Author Matt Haig on switching off: ‘I was crumbling under a tech overload… So I disconnected’

I was stressed out. I was walking around in circles, staring at my phone, trying to win an argument on Twitter. And my wife Andrea was  looking at me. Or I think Andrea was looking at me. It was hard to tell, as I was looking at my phone. ‘What’s up?’ she asked, in the kind of despairing voice that develops with marriage. Or marriage to me. ‘Nothing,’ I replied. ‘You haven’t looked up from your phone in over an hour. You’re just walking around, banging into furniture.’

My heart was racing. There was a tightness in my chest. Fight or flight. I felt cornered and threatened by someone who lived over 8,000 miles away from me and who I would never meet, but who was still managing to ruin my weekend. ‘I’m just getting back to something,’ I told Andrea. ‘Matt, get off there.’ But I couldn’t. ‘I just…’

The thing with mental turmoil is that so many of the things that make you feel better in the short term make you feel worse in the long term. You distract yourself, when what you really need is to know yourself.

An hour later, in the car, Andrea glanced at me in the passenger seat. I wasn’t on my phone, but I had a tight hold of it, for security, like a nun clutching her rosary. ‘Matt, are you OK?’ she asked. ‘You look lost. You look like you used to look, when...’ She stopped herself saying ‘when you had depression’, but I knew what she meant. And besides, I could feel anxiety and depression around me. Not actually there, but close. The memory of it something I could almost touch in the stifling air of the car. ‘I’m fine,’ I lied. Within a week I was lying on my sofa, falling into my 11th bout of anxiety.

Anxiety – proper, capital A anxiety – had been a part of my life since I was 24, in 1999, when I experienced a breakdown – or, to be more medically precise, a descent into panic disorder and serious depression that nearly cost me my life. The road to recovery for me, as I wrote in my 2015 memoir Reasons to Stay Alive, was not straightforward. The drug I was prescribed, diazepam, wasn’t the right one, and I ended up getting worse before  I got better. At my lowest point, I nearly threw myself off a cliff. The panic and depression eventually lifted, but at various points over the years  I would have bouts of anxiety, sometimes fused with depression, and it had been less than four months since my last dip.

I was scared. Even though this wasn’t in the same league as the breakdown in 1999, the bouts were becoming closer and closer. I was worried where I was heading. It seemed there was no upper limit to despair. I tried to distract myself out of it. However, I knew from past experience alcohol was off limits. So I did the things that had helped before to climb out of a hole. The things I forget to do in day-to-day life. I was careful about what I ate. I did yoga. I tried to meditate. I lay on the floor and placed my hand on my stomach and inhaled deeply – in, out, in, out – and noticed the stuttery rhythm of my breath. But everything was difficult. Even choosing what to wear in the morning could make me cry. It didn’t matter that I had felt like this before. A sore throat doesn’t become less sore simply because you’ve felt it before.

I tried to read, but found it hard to concentrate. I tried to get on top of my work by replying to all my emails. I woke up and clasped my phone, and prayed that whatever I could find there could take me out of myself. But it didn’t work. I began to feel worse. And many of the ‘distractions’ were doing nothing but driving me further to distraction.

When trying to express what a panic attack feels like it’s easy to talk about the obvious symptoms: the racing thoughts, the palpitations, the tightness of the chest, the breathlessness, the nausea, the tingling sensations inside your skull or your arms and legs. But there is another more complicated symptom I used to get. One which I have come to realise is at the heart of what my panic attacks have always been about. It is the one called, tellingly, derealisation.

Within a feeling of derealisation, I still knew I was me. I just didn’t feel I was me. It is a feeling of disintegration. Like a sand sculpture crumbling away. And there is a paradox about this sensation. Because it feels like both an extreme intensity of self and a nothingness of self. A feeling of no return, as if you have suddenly lost something that you didn’t know you had to look after, and that the thing you had to look after was you.

Rates of mental illness are rising in the UK and globally. According to figures from the NHS the proportion of people with serious symptoms of common mental health disorders – of which anxiety is the most common of all – has risen from under seven per cent in the 1990s to almost 10 per cent in 2014. There are now over eight million cases of anxiety a year in the UK, according to the Mental Health Foundation. 

When looking at triggers for mental health problems, therapists often identify an intense change in someone’s life as a major factor. Change is frequently related to fear. Moving house, losing a job, getting married, an increase or decrease in income, a death in the family, a diagnosis of a health problem, turning 40, whatever. Sometimes, it doesn’t even matter too much if the change is outwardly a ‘good’ one – having a baby, getting a promotion. The intensity of the change can be a shock to the system.

From the outside, at the time of this latest dip,  I wasn’t in a bad place. I was living a perfectly comfortable existence in Sussex with Andrea and our children, Pearl (then six) and Lucas (then eight). My latest book had been a bestseller and been translated widely and, 10 books into my career, I was feeling financially secure. Whatever the problem was, I realised, it had nothing to do with not having what I wanted. So what if the change I was experiencing wasn’t just a personal one? What happens when whole societies undergo a period of profound change? Slowly,  I began to realise that it might well be to do with my behaviour. To do, in short, with how my mind interacted with the frazzling and depressing pressures of 21st-century existence.

Contemporary sociologists and anthropologists pretty much agree that we are heading deep into a post-industrial society, and that change is happening faster than ever. Chiefly, and most measurably, the change is technological. Yes, there are other social, political, economic and environmental changes, but technology is related to all of them.

At the dawn of this century, world-renowned computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil claimed that ‘we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century – it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate)’. And Kurzweil isn’t some stoned eccentric, overdosing on sci-fi movies. His predictions have a habit of coming true. For instance, back in 1990 he predicted a computer would beat a chess champion by 1998. People laughed. But then, in 1997, the greatest chess player in the world – Garry Kasparov – lost to IBM’s Deep Blue computer.

And just think what has happened in the first two decades of this century. Think how fast normality has shifted. In the year 2000, no one knew what a selfie was. Google did just about exist but it was a long way from becoming a verb. There was no YouTube, no vlogging, no Wikipedia, no WhatsApp, no Snapchat, no Skype, no Spotify,  no Siri, no Facebook, no Twitter, no bitcoin, no gifs, no Netflix, no iPads, no ‘lol’ or ‘ICYMI’, no crying-with-laughter emoji, almost no one had satnav, you generally looked at photographs in albums, and the cloud was only ever a thing which produced rain.

In the early days of my first experience  of panic, the only things I had taken away were booze, cigarettes and strong coffees. Now, though, years later, I realised that a more general overload – not just a vodka and Marlboro Light one – was the main problem. A life overload. And certainly a technology overload.

I would stare at an unanswered email with a feeling of dread, and not be able to answer it. Then, on Twitter, my go-to digital distraction of choice, I noticed my anxiety intensify. Even just passively scrolling my timeline felt like an exposure of a wound. I read news websites and my mind couldn’t take it. The knowledge of so much suffering in the world didn’t help put my pain in perspective. It just made me feel powerless. And pathetic that my invisible woes were so paralysing when there were so many visible woes in the world. My despair intensified. So I decided to do something. I disconnected.

I chose not to look at social media for a few days. I put an auto-response on my emails, too. I stopped watching or reading the news. I didn’t watch TV. I didn’t watch any music videos. Even magazines I avoided. (During my initial breakdown, the bright imagery of magazines always used to linger and clog my mind with feverish racing images as I tried to sleep.) I left my phone downstairs when I went to bed. I tried to get outside more. My bedside table was cluttered with a chaos of wires and technology and books I wasn’t really reading. So I tidied up and took them away, too. In the house, I tried to lie in darkness as much as possible, the way you deal with a migraine. I had always, since I was first ill, understood that getting better involved a kind of life edit. A taking away. As the minimalism advocate Fumio Sasaki puts it: ‘There’s a happiness in having less.’

The only real technology I interacted with during this recent recovery – aside from the car  and the cooker – were yoga videos on YouTube, which I watched with the brightness turned low. The anxiety didn’t miraculously disappear. Unlike my smartphone, there is no ‘slide to power off’ function for anxiety. But I stopped feeling worse. I plateaued. And then after a few days, things began to calm.

The familiar path of recovery arrived sooner rather than later. And abstaining from stimulants – not just alcohol and caffeine, but these other things – was part of the process. I began, in short, to feel free again.

During this time, my mum had to have a major operation. She had open heart surgery to remove and replace a damaged aortic valve. The operation went well, and she recovered, but her week in intensive care was a bit of a rollercoaster, with doctors and nurses needing to keep a close eye on the levels of oxygen in her blood, and it made me painfully aware of the things that matter, and how easy it sometimes is for my priorities to be skewed. I didn’t need to waste mental space worrying about angry strangers on the internet, or self-imposed deadlines that – in the scheme of things – didn’t matter.

Andrea and I went up and stayed in a hotel near the hospital. I sat by her bedside with my dad as Mum slid in and out of sleep. I helped spoon-feed her hospital meals and brought in carrier bags full of shop-bought smoothies, and the occasional newspaper for Dad. My worry about Mum stripped everything else away. Even world news seemed like a background irrelevance when you were sitting in an intensive care unit hearing the wails of grief coming from beyond a thin hospital curtain as the patient in the next bed passes away.

Intensive care units are bleak places sometimes, but those sterile rooms full of people perched between life and death can also be hopeful ones. And the nurses and doctors were an inspiration. It’s just a shame, I suppose, that it takes such major events in our lives, or in the lives of the people we love, for perspective to arrive. Imagine if we could keep hold of that perspective. If we could always have our priorities right, even during the healthy times.

Imagine if we could always think of our loved ones the way we think of them when they are in a critical condition. If we could always keep that love – love that is always there – close to the surface. Imagine if we could keep the kindness and gratitude towards life itself.

I am trying now, when my life gets too packed with unnecessary stressful junk, to remember that room in the hospital. Where patients were thankful just to look at the view out of a window. Some sunshine and sycamore trees. And where life, on its own, was everything.

Abridged extract from ​Notes on a ​​Nervous Planet by Matt Haig, out 5 July (Canongate, £12.99). Matt begins his UK tour, discussing Notes on a Nervous Planet, at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on 3 July