like constant sense of that the world is a terrible place but as you actually also point out you know there we've come a huge a huge way in the last decades like actually a lot of the world's problems are a lot better than they used to be but there's this sense of negativity that pops up from that angle as well yeah there aren't many stories about guide dogs there's not most positive you know there are all kinds of like positive little things that are going on in the world in terms of like conservation efforts and this, that and the other. But news by its nature, the things that sort of stand out in the news cycle are negative things.

But in the broad picture, yes, there's lots of reasons to be positive. There's less sort of child poverty than there was globally. You know, a lot of the third world is becoming slowly second or first world. And there's a lot of improvements globally. But yes, we do dwell on the negative, the news cycle sort of runs on the negative. And it's a kind of addictive thing where we all feel the need to be up to date, not just every day, but every hour of every day. And I've got a friend on Facebook, an American lady of a certain age, and she can remember the 70s quite clearly. And she said, you know, we used to get our news at most twice a day, you'd have your sort of morning newspaper and your 6pm news bulletin. And they still got rid of Nixon, they still had the sort of social

changes and a lot of progress in the 70s. Without that, I sometimes think we're so overloaded, we're almost paralysed. And it doesn't, you know, Trump and Brexit, it doesn't seem to be massively evolving. And we're getting so over-informed. And every day there's sort of some massive revelation and yet nothing changes.

So I don't think there's a relationship between having our news more often and actually making more change. Yes, it feels like we're now looking from distraction to distraction to distraction. And that's really kind of the crux of your point, right? That we're so distracted that we're becoming overloaded. Yeah, we're overloaded and we're distracted. I mean, I've got two kids and they'll be in the backseat of the car on their iPads. Before we had kids, we were never going to do that.

But we do a lot of car journeys. So they're totally plugged in in the back like most kids are. And they start to panic if they see it's 3% and they need the charger on the thing. And they literally can't understand what I would have done when i was a child on the backseat of a car without having any technology i said well you know we had books or we looked out the window or we watched the raindrops or we were bored played i spy yeah played i spy exactly you're pointing at things and um yeah but don't but but we're in an age now where you you never have to be bored but you're kind of always slightly bored because we've got too much.

Too much choice definitely can be a bad thing. So we've talked a lot about the problems, but what are the solutions to this? In a world with so much noise, technology's not going away, 24-hour news isn't going away, how do we cut through all of this and and find our most best balanced self um yeah million dollar question i have obviously we can't put the genie in the bottle i'm a total hypocrite on this because i i do i use the internet like everyone

else and i i get quite addicted to social media and i I wouldn't ever tell anyone off for doing that. I think they shouldn't. And in some ways, 20 years ago, when I had my full meltdown, I would have liked to have been able to go on the internet and find like-minded people, because I felt so alone and so isolated, like there was nothing else. So there's a lot of great stuff, there's a lot of great information out there,

and we wouldn't want to undo or turn back the clock. I think the key thing, the big, broad key thing, is to see it as a health issue. I think one of the problems is we don't see mental health really as health. You know, we see it to do with personality or character flaws or this, that, and the other. And, you know, we talk a lot about mental health, but I still feel we've got this fundamental misunderstanding

of mental health because we see it as so separate to physical health we sort of base the whole health care system and everything else on this divide between mental and physical health i think as soon as you see mental health as a health issue you understand it like physical health we understand physical health is dependent on what we eat how we live how we sleep everything else um whereas with mental health things that affect our mental health we don't take that seriously for instance if someone is becoming ill and stressed out because of gcses or their a levels um people think oh well that's good for them a bit of stress you know it doesn't matter

whereas if it was literally affecting visibly their physical health no no one would think, oh, it's worth my child smoking 20 cigarettes a day to get an AA level. But we do all sorts of kind of think, oh, it's worth having that bit of stress and maybe risking anxiety disorders because of it. So I think everything would become a lot clearer if we understood mental health is real. It's a real health issue. It's integrated with physical health. It's affected integrated with physical health it's affected as with physical health by the outside world and how we live and then maybe one day um social media companies news companies and stuff will have to factor that in and there'll be a lot of pressure on them to sort of you know as they were with sort of fast food companies or tobacco companies or

whatever to understand it as a health issue yeah and because your brain does control so much of your health there's been this fascinating study that's just come out they did this placebo study it was the largest ever placebo study where they said that they had given that all the people had chronic back pains and they gave they said they were giving half of them this new great pill for their back pain and the other half were having a placebo but they gave everyone the placebo but still 45 percent of people in the study said that after a month that their back pain was infinitely better and they couldn't believe the transformation that they had had and it was just placebo and then it was actually even then when they knew it was a placebo it was still good for them to keep taking the and it just ground up rice pill

it was still good for them to keep taking it and it shows the power of the brain on the body it's the most powerful most needed and even even if and it's totally wrong but even if you thought mental health was just to do with your brain your brain is a physical thing your thought processes and your brain is obviously physical thing dependent on the rest of your body and yeah about, about back pain, if you've got a back pain to do with stress, like some people do, is that a physical or a mental problem? I've got tinnitus, I've got ringing in my ears. That's physical and mental. There's so many things.

You can hallucinate with a fever. You can be depressed because of a diagnosis. So, you know, the divide between... I have, I mean, not in a boasty way at all i've been incredibly fortunate that i've always just been a really happy person and um i feel so incredibly fortunate for that and i last year i'm slightly jealous i am so jealous imagine living with her because i am not that way but last year when my mum got really ill she had a big seizure last may and her um she had a surgery um and we had the first scan

was in september and that was the real for me the real big moment on if the tumor had come back there's probably not much more that we could do because she had a very aggressive high grade brain cancer and but if it hadn't come back and after she had had um surgery and done radio and chemo then maybe we had a chance and and i was in exceptionally exceptionally close to my mom um and in september the scan came back and the tumor had come back and work was super super stressful at the time and work was super, super stressful at the time and everything was just crazy. And, you know, I've thought I had real resilience and I could just kind of get on with it

and I could feel the physical senses of the stress that I was being caused and the grief that I was feeling and the hopelessness because I couldn't help mum. But I thought that, you know, I would just be able to, I'll be fine to get through it. And our office is in Soho, central London. I was walking from our office to go pick something up at lunchtime and i was walking i got halfway there and i literally suddenly it felt like the whole pavement was

moving was moving i couldn't stand up and i um i was like oh you know maybe it's just a sugar low or something i hadn't had any breakfast and called ella and i said you know i think something's funny's going on and i was saying to hospital i was violently sick i uh couldn't stand up i could literally could not stand up couldn't really speak and um the next three days they thought i'd had this attack they thought i could lose my hearing over time as a result and it was my first time of really really really feeling the effect of what mental health could do to you physically. And being in that dark place of having absolutely no understanding what's happened. We had basically been working for two years straight and had a break.

And the doctor said, like, you need to go and you need to stop. And we went away on holiday to Greece for a week afterwards and did stop and put everything away. And I've been absolutely fine and haven't had any symptoms since. But it was the first time I got a real insight into just the power of what stress and grief can do to you and how it just completely takes you over. And the only way to do something about it is not to think that you can just keep going but to actually stop and to really start to create the tools the processes the means to do something about it and the thing that i'm so happy about is i think particularly for men it's been mental health has been such an issue for so long where it's something you just had to get on with and now there is so much more conversation and an openness where it's almost a manly thing to talk about it

and to to get it out and i think that that is such an enormously positive change and something i'm so such a huge supporter of um and i think as much awareness we can bring to this the the better no absolutely well said um yeah i i think if people understood that if people understood that, if people understood how physical this stuff is, how it can happen to absolutely anybody, however you define your personality type, I think if you understood it like a kind of weight where we all have to carry, you know, and there's no one on earth who thinks

that they could lift up any physical weight. You know, we can't lift up five tons yet we all sort of think or a lot of us like to think that we can cope with anything but there comes an emotional weight which is just sort of too much and then we sort of buckle under it and that's everyone and you never know what that's what that snapping point is. And ultimately, I know we talked about, and you gave great examples of the solutions for you. For me, it was just coming back to, one, a complete sense of presence. And I have no idea.

At that point, we knew that mum wasn't going to live a very long life. We were starting to give hope by other doctors that she may be able to live longer than we had thought she would under just the standard process of care. But, one, the only thing that made it better was not to think do we have three months do we have six months do we have a year two years it was just all we have to is today and so i'm just gonna be super super present and enjoy absolutely every single day with her and then the other thing was just gratitude and it was for me it was just i think i've always been and and i think it was the reason that i it was just, I think I've always been,

and I think it was the reason that I've managed to be a happy person throughout my life. So I've always had a focus on what I'm grateful for. And I definitely look at the world as glass half full. But it was just a sense of no matter what happens, I am so insanely grateful to have had this person as my mom and that she will carry me and nurture me and has been my compass and my mentor throughout my life and is to have had that for 34 years and whether it's going to be for 34 years of my life or 35 36 37 years of my life just to be so so so so grateful for that the only time when i would really get to and be in a place where I found it just completely all-encompassing

and too difficult was when I got outside of presence or I got outside of gratitude and just having a focus on both of those things and coming back to that central place on that was the thing that always got me through it's amazing you had that awareness though to actually be able to sort of know um that's what you needed to do I think sometimes we're just a bit harsh on ourselves. I've also got a great wife, I must say, who is absolutely incredible. And I think that having someone to really, really support you is invaluable. And I think for men in particular, you know, we've got so much rubbish inside us. However well brought up we were,

or however sort of open-minded and liberal our parents were, it's just sort of somehow socially ingrained into us that there's something fundamentally difficult about asking for help or admitting vulnerability. And I mean, I was like... But you wouldn't break your leg and be like, oh, it's fine, I'm just going to get up. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.

You're going to go on a run. Yeah, I'm going to go on a run. I'll just run it off. But people like, you know, there's something fundamental about mental stuff, isn't there? I think people like to believe that they're in total. We all kind of know we're not in total control of our bodies, but we like to believe we're in total control of our minds. I think it's almost like, I know when I, so when I got physically ill, to start with, it was a physical illness.

And then as I started to feel kind of captive by the physical illness and that the physical illness wasn't shifting, my mental health got really bad. It had never been brilliant. It's always been something that's kind of been on and off. I know I have to kind of take care of my mind every day. I know I have tendencies to get anxious and overly worried and things, but it got very bad. And I remember my dad said to me, he said, you are depressed. I said, I'm not depressed. I'm absolutely not depressed. And I just wouldn't, I wouldn't reconcile it. It was almost like it was okay to say my physical body was weak, but to say that my mind was weak.

It was like a judgment on yourself. Exactly. It was like, you're not kind kind of good and it was only realizing how much my mum was being affected by it that made me care kind of doing some there was some meds I took that really affected my mind which which didn't help but there were you know there were some moments where I just really remember like how much I just really didn't care to to kind of exist anymore but how much I just for any help on that side of things how much I wouldn't own the label and it's taken me such a long time yeah to accept how dark I got but also to accept the fact that I don't have for whatever reason however the brain works I don't have probably the

best mental health disposition I don't feel as balanced as you do every day and therefore I've got to work on it and there's nothing wrong with that there's nothing wrong with that and also it's like um all illnesses or conditions or any health thing um it's something we experience it's not something we are and that was the key thing for me to get because i when i used to be called you know given labels like panic disorder generalized anxiety disorder depression i took them as insults. Yeah. I thought, I'm not that.

And let them define you. Don't say that about me. Dare you. No. But, yeah, and it was totally accurate labels and descriptions, but it didn't change me. It might have dominated my life during those things, you know, as a asthma

attack would dominate you if you've got asthma but it you're not asthma you're not arthritis exactly um and you're not depression um but it's very hard in the that initial not to be defined not to be defined by it and to have that life perspective and the biggest cliche in the world about time healing there's some truth in it when it comes to have that life perspective. And the biggest cliche in the world about time healing, there's some truth in it when it comes to anxiety and depression and things like that, because anxiety and depression gives you so much stuff in your mind that isn't true.

I was convinced I'd be dead at the age of 25 at my own hand. I was convinced my relationships would end, that everything bad would happen. And obviously in life, bad things happen. We lose people we love, this, you know, this, that and the other. But not the pessimistic, intense bleakness that depression gives you. That's not an accurate worldview. And that can only be disproved by time. So it's very hard when someone's in a very dark or suicidal place to get that message into their head. And with Reasons to Stay Alive, that's what I was trying

to do. I was trying to send them them message in a bottle back through time and so do you think kind of um conversation and openness around this is the way forward because it seems in taking your own you know very challenging and personal experiences and opening them up to the world that you know which is in a way a little bit what we've done with Delicious Yellow. And to me, I never realized the power of that. It was an accidental understanding when I was so embarrassed of my physical illness, that I didn't talk to anyone. And that had such a negative impact on my mental health. Because I didn't want to I was so I defined myself by I and therefore define myself as weird as different different, as alien, as not interesting, as a freak, as all the rest of it. And therefore thought no one would like me. And then when I started

talking about it, and other people said, well, do you know what, I've been through this, or I've been through that, and you realize you are not the only person dealing with this, actually, it's quite normal. And for me, it was the most reassuring thing I'd ever done. And I think had a huge and profound impact is on opening up to other people yeah I mean I was so scared about opening up and um I I think I wrote 10 books before that because I was sort of like building up to doing it and the reason still I was the first but I was asked by a friend to write and I don't know if I would have dared do it without that prompt um but once you do it once you cross the threshold you think what was i

worried about you know the reaction is so generally supportive yes there's a bit of ignorance here or there but generally it's warm and supportive and also it has that contagious effect where you suddenly feel less alone because other people are telling you their sort of survival stories and things that they've overcome and that that's very sort of nourishing and it's very good because when i first became ill the only person people you ever heard or i ever heard about with mental health problems were people who ended their life because of them and actually having the conversation makes you realize that that's the abnormal end point most people have some kind of mental struggle at some point in their life they survive with it and they you know sometimes even you know the cloud has that silver lining and there is light

at the end of the tunnel and people actually um have better things because of it you know so much good has i don't mean career stuff i mean life stuff so much good has come out of my experience of mental illness which doesn't take away from the absolute life-threatening pain of that mental illness, but I kind of wouldn't change it, even though I know I will have depression and anxiety again. So, Matt, thank you so, so much. This has honestly been incredibly inspiring and eye-opening, and I hope it's been really useful for for everyone listening

to and so something we do with all of our guests is we finish off the episode by asking them a mantra or a practice a routine that they do every day that that really helps them yeah well I mean my dad's a runner and the first sort of thing I did, that I actively did, was get outside and go running. It didn't work at first, it took a while. But I think one of the things that helped me about that was in panic disorder, a lot of the symptoms of panic disorder are also symptoms of running. But you know why you're breathless with running, you know why your heart's racing. So it was a way of sort of having a safe space.

And I sort of balance it now with yoga. But I still like getting outside running because you're not checking your phone while you're running and you're outside. And yeah, it's really not realistic to think we can disconnect for an entire day. As you say, like we live with this technology and there are brilliant things about it. But can you find just a minute every day to quieten your mind and disconnect yeah and one one tiny virtuous thing i've done um which helps with my sort of a relationship with social media is i don't charge my phone by my bed anymore so i have to charge it in the kitchen i like that and just having that sort of like having to get out of bed having breakfast before I'm scrolling through Instagram

or whatever um helps a little bit and also helps my sleep um you know because I think it's like ice cream you wouldn't want to tell someone that they could never eat ice cream again but we'd all know that if we're eating ice cream for six hours a day in bed on a Saturday non-stop that would have health consequences but if we're if our kind of take-home of today is trying to find a way to be present and trying to find a way to accept where you are today and be very, very grateful for that, then that taps into it, doesn't it? Because it would mean every day that you start the day,

you can take a minute to be present. This is where I am. I'm very happy and lucky to be where I am today. This is what I'm excited about today. And then you can open yourself up to the rest of the world, what's happening elsewhere in other people's lives, having already taken stock of your life.

I know this sounds so cheesy, but I'm a great believer. When I had my second most serious bout of depression in my life a few years after my breakdown, and I was living in New Yorkshire, there wasn't much light pollution. And I used to sort of go out at night,

taking the bins out or whatever I was doing. used to sort of go out at night taking the bins out or whatever i was doing and just sort of looking up and looking at stars just made you feel so happily small in time and space and you know to remind you know because we get so wrapped up in ourselves and not not that's not a judgment. We all do. And that's what mental illness is. You're literally wrapped up in yourself. And to sort of look at the sky and to contemplate the cosmos and the universe

and all of that is quite calming. Well, it feels like a pretty perfect closing note. So, Matt, thank you for coming today. Thanks, guys. Honestly, that was amazing. Thank you. Thank you. And if you have any feedback on this episode

we would love to hear it so please do review it please do rate it and share any of that feedback with us and otherwise i hope you can tune in for our next episode and definitely subscribe um there'll be a new episode coming out for you every tuesday thanks so much everyone Thank you. Ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n dot com.