‘The world is having a panic attack,’ says Matt Haig in his new book Notes On A Nervous Planet – and he should know. Aged 24, Haig had a breakdown on Ibiza, tried to throw himself off a cliff and then suffered three years of terrifying panic and anxiety.
‘I divide my life into two: before and after the breakdown,’ says Haig, now 42, when we meet at his home in Brighton. ‘It’s horrible to say you needed to have a nervous breakdown, but I needed something to slap me around the face before I realised I wasn’t very in tune with myself.’
Haig grew up in Newark-on-Trent, the child of teachers. School was an intimidating place and the library was a refuge, but he did not begin to write seriously until after his breakdown. He has published 13 novels, including How To Stop Time, which is being made into a film with Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role. But it was the non-fiction Reasons To Stay Alive that propelled Haig into the big time. The 2015 memoir of his breakdown topped the bestseller charts and has sold more than 300,000 copies. It’s full of empathy and wise advice. ‘Be gentle with yourself. Work less. Sleep more,’ he writes. ‘If someone loves you, let them. Believe in that love. Live for them, even when you feel there is no point.’
Matt Haig has published 13 novels, including How To Stop Time, which is being made into a film with Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role
The Rev Richard Coles has said the book should be available ‘on prescription’. Stephen Fry and Graham Norton are among Haig’s 215,000 followers on Twitter, where he is very active. But ironically, the sudden success of Reasons To Stay Alive threw him into turmoil.
‘I was ill-prepared for it. I’m not a doctor or a Samaritan, but suddenly I became a spokesperson for depression and anxiety, which itself was anxiety-inducing. I fell into a month of proper Anxiety with a capital A, where I could hardly leave the house. At the same time, I was getting all these emails saying, “Thank you, you’ve helped me so much.” On one level it was lovely, but I was also feeling like a fool.’
Everywhere he went, people wanted to tell him their stories. ‘This 60-something guy came up to me and I was the first person he’d ever told that he had depression. He’d had it for 40 years. And I was like, “Why am I the first one? You should really speak to a GP.” ’
He has learned to refer people on and not to carry all their problems in his head. And his experience has also confirmed what he already knew: that success and the money that comes with it are no kind of antidotes.
‘The world is having a panic attack,’ says Matt Haig in his new book Notes On A Nervous Planet – and he should know
‘For people who’ve experienced life-threatening versions of depression and anxiety, you could be living in Buckingham Palace, it makes no difference. You’d swap that moment to be a supermarket checkout person in full health, not living in a total moment of pain,’ he insists. ‘Money may offer a few more routes to getting better, but I wonder how many celebrities we need to see having very public breakdowns, or how many suicides, before we realise that fame and money offer no salvation?’
Nevertheless, the extra cash has enabled him to buy the family home his wife Andrea has just decorated, all in white. ‘That’s good for mental health,’ he says, as she arrives with their young children Lucas and Pearl, who are home-schooled.
Notes On A Nervous Planet is a fascinating look at the link between anxiety and the world we live in, exploring how technology and social media affects our sleep and health, both physical and mental. ‘Our brains haven’t really changed in 50,000 years. We’re genetically the same people. And yet the way we live is so fundamentally different.’
We live in a world of artificial light, ruled by clocks, out of sync with our natural rhythms, falling asleep bathed in the blue light of our smartphones, he says. Meanwhile, social-media corporations want us to believe they are our best friends. ‘Smoking is a very good analogy,’ says Haig. ‘There is a parallel between the way the big tobacco companies acted then and the Silicon Valley companies now. They try everything to look like they’re the good guys, while at the same time, our health gets worse. But I think it will take almost the same amount of time before we’re as fully aware about this as we are now about cigarettes.’
Haig’s solutions include turning off our screens every now and then and getting outside to do things that connect us with nature and other people. ‘We might have to be brave enough to switch the screens off in order to switch ourselves back on. To disconnect in order to reconnect.’
Which would sound pious if Haig were not one of our warmest, wittiest and wisest writers – who admits he loves online life as much as the rest of us. ‘Enjoy the internet. Don’t use it when you aren’t enjoying it,’ he says in his new book, before admitting that he just can’t stop checking Twitter. ‘Nothing has ever sounded so easy and been so hard.’
‘Notes On A Nervous Planet’ by Matt Haig is published by Cannongate, £12.99, on July 5