Notes on a Nervous Planet Read online

  Naomi Klein coined the term the ‘shock doctrine’ to describe the cynical tactic of systematically using ‘the public’s disorientation following a collective shock’ for corporate or political gain. Oil companies exploiting the shock of war to make inroads into a new country, for instance, or an American president exploiting terrorism to push hard-line anti-immigration measures.

  ‘We don’t go into a state of shock when something big and bad happens,’ she says. ‘It has to be something big and bad that we do not yet understand.’

  And the trouble is that now we have 24-hour news coverage, where events are continuously breaking but rarely absorbed. We are in a world of news, which by its very nature skims the new moment, garnished with headlines and sound bites, rarely giving us a calmer, more reflective understanding of the big picture.

  Shock results in negative but understandable emotions. Fear, sadness, impotence, anger. The temptation to spend our lives tweeting rage at the injustices of the world is a human one, but it isn’t enough. Ultimately, it may simply be adding more wails to the collective wails of shock which aid those in power, or on the political extremes, who might want us distracted.

  When an individual goes through panic disorder, the main response – amid the terror – is to feel cross and utterly fed up. But there comes a point where, in the process of recovery, you have to reach some kind of understanding and acceptance. Not because it isn’t that bad. But precisely because it is that bad.

  I remember once, during depression, staring up at a clear sky of stars. The wonder of the universe.

  At the bottom of the pit, I always had to force myself to find the beauty, the goodness, the love, however hard it was. It was hard to do. But I had to try. Change doesn’t just happen by focusing on the place you want to escape. It happens by focusing on where you want to reach. Boost the good guys, don’t just knock the bad guys. Find the hope that is already here and help it grow.

  Imagine

  IMAGINE IF WE had a day where we called human beings human beings. Not nationalities first. Not the religion they follow. Not British. Not American. Not French. Not German. Not Iranian. Not Chinese. Not Muslim. Not Sikh. Not Christian. Not Asian. Not black. Not white. Not man. Not woman. Not CEO of Coca-Cola. Not gang member. Not mother-of-three. Not historian. Not economist. Not BBC journalist. Not Twitter user. Not consumer. Not Star Trek fan. Not author. Not aged 17. Or 39. Or 83. Not conservative. Not liberal. Change it all to human. The way we see all turtles as turtles. Human, human, human. Make ourselves see what we pretend to know. Remind ourselves that we are an animal united as a species existing on this tender blue speck in space, the only planet that we know of containing life. Bathe in the corny sentimental miracle of that. Define ourselves by the freakish luck of not only being alive, but being aware of that. That we are here, right now, on the most beautiful planet we’ll ever know. A planet where we can breathe and live and fall in love and eat peanut butter on toast and say hello to dogs and dance to music and read Bonjour Tristesse and binge-watch TV dramas and notice the sunlight accentuated by hard shadow on a building and feel the wind and the rain on our tender skin and look after each other and lose ourselves in daydreams and night dreams and dissolve into the sweet mystery of ourselves. A day where we are, essentially, precisely as human as each other.

  Six ways to keep up with the news and not lose your mind

  1.Remember that how you react to the news isn’t just about what the news is, but how you get it. The internet and breaking news channels report news in ways that make us feel disorientated. It is easy to believe things are getting worse, when they might just make us feel worse. The medium isn’t just the message, it’s the emotional intensity of that message.

  2.Limit the amount of times you look at the news. As my Facebook friend Debra Morse recently commented: ‘Remember that in 1973 we typically got our news twice a day: morning paper and evening TV broadcast. And we still got rid of Nixon.’

  3.Realise the world is not as violent as it feels. Many writers on this subject – such as the famed cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker – have pointed out that, despite all its horrors, society is less violent than it used to be. ‘There is definitely still violence,’ says the historian Yuval Noah Harari. ‘I live in the Middle East so I know this perfectly well. But, comparatively, there is less violence than ever before in history. Today more people die from eating too much than from human violence, which is really an amazing achievement.’

  4.Be near animals. Non-human animals are therapeutic for all kinds of reasons. One reason is that they don’t have news. Dogs and cats and goldfish and antelope literally don’t care. The things that are important to us – politics and economics and all of those fluctuating things – are not important to them. And their lives, like ours, still go on. As A.A. Milne wrote in Winnie-the-Pooh: ‘Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That’s the problem.’

  5.Don’t worry about things you can’t control. The news is full of things you can’t do anything about. Do the things you can do stuff about – raise awareness of issues that concern you, give whatever you can to whichever cause you feel passionate about, and also accept the things you can’t do.

  6.Remember, looking at bad news doesn’t mean good news isn’t happening. It’s happening everywhere. It’s happening right now. Around the world. In hospitals, at weddings, in schools and offices and maternity wards, at airport arrival gates, in bedrooms, in inboxes, out in the street, in the kind smile of a stranger. A billion unseen wonders of everyday life.

  In praise of positivity

  THE OLD ME, before I ever became ill, was cynical about positivity, about happy songs and pink sunsets and optimistic words of hope. But when I was ill – when I was in the thick of it – my life depended on abandoning that pessimistic side of myself. Cynicism was a luxury for the non-suicidal. I had to find hope. The thing with feathers. My life depended on it.

  It might seem a stretch to tie psychological healing with social and political healing, but if the personal is political, the psychological is, too. The current political climate seems to be one of division – a division partly fuelled by the internet.

  We need to rediscover our commonality as human beings. How does that happen? Well, an alien invasion would be one way, but we can’t rely on that.

  The problem of politics is the problem of tribes. ‘When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence,’ taught the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti.

  One thing mental illness taught me is that progress is a matter of acceptance. Only by accepting a situation can you change it. You have to learn not to be shocked by the shock. Not to be in a state of panic about the panic. To change what you can change and not get frustrated by what you can’t.

  There is no panacea, or utopia, there is just love and kindness and trying, amid the chaos, to make things better where we can. And to keep our minds wide, wide open in a world that often wants to close them.

  8

  A SMALL SECTION ON SLEEP

  The war on sleep

  BEFORE 1879, WHEN Thomas Edison came up with the first practical incandescent light bulb, all lighting had been fuelled by gas and oil. The light bulb, heavily promoted via the Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company, literally set the world alight. The bulbs were practical – small and cheap and safe – and emitted just the right amount of light, and began to take off in homes and businesses throughout the world.

  Human beings had, finally, conquered the night. The dark – the source of so many of our primal fears – could now be negated at the flick of a switch. And now, as our evenings could stay lighter for longer, people increasingly started going to bed later. This didn’t worry Edison at all. Indeed, he saw it as an unequivocally good thing. In 1914, Edison, by now a living global icon, declared that ‘there is really no reason why men should go to bed at all’. He went further: he actually believed sleep was bad for you, and too much was likely to make you lazy. He believed the
light bulb was a kind of medicine, and that artificial light could cure ‘unhealthy and inefficient’ people.

  Of course, he was wrong. Without sleep we don’t function properly.

  Humans, like birds and sea turtles, have body clocks. They – we – have circadian rhythms. That is to say, our bodies react differently at different times of the day. They have evolved to function differently at daytime and nighttime. In another 150,000 generations humans might evolve and adapt to unnatural light, but right now our bodies and minds are still the same bodies and minds of those humans who existed before Edison patented his light bulb. In other words: we need our sleep.

  And yet we aren’t really getting what we need. The World Health Organization – which has declared a sleep loss epidemic in industrialised nations – recommends we sleep between seven and nine hours a night. But not that many of us do. According to research from the American National Sleep Foundation average American, British and Japanese people all sleep well under seven hours a night while other countries – such as Germany and Canada – hover precariously at the seven-hour mark. And according to more research – this time from Gallup – the average person sleeps for an hour less than they did in 1942.

  However, artificial light isn’t the only contributing factor here. Sleep experts point to things like the way we work nowadays as well as a growth in loneliness and anxiety that increases our desire to stay up chatting or distract ourselves with entertainment in a frantic 24/7 world.

  There are so many incentives to stay awake. So many emails to answer. So many more episodes of our favourite TV show to sit through. So much online shopping to do. Or eBay auctions to monitor. So much news to catch up on. So many social media accounts to update, or concerts to go to, or books to read, or potential dates to chat to, or ambitions to fulfil. So many people – unknown disciples of Edison – wanting us to stay awake.

  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. While some effects of sleeping badly are debatable, there are some on which the medical community have a broad consensus. For instance, according to numerous overlapping studies and sources, not sleeping well:

  –Runs down your immune system

  –Increases your risk of coronary heart disease

  –Increases your risk of stroke

  –Increases your risk of diabetes

  –Increases your risk of having a car accident

  –Is associated with higher rates of breast cancer, colorectal cancer and prostate cancer

  –Impairs your ability to concentrate

  –Interferes with your memory

  –Increases your risk of getting Alzheimer’s

  –Makes weight gain more likely

  –Reduces sex drive

  –Increases levels of the stress hormone cortisol

  –Increases the likelihood of depression

  As University of California ‘sleep scientist’ Matthew Walker writes in his book Why We Sleep: ‘there does not seem to be one major organ within the body, or process within the brain, 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 is essential, and amazing. And yet, sleep has traditionally been an enemy of consumerism. We can’t shop in our sleep. We can’t work or earn or post to Instagram in our sleep. Very few companies – beyond bed manufacturers and duvet sellers and makers of black-out blinds – have actually made money from our sleep. No one has found a way to build a shopping mall that we can enter via our slumber, where advertisers can pay for space in our dreams, where we can spend money while we are unconscious.

  Slowly, sleep is becoming a little more commercialised. Now, there are private sleep clinics and sleep centres where people pay for advice on getting a better sleep routine. There are ‘sleep trackers’, which monitor movement and have been criticised (for instance in a 2018 Guardian article on ‘clean sleeping’) for being unreliable and counterproductive, as they only serve to make people more anxious about sleep.

  But largely, sleep remains a sacred space, away from distraction. Which is why seemingly no one can go to bed early.

  And now, at this later stage of capitalism, sleep has become seen not just as something that slows work down, but as an actual business rival.

  The chief executive of Netflix, Reed Hastings, believes that sleep – not HBO, not Amazon, not any other streaming service – is his company’s main competitor. ‘You know, think about it,’ he said at an industry summit in Los Angeles back in November 2017, cited in Fast Company. ‘When you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night . . . we’re competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.’

  So this is the attitude to sleep: something to be suspicious of because it is a time when we are not plugged in, consuming, paying. And this is also our attitude to time: something that mustn’t be wasted simply by resting, being, sleeping. We are ruled by the clock. By the light bulb. By the glowing smartphone. By the insatiable feeling we are encouraged to have. The feeling of this is never enough. Our happiness is just around the corner. A single purchase, or interaction, or click, away. Waiting, glowing, like the light at the end of a tunnel we can never quite reach.

  The trouble is that we simply aren’t made to live our lives in artificial light. We aren’t made for waking to alarm clocks and falling asleep bathed in the blue light of our smartphone. We live in 24-hour societies but not 24-hour bodies.

  Something has to give.

  How to sleep on a nervous planet

  THERE ARE ALL kinds of pay-for or technological solutions out there. From those sleep-tracking devices to light bulbs free of blue light to hypnotherapy to sleep masks. But many of these consumer products seek to increase our anxiety around sleep.

  In fact, the best ways are simple. The most consistent expert advice includes getting into a routine, avoiding caffeine and nicotine and too much late night alcohol (I can vouch for all this), exercising early in the day, avoiding late large meals, relaxing before bed, and getting some natural daylight.

  Doing ten minutes of (very) light yoga and slow breathing has worked well for me during anxiety patches where sleep has been problematic.

  But one of the most effective solutions, if a little boring, is breathtakingly simple. According to Professor Daniel Forger of the University of Michigan, who led a team of researchers looking at sleeping patterns around the world, we are in the midst of a ‘global sleep crisis’ as society pushes us to stay up later. The answer, as he told the BBC, is not having more lie-ins. It’s going to bed a little earlier, as the later people go to bed, the less sleep they get. Whereas what time we wake up in the morning makes surprisingly little difference. But even the act of going to bed a little earlier might require cultural change. ‘If you look at countries that are really getting less sleep then I’d spend less time worrying about alarm clocks and more about what people are doing at night – are they having big dinners at 22:00 or expected to go back to the office?’

  Another solution is to be disciplined about your phone and laptop use, and try not to be on them in bed, as the blue light negatively affects the sleep hormone melatonin.

  Anyway, I’ve just realised it’s now after midnight as I type these words. I better close my laptop. And I’m going to try to fall asleep without even checking my phone.

  9

  PRIORITIES

  A trip to a homeless shelter

  EVEN WHEN THE world is not overtly terrifying us, the speed and pace and distraction of modern existence can be a kind of mental assault that is hard to identify. Sometimes life just seems too complicated, too dehumanising, and we lose sight of what matters.

  A few months ago I went to a homeless shelter. It was in Kingston upon Thames, an aff
luent London suburb which many might imagine would be unlikely to have a homeless problem.

  I had been invited there to talk about books and mental health. The place – the award-winning Joel Centre – is based around more than just the idea of giving people a bed for the night. Its ethos is ‘Helping People to Believe in Themselves’. A volunteer there told me the idea is that ‘the people here are lacking more than somewhere to sleep, they are lacking belonging. We aim to give them that. The problem is homelessness not houselessness. And when you are homeless you are missing more than just a bedroom.’ He added that working there had made him realise what people ‘really need in life – away from all the crap’.

  So, the people there, alongside a bed and a lockable wardrobe and access to a washing machine and bathroom, also get to sit around a table with other guests and eat a wholesome meal every day. Often the guests help to cook the meal themselves, and they also play an active part in cleaning the shelter and tending the garden and helping in the local community.

  The shelter is theirs. They are a part of it.

  After I spoke about my experience of mental health problems with them I got talking to the man sitting next to me. He was about my age. He looked like he’d been through a lot, mentally and physically, but he was smiling. He said he’d become homeless after his relationship had broken down and he’d fallen into a depression that he’d tried to deny and had then become an alcoholic. He told me that the centre had saved his life. He pointed vaguely to the door and told me that ‘out there’ life didn’t make sense. He got lost in it.

  He found the world dehumanising. Here, though, it was the simple things. ‘Just talking to people, sitting around the table with people, working for stuff you can see.’