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That's $87 in free gifts for first time subscribers, see all details at drinkagone.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More, Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 61 of the podcast with best-selling author and one of the most prominent voices in the mental health arena, Mr. Matt Haake.
And Matt's someone who suffered from depression and anxiety and in this clip he shares his personal journey and explains what has helped him to find optimism. We also explore how modern life is affecting our mental health, and Matt gives some great tips on how we can all improve the way that we feel. Where does your drive to talk about mental health come from? Well, I first became ill or actually recognised I was ill when I was 24 years old.
I had a medical term, but I had a full-blown breakdown led into panic disorder, depression, anxiety, a whole smorgasbord of mental health issues. And I was lucky in that I had a partner I was close to, who I could talk to, and my parents were quite open-minded and liberal on such issues, and I could talk to them. But beyond that, really for over a decade, I didn't talk about it at all, you know, I didn't talk about it to my friends. I'd actually, I ended up losing some friends for a while, not because they were stigmatising me, but because I just wasn't explaining things.
So I would cancel going to the pub or not be able to do things because of depression or anxiety. And I just ridiculously couldn't say that. So I think it's once the floodgates opened and once I was feeling in a better place and had come to terms with who I was and what happened to me, and that it wasn't a judgment on me. It was just an experience that happened.
I wrote about it on the internet, I wrote a blog called Reasons to Stay Live, which eventually after some prompting became a e-book. And yeah, it just felt like a release. It felt like such a nice thing. And all the things I'd been worried about in terms of sharing personal stuff about those sort of feelings.
I didn't feel any kind of stigma. I just felt a sort of warmth and support coming towards me, which made me feel less alone. Yeah. I say he's a doctor, and one of the I've learnt over, you know, almost 20 years I've seen patients now is that often, even if you can't help someone, just listen to them, first of all, makes a big difference.
But then when you tell someone that actually they're not alone, that you've seen other patients just like that this morning or earlier this week, I learnt that patients love it. They just love the fact. Not that someone else is suffering. No.
It's not just them. I think manning up may be one of the most toxic phrases that we've currently got. I don't know. I mean, what do you think?
Yeah, no, totally. And I think manup often just means shut up and it means get on with it. And it essentially means if you don't manup, if you do talk about it, then there's something wrong with you. The toughest times of my life, the times I had to be strongest were actually when I was looking the weakest.
Like the thing I'm most proud of doing in my whole life was walking to the corner shop from my parents' house when I was ill and agrophobic on my own to get a pint of milk and some marmites, which was a distance of less than 500 metres. And that's still, you know, I've travelled the world done various things, had various life experiences and that was still the toughest thing I ever did. So this idea that manning up means always, you know, doing the most heroic action or anything, is fundamentally wrong anyway. You know, because you're going through anxiety doesn't mean that you yourself are a weak person.
Anxiety, to the level I experienced, it actually made me a stronger person because to get over the anxiety I was experiencing and the agrophobia I experienced in my paddock, I had to sort of go through that. So you're having to face that fear continually every day beyond what most people would ever naturally experience, fortunately. So this idea that somehow manning, you know, admitting any illness or even experiencing an illness is the opposite of strength, I think is fundamentally wrong. Yeah.
You have obviously made immense progress yourself, you know, you've learned no doubt a lot about yourself through the things that you've been through and you've very openly shared them in your books, which is incredible. I think very inspiring for a lot of people. How can people learn from your journey, you know, what have you learned on that journey that maybe can inspire others, do you think? I think the simple idea of change, you know, I felt stuck.
I felt literally stuck. I mean, my depression lasted longer than average, you know, I had three years of really being stuck in a place and it's not like after those three years I was totally better. I've had lots of lapses, lots of sort of areas, almost sort of dial somewhere between. But what I didn't believe then, I didn't believe in the possibility of change, I didn't understand the fluctuations.
You have a condition like anxiety and you've always got it to a degree that it's going to change. It's going to shift your relationship to your condition, even if it's a permanent condition, if it's a chronic condition, your relationship to it is something that can change and something that does naturally change over time. You know, the one thing that for me was bigger than depression was time. And even if bad things do happen, you don't know the person you will be when you experience them.
Our minds change, you know, neuroplasticity, all that stuff. Our brain literally changes with experience and what we do and when we age and you will become someone else to who you are at that lowest point. And that, you know, the bottom of the valley, as I say in the book, gives you the worst view, but you know, it can be very hard to get that message in there. Yeah.
What is a nervous planet? Well, nervous in the sense that I think a lot of us are feeling stressed out because of the 21st century pace of living and there's a kind of overloaded culture of everything, which is often kind of paralyzing, but also nervous in the sense that of a nervous system is sort of like we're connected in ways that we've never been connected before. So our emotions and our psychology influence each other and we've got, that's a wider influence than it used to be when we used to live in our hunter-gatherer communities of that most 100 people. Now we can encounter 100 new people before getting out of bed.
We are saturated with everything and it's, you know, it's parallel, I think, a lot of the inverted commas craziness of the world to our own mental states and we're not making that connection. Yeah. Absolutely. There's so much in this book.
No, it's on a nervous planet. You've got the section on time. We need the time we already have. I really loved it.
You finished it off saying we often find ourselves wishing for more hours in the day, but that wouldn't help anything. The problem clearly isn't that we have a shortage of time. It's more that we haven't overloaded everything else. I think that just sums up so beautifully.
Is this something you've been saying with a lot in terms of when you were writing this? Yeah. And you know, something maybe hitting your 40s and having kids grow older, you're aware of a passing of time. But, you know, I think we all say it, don't we?
We all say if only I had the time I'd read more or I'd do this more or I'd travel more. And we're all feeling that absence of time, but in real terms, we've got as much time, if not more than any humans have ever had, and yet so something else is at play. And I think there's two things. One, we've got more literal demands on our time and also we have kind of conditioned ourselves to live somewhere else than the presence.
So, you know, I'm a great fan of the education system. I'm from a family of teachers, but I sometimes think the whole education system is a kind of reverse mindfulness where you're continually thinking about the future. So you're learning not for its own sake, but you're learning for grades or exams for the job at the end of it. You're learning about the university or not, and then you're thinking about the career path you take.
And so, from a young age, we're trained to always have that sort of forward thinking, that forward momentum, and it carries on into the workplace in our careers, and it doesn't encourage, we're not encouraged to just be grateful in the moment for what we have or know how to appreciate what we have. And I feel like, continually, it's always about accumulating something. Now, for instance, my latest technological obsession is my PASA app on my phone, say, I'm many steps up there. Now, it's a good thing to encourage people to walk more, and I'm a great fan of walking more.
But the fact that we turn everything into a number means that we're constantly trying to accumulate. I'm always worried now if I've done my 10,000 steps. And it doesn't matter the quality of those steps where I'm walking, I just want to reach for 10,000 number. And whether it's that income bracket, or whether it's, you know, our grades at school, whether it's a measurement we want our bodies to be, or whatever it is, we're conditioned, I feel to feel like we're not quite enough in the present moment, and we've always got to become the after picture.
We've got to become the next version of ourselves. And it's easy to forget that we're actually, everything we need is really already there, but we just sort of pile too much stuff on it. I mean, sometimes lose ourselves. Yeah, I think this is probably one of the biggest problems in this nervous planet in which we currently living in is that it's never enough.
There's always something else to do. There's always somebody else doing something that's perceived to be better that you think, oh, you know, I will be happy when I do this, and then you achieve it. And you're like, oh, it's not really made much difference to how I feel about myself. It sounds like the ultimate first world problems, but all you do at each successful stage you reach in life is that becomes your new normal.
So you've raised the bar of your own happiness. So you feel like you need to do more. You need to do more. And it becomes, you know, it's a ridiculous thing.
I say it a lot, but I honestly have known more happiness, more sense of gratitude and everything, this side of a line of illness than I ever did before. So it's a very complex picture. I wouldn't want to go and read it for three years of utter hell in panic disorder and deep depression, but at the same point, I wouldn't press that magic button to have not experienced any of that because I'm now in a position because of it, where I can appreciate things more. I understand myself better.
I'm not in a, I was this saying I'm in a place of 100% full mental health, just as I, you know, no one is necessarily 100% full physical health. It's something that I have to sort of monitor and manage and look after and be quite acutely aware of sometimes. But yeah, I'm, I'm a happier person for having known the deep despair and pessimism of, you know, the opposite place. So in some ways it's actually, I guess, obviously it's, in many ways it's made you the person you are today.
I guess it must have taught you so much about yourself and what you want to change, what is changeable, what isn't changeable, I feel that your experience, both as someone who's suffered from mental health problems or still continues to, you've had so many interactions with the public, you've written so many great books, I wonder, have you got any sort of short and sweet sort of top tips that you can share with people, three or four things that maybe they can think about doing in their own life that might improve the way that they feel. I think often it's about slowing down in some ways. So for me personally, I know you're a great believer in it too, but you know, I believe physical health and mental health are so interlinked. So one of the things that helped me early on and really helped me get over panic attacks was just going running and I know not everyone can do it or wants to do it.
But for me, having that space away from people, from my work, from everything else, just getting out, going running was a massive help and I know it sounds funny but there's a kind of truth to it. When I was running, I knew that was a place I couldn't have a panic attack because the symptoms of running are the symptoms of panic attack. You've got the breathlessness, you've got the racing heart, you're sweating, but you know why you are. And it's kind of a pain that you can control over.
So I found it very empowering, not just on the endorphin level and feeling of accomplishment, but actually it gave you that sense of sort of control which panic took away. And you know, I'm great. So running in yoga are my things. I love doing yoga.
Yoga came later. I actually started doing yoga for my back rather than for my anxiety, but I noticed that it was having a knock on effect. And whether that was simply just taking that time for myself, slowing my breathing down, which is something I still watch. But I think essentially it's about creating space, whatever it is, whether it's doing yoga, whether it's reading a book, whether it's going for a run, where we're just unplugged, we're just ourselves.
We're not working. We're not worried about money, about we're not making or whatever. And we can just be, you know, the reverse of a nightclub and just do it, you know, where we can just actually be. Just almost disconnecting in order to be connected.
Yeah, absolutely. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Please do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, want to go back and listen to the full conversation with my guests.
And if you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my new bite-sized Friday email. It's called a Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across and so much more.
I really think you're going to love it. It's the goal is for it to be a small, get powerful dose of feel-good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it at DrChasci.com forward slash Friday Five. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
Make sure you press subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.