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Name: Notes on a Nervous Planet
Rating: 4.5 (156 reviews)
Author: Matt Haig

Matt Haig

Build your very own twenty-first-century survival kit

4.5 (156 Bewertungen)

21 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig is a thought-provoking book that explores our modern world's impact on our mental health. It offers practical tips to deal with anxiety, stress, and information overload, urging readers to cherish their mental well-being in today's hectic world.

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Mentale Gesundheit Zufriedenheit

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Notes on a Nervous Planet
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What’s in it for me? Build your very own twenty-first-century survival kit.

Have you ever gotten into an argument online that left you in a red-hot rage? Do you repeatedly pick up your phone to check your notifications, seconds after you already checked? Do you feel the urge to look at your phone right now?

Instant-communication technology rules our modern life and seems designed to stress us out. That’s because news channels, social-media companies and advertisers know that the most effective way to keep us clicking, sharing and consuming is to keep us attached and anxious. From climate change to fake news to thigh gaps, it seems there’s never been more to worry about.

As a result, stress, depression, anxiety, eating disorders and other mental illnesses have been on the rise across the globe. Is it possible to exist in a world of instant communication and 24-hour news cycles without losing our minds? How can we stay happy and healthy in this chaotic digital landscape? You’ll find the answers to these questions, among others, in these blinks.

Along the way, you’ll also discover

how companies profit from your unhappiness;
why aging is nothing to worry about; and
which small habits can improve your relationship with your phone.

The world is faster and messier than ever, and it’s making us sick.

The modern world is a great place to live. There is less extreme poverty, hunger and violence than ever, and life expectancy is rising. But even though people live longer, more prosperous lives, they are also much more likely to be stressed, anxious and depressed. In industrialized nations all over the world, mental illness is on the rise.

Perhaps one reason for this is all the environmental, political and cultural changes we are experiencing at the moment. Change makes people nervous. Just think about the ice caps melting, robots taking our jobs or fake news stealing elections, and the world can start to seem like a pretty scary place.

Of all these transformations, none is happening as rapidly as technological change. According to Moore’s Law, the processing power of computers doubles every few years. In the 1960s, when this observation was first made, a simple mathematical computer was the size of a car. Today you can carry the whole internet around in your pocket.

This rapid technological progress may be at the root of many other changes, influencing everything from political elections to our body image. Social media, for example, has quickly become a huge part of our lives, with major impacts on how we relate to each other. Think about it – just a handful of years ago, no one knew what a selfie or a tweet was. Now we are constantly packaging, presenting and rating ourselves on social platforms.

But while technology is overhauled every few months, humans haven’t changed in thousands of years. No matter how many blue screens light up our homes at night, we still operate on the same internal clock as our ancestors did. We still need a healthy amount of sunlight, sleep and real-life social interaction. So, when we’re holed up inside for 14-hour workdays, emails keep us up at night and social media replaces human interaction, we deprive our bodies and minds of basic human needs. Like the author, you probably know from experience that too much technology, and social media, in particular, can exacerbate feelings of stress, anxiety and depression.

It’s high time we examine how our modern life intersects with mental health and find ways to protect ourselves from the negative effects of ever-faster technological change.

To stay sane in a messy world, we need to cut out the overwhelming choice that comes with modern life.

If you had a book club in sixteenth-century England, chances are you would eventually run out of things to read. The British Library estimates that during that time, only 40 books were published per year. In contrast, in 2016 the number of books in existence was estimated at 134,021,533. It can be depressing to realize that no matter how much of a bookworm you are, you will only ever read a fraction of all the titles in circulation.

Such an excess of choice is present in almost every aspect of modern life. From books to face creams to cereal brands, there is simply too much to choose from. There’s also way too much information. Through the internet, we can access a huge amount of data on everything, from recipes to personal opinions to historical events. This combination of excess and access leaves us with cluttered lives and cluttered brains. We are totally overstimulated, but constantly feel like we’re missing out. No wonder we often feel overwhelmed, anxious and depressed.

Don’t be afraid to unplug – you won’t miss what you miss.

Ever since we started carrying the internet in our pocket, it has taken over our lives. Over half the people on the planet are now connected. Not only are there more people logged on, we’re also spending more and more time online.

In some ways, the spread of the internet is a great thing. We can access tons of information, connect with like-minded people and livestream what is happening on the other side of the globe. But this hyper-connectedness has downsides, too. How many people convince themselves they have a fatal illness by Googling their symptoms? Or ruined their mood by scrolling through an ex-partner’s Instagram profile? How many times have we been haunted by the nonstop coverage of a mass shooting?

Work less, take time for yourself and get enough sleep.

Time – especially the feeling of not having enough of it – is one of the major stressors of modern life. With life-expectancy doubling over the past century, and time-saving technology at our disposal, we should have more of it than ever. The problem is that we also have more of everything else. Specifically, we have more work.

Work is great when it gives us purpose. But when it’s characterized by the constant pressure to do more and be better, it corrodes our mental and physical health. The modern work culture of constant assessment and ever-higher aspirations, combined with widespread work-place bullying and sexism, is toxic. In the form of stroke, heart attack and higher suicide risk, work stress can be fatal.

Remember that no one worries about your looks but you.

If the number of beauty products, health food items and personal trainers are any indication of how good-looking a society is, we’ve never looked better. There are tons of products and services meant to make us younger, prettier and skinnier. And yet, we feel worse about our looks than ever. In Japan, 38 percent of people report being seriously unhappy with their appearance. In the United Kingdom, hospitalizations from eating disorders have almost doubled in the past decade.

Why are we so concerned with our looks? A big part of the problem is overexposure to unrealistic beauty standards on social media. We are bombarded with more images of beautiful people than ever before. Apps and filters make the divide between what we think we should look like and what we actually look like even greater.

Awareness is the first step toward changing your behavior.

Do you know how much time you spend on social media in a day? If you don’t, that time is unlikely to decrease. Being mindful of what you do and how it makes you feel is the first step toward shifting your behavior for the better.

Imagine, for example, that we could weigh stress. Let’s call this unit of measurement a psychogram. All the stressful occurrences in your day weigh different amounts of psychograms. A call from your bank is 70 psychograms. A full email inbox is 250 psychograms. The psychograms for each activity differ depending on your personality, and so does the total number of psychograms you can handle in a day. In contrast, minus psychograms measure the things that soothe and lighten the stress, such as doing yoga or walking the dog.

Instead of always wanting more, try to be happy with what you have.

Here’s a big secret of consumerism – happiness is bad for business. A customer who is content with what she already has isn’t a customer at all. That’s why advertising is all about making us feel that we lack something that can be gained with the purchase of a product.

Modern marketing experts even have an acronym for the mental state of the ideal consumer. That is, FUD – “fear, uncertainty, doubt.”

As a society, we need to get better at addressing mental-health issues.

We’ve considered what you can do as an individual to protect yourself from the stresses of modern life. Let’s look at what we can do together, as a society, to make the world a less stressful place for everyone. How can we improve the connection between our culture and our mental health?

As on the individual level, the first step toward change is to become aware of the problem. Today, more and more people are openly talking about their mental-health struggles. But mental illness is still stigmatized. When we talk about a celebrity “confessing” to anxiety, or call someone “brave” for speaking about their depression, we perpetuate the idea that mental illness is something that should be hidden. This atmosphere of fear and shame can prevent people from getting the care they need.

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Worum geht es in Notes on a Nervous Planet?

Notes on a Nervous Planet (2018) is a compassionate guide on how to stay happy and healthy in the messy, modern world. Drawing on personal experience, author Matt Haig explores how technology can exacerbate stress, depression and anxiety, and presents ways to guard against this.

Wer Notes on a Nervous Planet lesen sollte

People suffering from anxiety, depression and panic disorder
Anyone who just can’t put their phone down
Parents, educators and coaches interested in responsible technology use

Über den Autor

Matt Haig is a British journalist and author who has written over 20 fiction and non-fiction books for both children and adults. His memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive, details his struggle with depression and was a number-one Sunday Times best-seller in the United Kingdom. His children’s books have been translated into over 25 languages.

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