Notes on a nervous planet - Matt Haig Flashcards
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom” - Søren Kierkegaard
“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears” - Michel de Montaigne
There is no shame in not watching news.
There is no shame in not going on Twitter.
There is no shame in disconnecting.
“We seldom realise that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually are own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society” - Alan Watts
According to Moore’s Law, processing power for computers doubles every few years.
In the year 2000, no one knew what a selfie was. Google was not a verb. There was no YouTube, no blogging, no Wikipedia, no WhatsApp, no Snapchat, no Skype, no Spotify, no Siri, no Facebook, no Netflix and the cloud only produced rain.
“We now expect more from technology and less from each other”
The socialisation of media has rapidly taken over our lives. We are constantly presenting and packaging ourselves, like potatoes pretending to be crisps.
Leading scientists believe that we are now leaving the Holocene epoch - one marked by 12,000 years of stable climate change since the last Ice Age and entering something else: the Anthropocene age or ‘new age of man’.
The whole of consumerism is based on us wanting the next thing rather than the present thing we already have. This is an almost perfect recipe for unhappiness.
We are not encouraged to live in the present. We are trained to live somewhere else: the future.
All through our education we are being taught a kind of reverse mindfulness. A kind of Future Studies where we are being taught to think go a time different to the time we are in. Exam time. Job time. When-we-are-grown-up time.
“Forever – is composed of Nows” - Emily Dickinson
The future isn’t real. The future is abstract. The now is all we know. One now after another now. The now is where we must live. There are billions of different versions of older you. There is one version of present you. Focus on that.
Regrets of the Dying - Bronnie Ware (palliative care nurse)
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits.
Remember:
Feeling you have no time does not mean you have no time
Feeling anxious doesn’t mean you need to be anxious
Neurobiologists have identified ‘mirroring’ as one of the neural routes activated in the brains of primates during interaction with others.
You see it every day on social media: people arguing with each other, entrenching each other’s opposing view, yet also mirroring each other’s emotional state. Political opposition but emotional mirroring.
Practice social media abstinence.
You are the only person in the world to have worried about your face.
Never let one rushed opinion define a whole human being.
“If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.” Carl Sagan
Do not seek to define yourself against. Define what you are for.
William Shakespeare has a mediocre 3.7 average on Goodreads.
Be a mystery, not a demographic.
There is a permanent gap between the signifier and the thing signified.
“Facebook is where everyone lies to their friends. Twitter is where they tell the truth to strangers”
We all know we tend to be more sad and worried and irritable and lethargic when we haven’t slept. Sleep is essential for our wellbeing. When we don’t sleep well, it can have serious consequences on our physical and mental state.
‘There does not seem to be one major organ within the body, that isn’t optimally enhanced by sleep. The physical and mental impairments caused by one night of bad sleep dwarf those caused by an equivalent absence of food or exercise.’
Sleep has traditionally been an enemy of consumerism.
‘Multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient. It creates a dopamine-addiction cycle, rewarding the brain for losing focus. It can also increase stress and lower IQ. Instead of reaping the big rewards from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks’. - Daniel Levitin
Accept uncertainty - the temptation to check your phone is down to uncertainty.
Technology contributes to a state of ‘continuous partial attention’. The mere presence of your smartphone can reduce ‘cognitive capacity’.
We do not have bodies. We are bodies. The idea of ‘mental health’ being separate to our physical self is as outdated as Descartes’ dodgy wig.
There is an intelligence to movement/sport.
The line we draw between minds and bodies makes no sense the more we stare at it.
Imagine if we could come up with a way to measure psychological weight as we each feel it. Let’s call this imaginary unit a psychogram. Wouldn’t that help people realise the reality of stress?
pg = pscyhograms
Your tweet that no one likes = 98pg
Guilt from not going to the gym = 50pg
Walking through a shopping centre = 1,298pg
Arguing with an online troll = 632pg
“The collision between one’s image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are 2 things you can do about it: you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat into the fantasy”
We are being sold unhappiness, because unhappiness is where the money is. Happiness is not good for the economy.
Few fashion magazines make anyone feel empowered. Most leave you anxiety ridden.
We need to build a kind of immune system of the mind, where we can absorb but not get infected by the world around us.
The model for most of consumer culture is dissatisfaction to temporary solution to increased dissatisfaction.
‘Make no mistake, email, Facebook and Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction.’
If everyone is getting out of bed too early to work 12-hour days in jobs they hate, then why question it?
When normality becomes madness, the only way to find sanity is by daring to be different. Or daring to be the you that exists beyond all the physical clutter and mind debris of modern existence.
“I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work”.
Politicians and business leaders keep the idea of relentless work as a moral virtue. We accept the 5-day working week as if it was a law of nature. We are often made to feel guilty when we aren’t working. We say to ourselves that ‘time is money’ but we forget that money is also luck.
Aim not to get more stuff done. Aim to have less stuff to do.
Don’t think your work matters more than it does. As Bertrand Russell put it: ‘One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.’
Straw Dogs by John Gray brutally explores the idea that human societal progress is a dangerous myth. We are the only animals obsessed with the idea of progress.
For me, reading was the most profound kind of socialising there was. A deep connection to the imagination of another human being. A way to connect without the many filters society normally demands.
Minus psychograms will make you feel lighter e.g. dancing, being surrounded by nature, walking the dog.
The world tries to tell us not to accept ourselves. It makes us want to be richer, prettier, thinner, happier.
‘Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth’ - Alan Watts
‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent’ - Eleanor Roosevelt
See yourself outside market forces. Don’t compete in the game. Resist the guilt of non-doing.
Don’t beat yourself up for being a mess. It’s fine. The universe is a mess. Galaxies are drifting all over the place. You’re just in tune with the cosmos.
One version of multiverse theory states that we create a new universe with every decision we make. You can sometimes enter a better universe simply by not checking your phone for ten minutes.
