# Matt Haig: What Doctors Called Depression Was Actually Autistic Burnout - Here's The Difference

An episode of [Live Well Be Well with Sarah Ann Macklin | Health, Lifestyle, Nutrition](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1508380100), 15 Apr 2026, 1 h 44 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/1033d1554/podcast/play/118481016/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2026-3-15%2F422120505-44100-2-20dcbc300a8e9.mp3

Exciting news - pre-order my debut book https://linktr.ee/HealthySBTH?utm_source=linktree_profile_shareHave you ever felt on fire from the inside, with no language to describe what was happening? That is exactly where Matt Haig found himself at 24. And what he chose to do with that experience has since helped millions of people feel less alone. This week on Live Well Be Well, I'm sitting down with bestselling author Matt Haig. Over two decades, he has written with raw honesty about depression, anxiety, and neurodiversity. Diagnosed with ADHD and autism in his mid-40s, he writes not to have the answers, but to make you feel like your questions are valid. Here's what we dive into: - How Matt's crisis at 24 in Ibiza, including agoraphobia, panic attacks, and suicidal despair, became the turning point that made him a writer. - Why writing about mental health was never about being an expert, but about finding language so a younger, suffering version of himself could feel less alone. - What a late ADHD and autism diagnosis in midlife actually feels like, and why understanding your brain does not mean you suddenly understand everything about yourself. - How ADHD can be quietly advantageous when you stop fighting it, and why an interest-driven brain can lead to a deeply authentic life. - Why the opposite of depression is not happiness. It is the boring, beautiful neutrality of a mind that can spend one minute thinking about an ordinary email. - How the word "impossible" became Matt's greatest source of motivation: if you survived the most impossible thing, everything else becomes possible too. - How running, routine, and the most unglamorous physical basics were the things that actually brought Matt back. Love, Sarah Ann 💛 *** This episode is sponsored by: DIOME: Rest deeper. Stay grounded. Rested is available now and Grounded lands later this month. 👉 Get 20% off with code SARAH20 at DIOME.CO *** The Great British Veg Out How to support your gut, energy, and hormones by eating more — not less. 👉 https://sarahmacklin.substack.com/p/the-great-british-veg-out Reset Your Health If your body feels off after stress, travel, or burnout — this is where to start. 👉 https://sarahmacklin.substack.com/s/reset-your-health-in-30-days 👉 Practical beats perfect. Here’s a free 5-recipe PDF I use to support energy and stress during busy weeks. https://open.substack.com/pub/sarahmacklin/p/download-your-free-5-recipes-to-relieve 👉 If this resonates, you can join the thousands who read The Compassionate Cure each week. https://sarahmacklin.substack.com/ *** If You Enjoyed This Episode, You Might Also Like: ADHD or Depression? Watch This! Kelly Williams Brown on Feeling Stressed & Overwhelmedhttps://youtu.be/lz7-R_TlJg4 *** Sign up to Sarah’s Compassionate Cure newsletter: Science Simplified, Health Humanised. Join thousands in exploring actionable insights that prioritise compassion, clarity, and real-life impact. https://sarahmacklin.substack.com/ *** Highlights 00:00:00 Intro00:02:47 Writing Reasons to Stay Alive before therapy, before diagnosis 00:06:49 The "two for one" diagnosis: ADHD and autism in midlife 00:10:11 Why Matt hates the word diagnosis and how language shapes recovery 00:14:40 Shoplifting, dopamine, and an undiagnosed ADHD brain 00:22:25 Why Matt would not take his suffering away: darkness and light 00:27:25 The breakdown in Ibiza at 24 and the crisis within the crisis 00:31:58 Recovery counted in lampposts from his front door 00:36:00 The boring email moment and why neutrality is the goal 00:41:16 The word "impossible" and how surviving it opened everything 01:01:09 Winnie the Pooh as the wisest mental health book ever written 01:09:18 Social media, authenticity, and losing followers as exfoliation 01:29:46 The body budget and why physical basics are the real medicine 01:33:00 Matt's definition of Live Well Be Well***

## Transcript

[0:00] I absolutely believe that my depression was kind of like an
[0:05] extreme autistic ADHD burnout. Feels weird saying that ADHD is
[0:12] where your brain can't prioritize things in terms of
[0:16] importance, but in terms of interest, I think one of the
[0:19] reasons I write is to try and find myself.
[0:21] Nat Higg turned his breakdown at 24 into the book that sold 10
[0:25] million copies and changed how a generation talks about
[0:28] depression. A quite silly novel about an
[0:32] alien comes to earth. People who are autistic
[0:35] contacted me and said I love that you wrote this fable of
[0:38] autism. I had no idea I was writing
[0:40] about autism, but when I started to write about depression and
[0:44] anxiety, I didn't really know myself that well.
[0:48] You think the wisest self help book is Winnie the Pooh?
[0:52] Yes, because they represent every single aspect or mental
[0:57] health. The character I possibly relate
[0:59] to most is Tigger because you know, got ADHD, Piglet with
[1:03] anxiety, Eeyore who's depressed, Winnie the Pooh is an addict.
[1:08] So honey, when you're in that depressed state, what you're
[1:11] craving is what a lot of people are trying to escape from.
[1:13] You're craving normality without pain.
[1:16] You're craving the things that we take for granted.
[1:19] The opposite of depression isn't happiness.
[1:21] The opposite of depression isn't illness.
[1:22] And in fact, the moment I knew I wasn't always going to be
[1:25] depressed was. For the last two years I have
[1:31] kept a secret from you and it's this.
[1:33] It's my new book, Healthy Shouldn't be this hard.
[1:36] And I think it is a problem that we are all feeling.
[1:40] And I was feeling it so much that I wrote a book on it.
[1:42] Now, if you've been a guest of this podcast for a while, you
[1:45] know that I am all about kindness, self compassion.
[1:48] But when I dug into the research of this, my mind exploded.
[1:53] The connection between the mind and body is so integral, but we
[1:56] completely miss out on all the conversations on health, on how
[2:00] we speak to ourselves. And that is such a driving
[2:03] factor on how our food responds to what we eat, to the choices
[2:07] that we make. And we are so overwhelmed right
[2:10] now in the $8.5 trillion industry that is the Wellness
[2:13] industry, which is predicted to be by 2027.
[2:17] So if you need a helping hand, if you want a new way to live
[2:21] and be well and buy my new book, Healthy shouldn't be this hard
[2:25] out on May the 28th. But you can pre-order it now.
[2:29] I'll pop the link below in the show notes.
[2:31] And I would love if you could support me on this.
[2:34] And I honestly think it will support you too.
[2:37] I'm so happy you're here today. Yeah, I am, and I'm pleased that
[2:40] my ADHD allowed me to remember this because I I was having a
[2:44] bit of a mix up in my own mind and my own diary about when I
[2:48] meant to be where and. But yeah, we've somehow managed
[2:51] to actually get here. We've done it.
[2:53] Well, I guess that is my first question to you, which I haven't
[2:56] actually asked you even when you walked in the door today.
[2:59] You have written for over 20 years and you have done things
[3:03] from depression to anxiety to happiness, like the whole
[3:06] spectrum. But I'm curious like right now
[3:10] 2026, how are you feeling today? Today I'm feeling quite good
[3:17] actually. Yeah, I'm quite good.
[3:19] I mean, I, I suppose the problem I have with that question is
[3:23] that I'm not always very aware of how I'm feeling until I'm
[3:26] asked it, which is why it's a good question to ask people.
[3:29] And I think it's, again, having a kind of fast mind where you're
[3:33] not really always in that space of contemplating yourself and
[3:38] how you're feeling. But yeah, I'm feeling quite
[3:41] excited. I'm in a phase of my life where
[3:47] after a period of sort of like stagnation, I suppose I'm
[3:50] thinking of the future again in a good way, and plans and books
[3:56] and other things and life stuff. And yeah, so I'm feeling quite
[4:01] good. So you're in a good space.
[4:02] Yeah, I'd say so. It's interesting because, you
[4:05] know, you said that sometimes you're not sure of how you feel,
[4:07] but I think one of the biggest elements of your work is that
[4:10] you've allowed people to be feel seen through the language that
[4:14] you've used. And people are like, oh, wow,
[4:16] I've never been out to express myself.
[4:17] And I've read that a lot on like the Reddit forums and on
[4:20] Goodreads and on the reviews. People just say that you seem to
[4:23] dictate exactly how they feel. Yeah, the kind of people say
[4:28] that there's a lot of other people who say other things.
[4:31] It's what you let in, isn't it, in terms of that.
[4:34] But I feel like whatever genre you're in, whatever sort of
[4:40] discipline or media you're part of, people respond to
[4:45] authenticity. Especially in 2026, I think
[4:52] people are responding to the real, the non artificial.
[4:56] And so I'd say that's what I've always tried to do, especially
[5:02] since I started talking about mental health.
[5:04] And it seems funny saying that now because when I started to
[5:06] write about depression and anxiety, I didn't really know
[5:12] myself that well. I didn't know what I had going
[5:17] on in terms of like neurodiversity.
[5:19] I didn't have diagnosis. I hadn't even seen a therapist
[5:23] when I wrote a book called Reasons to Stay Alive.
[5:25] And so I'd had depression for many years, and I had never had
[5:32] therapy about it. I'd had brief spells and pills,
[5:35] but I hadn't, you know, found a pill for me.
[5:38] I hadn't got any of the answers, really.
[5:40] But I think people respond to you if you acknowledge your own
[5:47] limitations, your own confusion about yourself.
[5:49] But you're articulating a feeling and that's what I
[5:55] struggled with for a while because I thought, hold on, am I
[5:58] like an advisor now? Am IA therapist now?
[6:01] Am I taking that role on? And I realised, no, I'm not
[6:05] really. People just want a space, A
[6:08] something to point to, whatever. It's a book, podcast, ATV show
[6:13] where they can say, oh, that's what I feel or that's similar to
[6:15] what I feel or what my partner feels.
[6:18] And so to be able to do that was good.
[6:21] I mean, I can remember during the biggest crisis of my life,
[6:26] when I was 24 years old, suicidal in Spain and absolute
[6:34] mess, like agoraphobic, a panic attack that wouldn't end,
[6:39] wanting to die in the sense that I didn't want to go through what
[6:43] I was going through. I didn't have a death wish.
[6:46] I just, you know, it's like being trapped in a burning
[6:48] building, that sudden feeling of terror and despair and seeing no
[6:54] way out. And I can remember feeling like
[6:56] that and thinking no one has ever felt like this before.
[7:00] And it's so melodramatic. But depression is quite
[7:02] melodramatic. And it's so ridiculous because
[7:04] so many millions of people at that moment in time were feeling
[7:07] like that. But that is what I felt because
[7:09] I hadn't ever had what I was feeling articulated to me in any
[7:17] form. So when I started to talk and
[7:21] write about mental things, I remember that feeling and
[7:27] thought that was my challenge. Is there a way to get through to
[7:31] someone in that state of mind where they can't they can't read
[7:35] something super academic or dense or formal or doctorly, but
[7:43] that is real and that's offering something.
[7:45] How? How do you get to that person?
[7:48] And that was, that was always the challenge.
[7:50] And I don't think I always succeeded in that challenge, but
[7:52] that was the sort of aim I had to write.
[7:56] And that freed me up from trying to be clever or pretentious or
[7:59] anything else. Just having a conversation with
[8:01] this imaginary person who was really a younger version of me,
[8:06] to see what would keep that person there.
[8:09] Feeling seen. It's so powerful.
[8:11] Did you think you felt that you saw yourself when you were
[8:15] writing? Yeah, it's interesting because I
[8:18] think one of the reasons I write is to try and find myself, which
[8:24] may sound a little bit grand, but I'll give you an example.
[8:28] I wrote a quite a silly novel about an alien comes to Earth.
[8:35] The humans, yes. And he comes to Earth and he
[8:38] looks like an ordinary human being at Oxford University, but
[8:42] he's not. He's an alien and he's here and
[8:45] he doesn't understand human rules or human systems.
[8:48] And, and it's the kind of comedy because it's fish out of water.
[8:51] And loads of people contacted me about this and I wrote this like
[8:55] 15 years ago. Loads of people who are autistic
[8:58] contacted me and said, I love that you wrote this fable of
[9:02] autism. I was like, did I?
[9:04] I did not know. And so I was wondering and like
[9:07] I had the question, are you autistic?
[9:09] Are you autistic? Because this is exactly what
[9:11] being autistic feels like. And I had no idea I was writing
[9:16] about autism. But then years later, after my
[9:18] son got diagnosed with autism, I went along to get assessed for
[9:21] what I thought would just be a sort of ADHD assessment.
[9:24] But it turned into a sort of two for one ADHD, autism, which was
[9:30] a surprise. And even after people had said
[9:32] that to me, it was a surprise. But so I think, like in writing
[9:35] your own experience and putting your own emotions and view of
[9:39] the world out out there, you're also getting something back.
[9:43] You're getting a kind of identity, I suppose, back of who
[9:47] you are. If you're confused about who you
[9:49] are. That makes sense, yeah.
[9:51] Well, I think the confusion there is a central piece, right?
[9:54] Because it's really hard to have a mix of different feelings, but
[9:57] you're not quite sure how they associate in society.
[10:02] You're kind of like, well, where do where do I place that?
[10:05] And that concept of which I know you've written beautifully
[10:07] about, am I normal that I think we all crave to be at school
[10:11] because we all kind of want to fit in.
[10:14] And then actually there's that kind of like push and pull
[10:17] where, you know, within any neurodiversity, masking is such
[10:21] a big thing. You kind of learn the social
[10:23] norms to to fit in. But once you got that diagnosis,
[10:26] you were how old were you when you got diagnosed?
[10:29] And I actually hate saying word diagnosis.
[10:30] It makes it sound like you've got a lifelong illness.
[10:32] You've got less diagnosed in middle age.
[10:34] I mean, I've only been diagnosed since it was during COVID, so
[10:38] four years ago, like mid 40s. So I, I, I'm really like a ton
[10:44] of people got diagnosed at that time and still are.
[10:48] And I, I'm still sort of working out.
[10:52] I find especially with ADHD, the stigma isn't the same as it is
[10:58] with, say, talking about certain mental illnesses.
[11:02] It's a different kind of stigma. It's a stigma of not really
[11:05] seeing it or being there. You know, there's a stigma with
[11:08] certain mental illnesses you could mention where people would
[11:11] sort of be instantly distant and a little bit scared or a little
[11:15] bit worried about you. Whereas you say ADHD or even
[11:19] autism. You know, people have this idea
[11:21] that we're all on a spectrum and that everyone's it's a
[11:23] personality trait and you've got it.
[11:26] But for people like me who definitely as soon as like, you
[11:29] know, every bit of criteria in the test, I was like, you know,
[11:35] leaning heavily. Who were a star students?
[11:38] ADHD, full marks. I felt like, you know, it had
[11:43] answered so much about something that was continual and that had
[11:47] caused me so many problems and issues in my life.
[11:53] And a lot of them didn't have to be problems if I'd have known I
[11:56] was at school. I was diagnosed as well, not
[11:59] diagnosed, but I was told I was special needs in quite a few
[12:04] subjects in our history and something else.
[12:07] I was always told I was special needs and sometimes like put
[12:11] into a separate class and I was never told what those needs were
[12:19] or what was special. But I just had that sense of
[12:22] difference. And I never thought it was
[12:25] autism, because if someone had autism, it was very distinct and
[12:29] very extreme and it was Rain Man and it was a very certain thing.
[12:34] And I wasn't that, but I didn't know what I was do.
[12:38] You get grief now because you were late diagnosis.
[12:41] Like I've heard you talk about it as bittersweet.
[12:43] And yeah, I say that because I, I was, I'm going to say we're
[12:48] blessed, going to like reframe. It took some positive self talk.
[12:51] So do you think there's positivities to it?
[12:54] I was blessed with dyslexia at 24 and then I was blessed with
[12:58] ADHD at 35. And so I had 10 years.
[13:03] When you say blessed, do you mean like knowing it was the
[13:09] blessing? You know, like having that sort
[13:11] of relief of knowing. I think so.
[13:13] I also think like when, so the reason why I have a problem with
[13:16] the word diagnosis is because when someone said I was
[13:19] diagnosed, when I said that before people go God, it sounds
[13:21] like a lifelong chronic mental illness.
[13:24] And I think that reframe because then when I was given that label
[13:27] at university, I was also in the disabled, the disabled allowance
[13:32] where you get obviously like a free computer and things like
[13:34] that, but you're, you're kind of registered disabled.
[13:37] So automatically your brain is going, gosh, I, this is a really
[13:42] bad thing. And so kind of changing the
[13:45] language has really helped me. And we have the right time for
[13:48] that because like if you go back 40 or 50 years, if you were
[13:52] diagnosed with ADHD, what was it?
[13:54] Minimal brain deficit or something?
[13:56] You were diagnosed with a brain deficit.
[13:59] And although I was never diagnosed with that, just having
[14:04] any kind of like, special needs label was so stigmatizing,
[14:11] especially among teenage boys at that time.
[14:16] And so I just had, you know, this general sense that I was a
[14:19] weirdo without knowing why. And like now, the more I
[14:23] understand ADHD, the more I see that like all life, it's kind of
[14:29] what you make of it. But it's hard to make something
[14:34] of something if you don't know what The thing is that you're
[14:37] dealing with. So when you've just got this
[14:39] energy and this feeling of difference and that you're aware
[14:43] that you think differently to other people, but you don't know
[14:45] why, that's the dangerous thing. Because that can lead to low
[14:49] self esteem and that can lead to your parents being frustrated
[14:52] with you, your teachers being frustrated with you, your peers
[14:54] being frustrated with you. Because you know if someone
[14:59] doesn't understand the behaviour, then it's
[15:01] automatically naughty. If it's not conforming to what
[15:06] you're meant to be doing for school or for your parents, you
[15:09] know a messy bedroom is naughty. Being late is bad behaviour.
[15:14] Whereas it's the only behaviour. But one thing I think for me has
[15:19] been an advantage about ADHD is because can't can never remember
[15:24] who described it like this, but it made total sense that ADHD is
[15:31] where your brain can't prioritize things in terms of
[15:36] importance, but in terms of interest.
[15:40] So things that are the most interesting for me I can focus
[15:45] on. And so it's kind of, it can be a
[15:49] filter where you end up having quite an interesting life and
[15:54] pursuing passions quite easily because they're the things you
[15:58] can actually lock into and focus on versus the stuff you should
[16:04] be doing. Inverted commas should because
[16:07] actually something inside you just is not stimulated by
[16:12] answering that e-mail or doing that thing you're meant to be
[16:15] doing. And so I think in a way, you
[16:18] know, when you look at the sort of like regrets of the dying and
[16:21] people who've looked back on my life and how they should have
[16:24] lived it, ADHD can be helpful for that because it actually
[16:28] gives you that perspective instinctively by saying, no, I
[16:32] want to do this exciting thing or this.
[16:35] Obviously there's a massive danger there because if you're
[16:37] just running on dopamine and you can get dopamine in good or bad
[16:43] ways, then if the easiest way to get it is by doing bad things or
[16:47] getting addicted to things that are terrible for you, then it's
[16:51] easier for you to become an addict than to other people.
[16:53] But if you understand that you've got ADHD and This is why
[16:57] you're doing it, I think it stops a lot of that and you
[17:00] become a bit more mindful and you can, it's like sailing in
[17:04] the wind. You can use it to your
[17:06] advantage. Yeah, and you can put strategies
[17:08] in as well to help from the other times.
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[18:05] buying once or subscribing. Did I read and tell me this is
[18:09] true or false? Did I read that you have spoken
[18:12] about yourself as a kind of Robin Hood justification for
[18:15] when you were from when you were younger?
[18:17] Yeah. To understand your ADHD and the
[18:20] shoplifting that came along with it.
[18:22] Yeah, well, that was the first thing that I really thought, OK,
[18:26] this isn't right. I didn't want to be a
[18:28] shoplifter, but I was. I was shoplifting me and my
[18:31] friend. I won't name my friend he's.
[18:34] Running them out, he's. Probably, I don't know, he's
[18:37] probably running Tesco, but I don't know what he's doing.
[18:40] But my, my friend, let's call him Paul because that was his
[18:46] name. He, yeah, he got me into it.
[18:52] And. Oh, Paul.
[18:53] Yeah. Well, it was in a sport shop.
[18:56] The first thing I ever stole was a tennis ball, which is really
[18:59] not, not the. It's so niche and not so hard.
[19:03] You put the tennis ball in your pockets and it's like, it's not
[19:06] subtle, but we. Yeah.
[19:09] So we started with tennis balls. I, I was so addicted to
[19:13] shoplifting that I would volunteer, to my mum's surprise,
[19:18] to go to the supermarket with her on a Friday evening to do
[19:21] the supermarket shop. And I just sort of like, follow
[19:25] behind my picking mix. Eddie, Eddie.
[19:28] Little things. I don't know what it was that I
[19:31] was. Yeah, but anything, anything
[19:33] pocket sized. And it wasn't ever about the
[19:36] things. It was always, it wasn't about,
[19:40] you know, we weren't particularly poor or anything.
[19:43] It was simply about the thrill and the dopamine that I got from
[19:48] walking out of the door, out of the supermarket and thinking
[19:53] I've just done something a bit naughty.
[19:55] I got addicted to that. I was literally stealing things
[19:57] every day for quite a few years. And yeah, and I hated myself for
[20:03] doing that. So I was actually in my heart.
[20:06] I was quite. You know, I was like this quiet
[20:09] boy, this sort of bookish teenager.
[20:11] I wanted to do well, I wanted to sort of like, please people.
[20:16] Yeah. I had this thing where which I
[20:18] was addicted to, and I didn't understand why.
[20:21] And it lowered yourself esteem, so it therefore made you more
[20:23] likely to keep doing it. And also, yeah, I did justify
[20:28] myself as Robin Hood because I sometimes gave the stuff to my
[20:33] friends. So not only did I live in
[20:34] Nottinghamshire, that makes it. Even better.
[20:38] Not in the forest, but yeah, not much forest left in
[20:41] Nottinghamshire, but did live in Nottinghamshire and I used to
[20:45] sort of like, yeah, I'd go to Boots.
[20:49] Not recommended as they have lots of plainclothes sort of
[20:53] that's, but I used to steal like wet look hair gel or like a
[20:59] crunchy bar. And yeah, give it to give it to
[21:03] my friends. Yeah.
[21:05] And then I just got a little bit arrogant with it and felt like
[21:08] it was like a skill that I had. And then that moment I got
[21:14] arrested. You were 16, right?
[21:17] 16 got arrested and went to the police station, which was around
[21:21] the corner from our house. We lived quite centrally in our
[21:23] small town of Newark and I had a long afternoon in a police cell.
[21:30] And I wasn't scared of the police cell of a police, but I
[21:33] was scared of my mother. And she, because she was my mum,
[21:38] was a head teacher. Oh, wow.
[21:40] So there's a lot going on. And yeah, so she came in, did
[21:45] the good old, you know, strict middle class mother routine and,
[21:51] you know, told the police officer she was going to punish
[21:53] me more than the police could. And they let me off with a
[21:56] caution. And yeah, that was the last time
[22:00] I ever stole anything. But I needed that.
[22:03] I needed that shock. And I hate being that person who
[22:08] needs to sort of like, certainly when I was younger, I needed
[22:12] something bad to happen to stop doing a thing.
[22:14] Same with drugs. Like I had to have a breakdown.
[22:19] But having had a breakdown, I ended up far better than I would
[22:24] have been otherwise. I think if I hadn't broke down,
[22:28] I would have stayed a low level depressive, not understanding my
[22:34] mind, not understanding neurodiversity.
[22:37] I'd have stayed like that forever and I'd have been
[22:40] drinking every night and not addressing my issues.
[22:47] Because I can remember at 24 years old when I was in a
[22:50] breakdown and I was told I had panic disorder.
[22:52] I was told I had depression. It was, it was almost as bad.
[22:57] It, it like kept me in the depression knowing I had
[23:00] depression because I was so stigmatized by the word
[23:03] depression. And it, it seems strange now
[23:08] because you see men all the time talk about mental health.
[23:13] It's almost a cliche. It's almost like ATV cliche
[23:16] where someone's having an interview and we talk about
[23:18] mental health and it's so common and so every day.
[23:21] But in the end of the 90s and in two year 2000, the only people I
[23:27] could think of who had depression were suicides.
[23:31] I had Kurt Cobain. Cobain in my mind.
[23:33] I had Hemingway, Sylvia Plath. You know, you, you thought of
[23:40] suicide, so you thought of mental illness as a thing that
[23:44] ended in death at your own hand. And that was the trajectory of
[23:50] that. Was that So.
[23:53] Yeah. And then when I became a writer,
[23:55] I still had that. And then it was like, you know,
[23:58] you have this kind of pretentious feeling like a
[24:02] doomed, tragic, poetic person who's going to end up, you know,
[24:08] an alcoholic or dead. And that's just who you are.
[24:12] And you're too sensitive for the world and obviously drama that
[24:15] you have in your head and it's ridiculous.
[24:17] But that was the kind of idea of mental illness at that point.
[24:22] And so, you know, there's a lot of cynicism and eye rolling now
[24:25] about the Mental Health Conversation TM.
[24:30] But one thing that has definitely changed for the
[24:33] better is that we can talk about it and we see it as a thing you
[24:40] live with rather than die from. And, you know, so it's actually,
[24:45] you know, no one now who falls into depression can only think
[24:51] of people who've died from depression.
[24:52] You can think of people who live with depression.
[24:55] And that is a significant difference.
[24:57] And yes, obviously there's all kinds of important
[25:02] infrastructure that needs to change and all kinds of
[25:06] awareness and money that needs to be spent in the right places,
[25:09] but at least we've got to a point where we don't have to be
[25:12] locked in our own sort of silence and fear about it.
[25:16] I mean, you talk about that, as you know, there's like obviously
[25:18] kind of a lot of people now that talk about it in a very like
[25:21] hopeful way and that you can get out the other side.
[25:23] And that's what a lot of your kind of books on which you just
[25:27] said, like Reasons to Stay and on, you know, Notes on a Nervous
[25:29] Planet talk about. But do you also think that it
[25:32] gives you a definition behind your work?
[25:34] Because for you, it was such an outlook that it allowed you to
[25:37] create these pieces that people connect to?
[25:40] Like, would you ever take away not suffering with that because
[25:43] it was kind of partly due to how well these books have done and
[25:47] how much people have related to you?
[25:48] Yeah, I mean, I definitely wouldn't take it away, but not
[25:51] just for that reason, for for my own selfish reasons as well.
[25:57] In art history, I did some art history at university.
[26:00] And like, there's a Italian term, chiaroscuro, for the
[26:05] contrast of light and shade in a painting.
[26:07] And like, Renaissance artists used to love having a very
[26:12] heavy, dark background to make, I don't know, John the Baptist
[26:16] of the Virgin Mary sort of shine with this sort of spiritual
[26:20] glow. But it was the darkness that
[26:22] made for light sort of shine. And I think that's like life.
[26:25] And I feel like that appreciation of normality, of
[26:31] neutrality, of boring things, of looking at grass, of looking at
[26:35] the sky. You end up sounding like a
[26:38] Labrador when you say this. I just get the grass, look at
[26:40] the sky. But it's kind of true.
[26:42] I could never do it. I needed the most extreme things
[26:46] to feel happy when I was younger.
[26:49] So I needed cocaine. I needed very loud music.
[26:52] I needed alcohol. I needed, if I, you know, like
[26:57] the spiciest food, you know, if I was at an Indian restaurant,
[27:00] I'd be like always the vindaloo or the most extreme.
[27:04] Everything was extreme. Everything was loud and you
[27:08] know, literally loud. Like I had tinnitus because I
[27:11] used to stand in the loudest bit of the rave or whatever.
[27:14] And it's just like everything had to be, you know, I was
[27:16] trying to lose myself in sensation.
[27:20] And after the breakdown, I became, for a little while, the
[27:24] opposite person where, well, I was literally agoraphobic.
[27:28] So I couldn't go out. I couldn't listen to music, or
[27:32] at least that type of music. And so everything was too
[27:37] stimulating. And then eventually I found this
[27:40] sort of middle space, which was the sort of space I should have
[27:45] always been in, which is just sort of like realising that just
[27:49] because you're not doing something extreme doesn't make
[27:51] it boring. It's actually kind of boring to
[27:53] need to have an extreme that says something about where your
[27:58] heads are and what you're denying.
[28:00] I actually read something really interesting.
[28:02] You know when you just spoke about when you had your
[28:05] depressive episode and first big breakdown at 24?
[28:08] Was it 24? Yeah. 24/19/99 Yeah.
[28:12] So it's really interesting. So I talk a lot about I didn't
[28:14] have a depressive episode, but I my body completely shut down on
[28:18] me when I was 23 and I was hospitalised and I had sepsemia,
[28:22] I had E coli, you know, I had rygords where I was, it looks
[28:25] kind of like a, a seizure and I collapsed and I had intensive
[28:28] care for a very long time. And that was my turning point.
[28:31] And everyone have all has always tried to kind of put words in my
[28:34] mouth and say, was it the modelling industry that drove
[28:37] you there? Was it food?
[28:38] And I always reference it as well.
[28:40] It was stress. Like it was so much stress.
[28:43] It was the perfectionism of the image.
[28:45] It was not wanting to let this go because I felt stupid when I
[28:48] was younger. And finally I got given a chance
[28:50] and to let that go was so stressful.
[28:52] And then I've read that your burnout at 24 was also
[28:57] potentially now connected that you could understand to
[28:59] neurodiversity as well, like a neurodiversity breakdown, not
[29:02] just depression. And it actually made me think
[29:04] about about mine. Oh.
[29:06] Really. And I was like, was mine partly
[29:09] due because I wasn't handling the stress very well due to my
[29:11] neurodiversity? Could it have been?
[29:14] And so how do you look at that now?
[29:16] Because obviously it was framed as the big depressive suicidal
[29:19] episode, but do you see it as the neurodivergent burnout?
[29:24] I do and it feels weird saying that because obviously I've, I
[29:28] wrote books before I had my diagnosis.
[29:29] So I feel like a little bit like that's a incomplete version of
[29:34] me, but I feel like even when you know something extra about
[29:38] your brain, like I know and you know more about yourself now
[29:42] than you did in your 20s, you still don't know everything.
[29:46] Our brains are the most mysterious things in the
[29:48] universe. We have however many was 80
[29:51] something billion neurons in our brain and we still even the top
[29:55] sort of medical experts on ADHD don't really know why the
[29:59] neurotransmitters aren't sort of communicating properly.
[30:02] So to know some a little bit more about yourself isn't to
[30:05] know everything about yourself. So it's always a journey.
[30:08] But I absolutely believe that my depression was kind of like an
[30:16] extreme autistic ADHD burnout from brain fatigue of not only
[30:24] having a brain that was sort of running three times the speed,
[30:28] but also not knowing that and so not being able to medicate that.
[30:34] And I don't mean literally in terms of medicine, I just mean
[30:38] in terms of knowing how to sort of talk to myself about it and
[30:42] knowing how to behave. So I would always just be
[30:47] heading, you know, literally Bernie Macandall the wrong ends
[30:51] because I'd be heading towards the very places that would be
[30:55] the worst for me. So I've been heading into a
[30:59] world, well, I literally physically headed to Ibiza,
[31:04] which you know, being ADHD in your early 20s and male not
[31:09] knowing you've got all this mental stuff going on.
[31:11] Then going these lot to live in Ibiza at the end of the 90s was
[31:18] not, you know, with hindsight, it wasn't the right thing.
[31:21] I should have been walking in Northumberland or the Cotswolds,
[31:26] but I wasn't. And so I went to this, the place
[31:29] I was attracted to, like the moth to a flame.
[31:31] And then, yeah, it literally nearly killed me.
[31:36] And I literally nearly jumped off a Cliff in a Beaver and
[31:41] ended up in a hospital in a Beaver and being prescribed very
[31:45] strong doses of diazepam, which didn't make anything better.
[31:49] And I was just terrified about what was going on because as a
[31:58] young man, certainly as a young man at the end of the 90s, you
[32:04] felt like you had to be in control of your own minds and
[32:09] that you were. And you had this thing called
[32:10] free will and your brain was your servant.
[32:15] And you sort of like you understood yourself.
[32:19] And then something happens where you think, oh, I'm not in
[32:21] control. I'm not only not in control of
[32:23] my external life, I'm not in control of my internal life.
[32:27] And so that causes a crisis. So you're in a kind of state of
[32:32] meta crisis where you're having a crisis about the crisis,
[32:35] you're having depression about depression, you're having
[32:38] anxiety because you've been told you've got anxiety.
[32:40] So everything sort of like folds in on itself like a black hole
[32:44] because the rumination, the rumination and you can't get out
[32:49] of it. Because if you've got like I
[32:53] sometimes have a bad back, you can point to your back, however
[32:58] bad that pain is and it can be really, you know, it can be
[33:03] really consume you pain can consume it.
[33:06] You can psychologically cope with it.
[33:09] Even if you can't cope with it in terms of the pain, you can
[33:11] cope with it in the abstract sense of thinking, well, I'm not
[33:15] my back. I can point to my back.
[33:18] I can say this is where the pain is.
[33:20] It's between these vertebrae. This is the problem.
[33:24] Whereas when it's your brain, how do you step out of your
[33:27] brain to point to your brain? And so you're trying to work
[33:31] everything out from the inside as it's falling out.
[33:34] So it's like you're trying to, it's like you're an architect or
[33:39] a interior designer trying to work out, but what to do with
[33:44] the house as the house is on fire.
[33:47] So you're going around choking on this and trying to work out
[33:50] how do I fix this house and where should the windows be?
[33:53] And you are literally, you know, so it's almost impossible.
[33:56] You're firefighting your own mind and trying to work out
[34:00] yourself. And that's why it took me so
[34:03] long to get out of there because I didn't have and that's what
[34:07] motivated me when I started writing the non fiction stuff.
[34:11] What motivated me was just to try and help people who were in
[34:16] that situation to try and help this hypothetical younger me to
[34:21] sort of give them a sort of an escape route from that.
[34:24] And the escape route is weirdly to not be looking for the escape
[34:29] route. You escape yourself by accepting
[34:33] yourself. So to get out of, you know, for
[34:36] me to get out of panic, to get out of having a panic attack
[34:41] every time you leave your house, you have to get to a point where
[34:45] you say I'm going to have a panic attack when I leave that
[34:47] house, but I'm still going to choose to have that panic attack
[34:51] rather than be a person who can never leave the house.
[34:54] So you have to get to a point where a bigger fear beats a
[35:00] lesser fear. So the fear of being someone who
[35:04] could, of being like Howard Hughes in that Las Vegas hotel
[35:08] room where he can't leave the house and he's weighing into
[35:12] bottles or, you know, I had that because I've seen the Aviator.
[35:16] It was around that time, wasn't it?
[35:17] Yeah. And as I was coming out of
[35:19] agoraphobia, I was not wanting to be Howard Hughes.
[35:23] I was wanting to sort of get out into the world.
[35:25] And so I would do whatever it took.
[35:29] And I used to count my progress in lampposts from my house.
[35:35] So, you know, if you'd made six lampposts without having a panic
[35:39] attack or whatever it was, or going to the corner shop, and it
[35:42] felt like I had in my head the Indiana Jones music as I went to
[35:47] the corner shop. And it wasn't to shoplift this
[35:49] time, it was just to get some Marmite.
[35:52] And, you know, so I'd have like Indiana Jones and the Temple of
[35:55] Marmite in my head as like a real adventure.
[35:59] And it made me realize that people are achieving immense
[36:06] things all the time. People who are going through
[36:11] invisible illness, invisible grief, invisible terror that
[36:18] we're passing in the street every single day are probably
[36:23] using more courage than astronauts or stunt.
[36:27] You know, every day there's all these ordinary things that are
[36:30] happening that are taking such courage in people's outwardly
[36:36] mundane, ordinary individual lives.
[36:39] And it so it gave me a kind of empathy and or for people's
[36:47] internal stuff, the stuff you can't see.
[36:49] Well, I love this thing that you wrote, which feels like it
[36:52] connects to this, that your worst days become a reference
[36:55] bank. So when a day hits you harder,
[36:58] you can measure it against your worst and find your way through.
[37:02] And I definitely feel like I can connect to that because I think
[37:05] that's that's basically how I divide to define resilience that
[37:09] actually you have to keep pushing.
[37:12] But then you actually know that you've got through some really,
[37:14] really hard times. Do you still use that today?
[37:18] Like, did you have you used that this year?
[37:19] Have you used that? This might be one of the first
[37:21] podcasts you've done in a while. I'm sure there was a lot of
[37:23] like, well, I mean, you were literally, yeah.
[37:26] Last night I saw you posting your stories.
[37:28] I'm doing a podcast tomorrow and I'm currently watching about
[37:31] ADHD. And I had to message you.
[37:33] And I was like, yeah, you don't need to prepare for this.
[37:36] Just come as you are. I know that's scary.
[37:38] I always feel like I need to be prepared for everything because
[37:42] I'm a catastrophizer, but yeah. Did you use that?
[37:44] It's a good analogy. There's always some terrible
[37:49] day, however old we are, there's always some terrible day we've
[37:52] lived through but we've accidentally lived through or
[37:55] gone through. And so people always say don't
[37:59] they think of a good, good time, think of a happy time.
[38:02] And that works sometimes, but I think more useful when you're in
[38:05] an emergency situation mentally is to think of other things.
[38:10] You've survived. So you're thinking of the bad
[38:12] stuff, you're not thinking of the happy stuff.
[38:14] And in fact, when I was depressed, seriously depressed,
[38:17] I didn't care about happiness. I just wanted to feel, you know,
[38:20] happiness was like, so exotic, ridiculous.
[38:24] It was just so far away. It was like another language.
[38:26] And I just could not even imagine that.
[38:29] So the opposite of depression isn't happiness.
[38:31] The opposite of depression is Wellness.
[38:33] It's just like not, you know, of being neutrally bored.
[38:37] And in fact, the moment I knew I wasn't always going to be
[38:41] depressed was my girlfriend, who's now my wife.
[38:45] Wife was setting up this business back when we lived in
[38:51] Leeds and we were, this was in the year 2001 I think.
[38:56] And I was trying to help her with press releases and sending
[39:00] emails. And I was literally thinking
[39:03] about an e-mail for a minute without thinking of some,
[39:07] without hallucinating or without thinking of some sort of like
[39:11] catastrophic thing going on in my brain.
[39:12] I was thinking of wording an e-mail and it was a very boring
[39:16] e-mail to like the Yorkshire Post or something.
[39:21] And I just thought, I've had a minute of thinking about an
[39:25] e-mail rather than thinking I'm going to die, I'm going to be in
[39:29] a straitjacket, everything feels terrible, what's going on with
[39:32] my heart, blah, blah, blah. And so just that minute of
[39:36] boring e-mail in my mind was like the moment I thought it's
[39:41] going to be two minutes of thinking about a boring e-mail
[39:44] or three minutes of thinking about something that's on TV.
[39:48] Oh, that's just nothing. So when you aim at the press
[39:51] state, what you're craving is what a lot of people are trying
[39:55] to escape from. You're craving normality without
[39:59] pain. You're craving, you know, the
[40:01] things that we take for granted and that we want to leave behind
[40:05] on a Friday night. You're actually craving what
[40:09] people are wanting to leave behind, so when you come out of
[40:12] it, you have this sense of gratitude for things you've
[40:16] never had before. I love that.
[40:20] I also love that you said that your favorite word is
[40:22] impossible. Yeah.
[40:25] Tell me why. I like the word impossible.
[40:30] I've used it a lot in my book. Sometimes I even wrote a book
[40:34] called Life Impossible, and it's because you.
[40:38] Didn't write Mission Impossible did.
[40:39] You I didn't write mission. Impossible.
[40:42] I wrote I want to write some children's stories about elves,
[40:45] and impossible was the ultimate swear word for enough to say,
[40:49] because, you know, if you're an elf, you've got to believe
[40:51] everything's possible, especially if you're working for
[40:54] Father Chris. But that's literally a different
[40:57] story. Sorry, but yeah, impossible.
[41:03] Because just in my very negative, pessimistic, depressed
[41:06] brain, I felt it was impossible to get better.
[41:10] So it's just as simple as that. And the reason I became
[41:15] published as an author, which had been probably a dream when I
[41:19] was a student to write books, but I didn't have the self
[41:26] esteem or belief in myself to do that because I thought it was
[41:30] impossible. So when you recover from
[41:35] depression, which you think is impossible to do because you've
[41:38] had depression for three years, you've had you've swung between
[41:42] panic attack, which drains you and then you end up in
[41:46] depression. And then just as you're slightly
[41:49] coming out of depression, you have a panic attack.
[41:51] So you have this horrendous swing between anxiety and
[41:53] depression, and you think, I'm never going to get out of that,
[41:57] I'm never going to get out of that.
[41:58] So when you do get out of that, you think, well, that was
[42:02] literally the most impossible thing and it was so impossible.
[42:06] I mean, you don't want to die if you think you're going to get
[42:09] out of something. So to really be suicidal, I must
[42:15] have felt there was absolutely no chance.
[42:19] There wasn't 1% chance I was going to get better.
[42:23] This was, this was what my brain was telling me.
[42:26] It was saying, this is new, this is where you are.
[42:30] There's no way you don't know what's going on with yourself.
[42:32] So there's no way you're ever going to know how to get out of
[42:35] this. That's it.
[42:37] And it's terrifying. And so it was impossible.
[42:40] It was like falling down a well and there's no ladder, there's
[42:45] no light. And you just, what do I do?
[42:48] So when you do, when you like, you're in that well and you find
[42:52] a tunnel that leads upwards, you're like, wow, I can
[42:56] literally that was the most impossible situation and I got
[42:59] out of it. So it gives you a kind of almost
[43:03] an arrogance where you feel like, well, what other
[43:08] impossible things could I do? Oh, I could get a book deal if I
[43:14] if I had that same perseverance that kept me alive.
[43:19] It kept me going. I can handle rejection letters.
[43:23] I can handle 50 rejection letters.
[43:25] I can just keep going until I get what I want.
[43:30] And it sounds really kind of like crazy and delusional.
[43:34] But then to myself, nothing was more crazy and delusional than
[43:38] getting better. So it was like I didn't mind.
[43:41] I can remember when I started writing and when I started
[43:43] writing. How old were you when you
[43:45] started writing? When did you get up there?
[43:46] Mid 20s, so like 2526. I'd hardly had any kind of
[43:53] proper work. I'd stayed in education as long
[43:55] as I can and then long summers in a beef, a master's degree in
[44:00] English, then another long summer in Ibiza.
[44:02] So the combination of like studying heavy duty 19th century
[44:08] literature and critical theory and then having a summer in
[44:12] Ibiza and over analysing everything on lots of drugs was
[44:18] not good and having no sleep. So, you know, my breakdown was
[44:22] kind of inevitable. But I'd had sort of like part
[44:26] time jobs in little three weeks here and there, but I've never
[44:29] had a proper job. And then I was suddenly
[44:31] agoraphobic and I, I, you know, the idea of being able to go out
[44:36] into a nine to five wasn't available to me at that point.
[44:41] So my dream for me, my dream job became my only option in the
[44:48] sense that what can I do? And this was like pre social
[44:52] media. This was very early naughties.
[44:55] So what could I do? And so I had my WH Smith A4
[45:01] refill pad and loads of barrows and I just started writing and
[45:06] typing it up. And yeah, I just, I wrote
[45:11] because that was the only thing. And also I noticed when I was
[45:14] writing, I wasn't thinking, especially when I was writing
[45:17] made-up stuff or writing fiction, I noticed I wasn't
[45:22] thinking about myself so much. So it became quite a mindful
[45:31] meditative exercise and I didn't care when I sent off my first 3
[45:37] chapters that I was being rejected and that some people
[45:41] were. Where were you?
[45:42] Sorry? You were rejected.
[45:44] Yeah, I was rejected lots by lots and lots of agents.
[45:49] But you never you never gave up. No, I liked it because I'd have
[45:55] liked to have been accepted more than rejected, obviously, but I
[46:00] like the process. It's that thing, isn't it?
[46:03] I reject, you know, you, the person who never has a rejection
[46:08] because you're not sending anything off is definitely not
[46:11] going to make it. The person who has loads of
[46:13] rejection letters at least has a chance of making it because
[46:16] they're sending something off. So the rejection back is a sign
[46:21] that you're out there, but you're alive, but you're having
[46:24] a some kind of dead end relationship with the world.
[46:29] And so, and I will say that was my, that was my education
[46:33] writing, because sometimes an agent would have actually read
[46:36] it and would have a comment and I'd take it on board.
[46:39] And so I had this strange resilience, which I don't really
[46:44] have as much now, but in my 20s I had a strange, you know, I had
[46:49] no contacts. I had, I knew no one.
[46:51] I had no right of friends, no publishing friends.
[46:54] I had nothing. But I had this insane like
[47:01] drive, Yeah, after depression when I was just like, I can, you
[47:06] know, it's, it does. What I, what I've got is I can
[47:11] be resilient and I can keep going.
[47:14] That's the skill I have. And so, yeah, I just kept on,
[47:19] kept on, kept on. And I think, you know, that's
[47:23] still the case. You need to have that
[47:24] resilience, especially in any kind of creative industry where
[47:29] you don't let a rejection stop you.
[47:33] You you use it as a kind of fuel that you're on the road do.
[47:37] You think that person would have ever thought younger Matt in
[47:41] their 20s that they would sold over 10 million books by now?
[47:46] No, def definitely not. I mean even like 10 years ago I
[47:52] wouldn't have thought that, but I would have thought, you know.
[47:57] Oh, I wasn't even aiming for that.
[47:59] I think I'm trying to remember what my aim was.
[48:02] I think my aim was to be published, to go into a bookshop
[48:06] and see a book and, and you know, the human mind being what
[48:11] it is, you, you tick off one thing and then you have the next
[48:14] thing. You think, well, I don't want a
[48:16] book just on the shelf. I want a book on the table.
[48:18] Then I don't want a book just on the table.
[48:20] I want it in, you know, every bookshop.
[48:22] When you want to be in the charts, then you want to be #1
[48:24] in the charts, then you want blah, blah.
[48:26] So yeah, it's annoying, but at the same time it keeps you
[48:29] having some sort of drive in terms of your career and that's
[48:35] been useful. So to keep going.
[48:37] But no, I did I yeah, it's all, it's been lovely.
[48:40] The loveliest thing is still the personal things, like when
[48:45] someone really responds to your work or relates to your work and
[48:50] they say something very, very personal about how it's helped
[48:53] them or their mother, or you hear from someone in a faraway
[48:57] place, it's mad. That's something so internal as
[49:00] your imagination can connect with people.
[49:02] That's nice. It is what I think, if you
[49:04] actually think about, I mean, we're speaking a lot about
[49:06] depression. It affects 280 million people
[49:09] worldwide. That's a lot of people.
[49:11] Yes. And that's like, I feel like
[49:15] with mental illness, the numbers are often lower than they would
[49:21] be. And this is what's frustrating
[49:23] about like, we live in a world where we think everything's over
[49:26] diagnosed and we think that the same.
[49:29] Well, this is the thing that's neurodiversity, right?
[49:30] People will now say everything's become very over diagnosed, over
[49:34] diagnosed. But my theory on that is that it
[49:37] was just under diagnosed and actually, you know, especially
[49:41] as well for women that masked, it was like naughty little boys
[49:44] that had ADHD were like never considered right?
[49:48] And women just learnt to mask and how can I fit into society?
[49:51] And that's essentially what obviously I did.
[49:53] But I had no attention span. So I would be told to stand out
[49:55] of the class because I was talking, but because I just was
[49:58] in my own little land the whole time.
[50:00] But I was never a naughty kid, no.
[50:02] And so I think now that you have this whole surgeons of people in
[50:05] their 30s, forties, fifties, 60s now getting diagnosed because
[50:08] they were all misdiagnosed. Of course, I mean, other
[50:13] galaxies have always existed before we had telescopes to see
[50:16] the other galaxies. And it's just like ADHD was
[50:21] always there. It was called other things.
[50:25] And in the future, I would bet it's going to be called
[50:28] something else because ADHD famously doesn't necessarily
[50:32] capture what it actually is. And I don't think the word
[50:35] depression captures what depression is in terms of mental
[50:38] illness. And so I think a lot of the
[50:40] terms we have for neurodiversity are going to change.
[50:43] But I feel yes, in terms of diagnosis, I feel we, I feel
[50:48] like there's so many more people who have stuff that they don't
[50:53] know about. I mean, and I think famously
[50:56] what happens is when you get a diagnosis, you start to look at
[51:00] your family, especially older generations, and think, ah, yes,
[51:09] OK, this might be where it stems from.
[51:12] And you know, so I feel like people are always scared by the
[51:17] sudden appearance of something. But the sudden appearance of
[51:22] something doesn't mean it's just arisen.
[51:25] It's just that we've found a way to see it and recognise that.
[51:28] And that's been true with physical diseases.
[51:31] You know, you don't go back 500 years and have people dying of
[51:36] all these specific, you know, you don't hear of people dying
[51:39] of prostate cancer in a Shakespeare play, but people
[51:42] have prostate cancer. You know, there's things that we
[51:45] know exist that we didn't know existed before.
[51:49] In the physical side of things, we accept it.
[51:51] But as soon as something becomes mental, people are so suspicious
[51:55] of neurodiversity and anything mental, even temporary disorders
[52:02] or illnesses, because I think it questions our everyone's sense
[52:10] of identity. I think even if you're not
[52:13] neurodiverse, even if you've got nothing going on with your mind
[52:17] that's exceptionally different to the mainstream, knowing that
[52:23] you're that minds are wired certain ways for certain things
[52:27] or knowing that our minds can trip up and fall into depression
[52:31] or something. I think it frightens people
[52:33] because it says I'm not in control and I'm not totally in
[52:41] charge of my own free will. And I think that's frightening
[52:45] for people. And I think, you know, when it's
[52:47] a physical thing, you don't have that existential philosophical
[52:52] rumination. But it is because life is
[52:55] fragile. Life is very fragile and the
[52:58] older you get, you accept that more.
[53:00] But I think certainly for younger people, and you're right
[53:02] about, you're right about women especially, you know, I, I think
[53:08] it's even the diagnostic criteria we have now.
[53:11] I think women are being missed. I think a lot of men are being
[53:15] missed too, but that might be for different reasons.
[53:17] I think that might be more to do with like men not, you know,
[53:22] it's the way that men famously don't go to the doctor as much.
[53:26] I think men are often not diagnosed almost out of choice
[53:30] because they might know something's going on with them,
[53:33] but they don't want to have the sort of tag of I'm different or
[53:37] I'm vulnerable. I think that can be true for
[53:40] women, you know, because I think anyone who's taught to sort of
[53:43] conform, it can be hard. But I think it's good that we're
[53:49] having conversations and that people like you are speaking
[53:51] about your experiences, which are possibly different to my
[53:55] experiences. And yeah, I mean, I again, I was
[53:59] always inverted commas naughty at school, but I never wanted to
[54:02] be. It was just branded that because
[54:04] I was restless and I was always moving about or staring out the
[54:11] window. I find eye contact hard as you
[54:13] might notice, but and I've always.
[54:17] And you find chit chat hard. I find chit chat hard.
[54:20] It depends what the chit chat's about.
[54:21] But yeah, lightweight chit chat I find, Yeah, I like deep
[54:25] conversations. I like this, Yeah, But I want
[54:28] every conversation to be like this.
[54:29] So if someone stops you in the street and asks how you're
[54:31] doing, they're not wanting this. Yeah, they're not wanting a
[54:34] podcast. The life story, yeah.
[54:36] They're not wanting a full sort of philosophical dialogue, but I
[54:39] can do that anywhere. But yeah, actually I also find
[54:45] crowds difficult and I'm a quiet people pleasing person.
[54:50] I don't ever like. I've got like a stereotype of
[54:52] autism is that you're not that empathetic or emotionally
[54:55] intelligent about reading such. I'm not.
[54:58] I feel like I'm the opposite. I get too bothered about what
[55:01] other people are feeling, but at the same time I can really put
[55:04] my foot in it and look rude without meaning to.
[55:08] A classic way I would have looked rude before is by just
[55:12] sort of almost walking out or tuning out of conversations.
[55:16] If there's a sort of group of people around the table, I'd
[55:19] just look at my phone. I'd look very rude or walk out
[55:23] or pretend I needed the toilet. And it was a way, I now realize
[55:28] of processing things that I hadn't been able to process.
[55:32] So I just need. So I still do like at Christmas
[55:36] if we've got a lot of extended family there and I love them all
[55:39] and I really am glad that they're there in my house.
[55:42] And I'm not anti social in that sense.
[55:44] It's just I need a little bit of time away to process it and then
[55:49] it catches up. It's like it's almost like
[55:51] interval training. It's.
[55:52] Like recharging a battery. Yeah, it's like if you're, you
[55:57] know, going all out, I'm a treadmill for 10 minutes and you
[56:00] need to walk for a little bit and then you can go back out
[56:01] again. And it's like that.
[56:03] It's just sort of mental cardio. I'm interrupting for one moment
[56:09] to ask one small favour. Please subscribe to the show.
[56:13] This helps it grow more than you know.
[56:16] And I'm so bad at asking this from you.
[56:18] I'm so bad at thinking about this.
[56:21] But you know, my goal was 100,000 to get to on YouTube and
[56:25] I really want to bring you more content and bigger episodes, and
[56:28] we can only do that with your help together.
[56:30] So please do hit subscribe. Thank you.
[56:33] You're so known for writing two. I mean, it's you're very
[56:36] exceptional that you write fiction and non fiction.
[56:38] There's not that many people that can swing that easily in
[56:41] between two. And your most famous book, the
[56:44] Midnight Library was I mean, it's kind of you go into the
[56:48] Internet and it's overwhelming how many people are writing
[56:51] reviews about the Midnight Library because it also brings
[56:54] in so many different philosophical points.
[56:57] And this is the thing, the regrets, different roads that we
[57:01] could have taken. What if we would have taken that
[57:03] road? What would have happened, you
[57:05] know, when I had Allen debotten on like, you will marry the
[57:08] wrong person. What if I married a different
[57:10] person? Like all of these thoughts that
[57:12] we have. Why do you think we're so kind
[57:16] of fixated on that way of thinking on what if that what
[57:19] happened and what made you write that?
[57:21] Because it's it's such an interesting concept.
[57:24] I think we're encouraged to be regretful even in the sort of
[57:30] present of our lives. I feel like we live in a world
[57:34] now where we're encouraged subconsciously, subliminally, to
[57:38] be dissatisfied. I feel like we have whole
[57:42] business models based on it. We have technology based on it.
[57:46] We live in a world of addiction, legitimized addiction.
[57:52] I think social media is a massive part of that.
[57:57] If you think of something like Instagram, what are you doing?
[58:01] You're literally looking at parallel lives.
[58:04] You cannot help but place yourself in the situations
[58:09] you're looking at. If someone's in a gorgeous
[58:11] holiday destination and you're at a bus stop and it's raining,
[58:17] you can't help. I think I would rather be there
[58:20] under that palm tree, even if you consciously, you know, oh,
[58:23] well, it's just set up. It's just fake.
[58:26] It's just, you know, well, I've taken that photo 100 times.
[58:29] You still think, Yeah, but I'd rather be doing that than here.
[58:32] So we live in a world of constant comparison, and I do it
[58:38] and I realize it doesn't matter what stage you're at in your
[58:41] career, you can always compare. There's always going to be
[58:44] someone always selling more books, getting better reviews,
[58:48] always. There's always a level, even if
[58:51] you're at the very, very top, you think well.
[58:55] Tomorrow can't be taken away. Yeah, yeah.
[58:57] That younger author there is coming up very fast.
[58:59] You know, there's always something to be envious of you
[59:02] if you if you're that way inclined.
[59:04] And so you sort of need to go through different levels.
[59:07] You need like I'm looking in the sense that I've I've been a
[59:09] struggling writer. I've been a relatively
[59:11] successful writer I've had. You are very successful.
[59:14] I would take relatively out of that.
[59:16] Well, that's just let's just leave.
[59:18] Yeah. Well, it's, yeah.
[59:19] I've got, you know, a lot of people have read my books and
[59:22] that's what I've wanted. And it's, you know, I, I, yeah.
[59:27] Very humble, but I will have to recrate you on that as a Fact
[59:30] Check. Well, you have to be a bit
[59:34] dissatisfied, though. I feel like to write the next
[59:36] book, you have to be a little bit dissatisfied with what
[59:38] you've just like, you know, you have to sort of always be
[59:42] correcting yourself, but at the same time, you're right, you
[59:44] have to be appreciative of what you've got, but.
[59:46] Isn't like, why are we also regretful?
[59:48] Like we're always looking back on the things that we could have
[59:50] done, should have done. Did we take the right path?
[59:52] And that is the whole part of the Midnight library.
[59:54] I mean, it is such a fascinating concept and.
[59:57] I feel like a lot of a lot of crises that people have in life
[1:00:03] is because they think they've took the wrong turn somewhere,
[1:00:05] yeah. Exactly.
[1:00:06] But you can never know if you took the wrong turn somewhere,
[1:00:09] you could win the lottery and be looking down at your numbers so
[1:00:14] ecstatic and that's what causes you to get run over.
[1:00:16] You could just you could have the best, you know, you.
[1:00:20] There's so many random things that are unknowable and I know
[1:00:27] just from my own life, but a lot of the bad things that have
[1:00:30] happened to me turned out to be the good things, you know?
[1:00:34] A horrendous breakdown turns into a way to help other people
[1:00:38] at some future point down the road.
[1:00:41] A terrible experience becomes something that can fuel
[1:00:45] creativity, so. Do you think that you'll empathy
[1:00:50] them is because you've had so much pain that you can now
[1:00:53] physically feel that pain in other people?
[1:00:56] I think when you've had a pain that you can't articulate, you
[1:01:01] then don't need other people to articulate their pain.
[1:01:05] You know, you can kind of, it's not quite telepathy, but it's an
[1:01:09] understanding that people are going through more than showing
[1:01:14] any situation. So I think that I think ADHD as
[1:01:22] well are that neurodiverse feeling in your mind where
[1:01:26] you've had to act a certain way that's opposite to what you're
[1:01:30] feeling. So you have to sit still at
[1:01:33] school, you have to be patient during a two or three hour exam.
[1:01:38] You have to do things that are so against the grain that you've
[1:01:43] had all that time and your mind, while your body is still, your
[1:01:48] mind is going off into other places and other people and
[1:01:51] other imaginings. So your imagination grows out of
[1:01:55] that forced stillness of forced conformity.
[1:01:58] So your brain is escaping where your body calms or where the
[1:02:03] situation dictates. You must stay confined in a
[1:02:06] certain place or a certain town. So that imagining is very much
[1:02:13] linked to empathy as well, because you're sort of able to
[1:02:16] see other situations because you're putting yourself in other
[1:02:18] situations all the time. And that's a blessing and a
[1:02:21] curse. Because going back to your thing
[1:02:24] about comparison, you're constantly aware that there's
[1:02:30] alternate versions of you everywhere.
[1:02:33] And you're thinking, am I the best one or even in the best
[1:02:39] half of them? You know, I could I be living
[1:02:41] better? And you know, it's that thing of
[1:02:46] every job opportunity or relationship or health situation
[1:02:55] or whatever is anything you've passed by, You think, what would
[1:03:00] my life have ended up? And that can be useful or it can
[1:03:06] be paralysing. But I think for me, writing
[1:03:12] about that, writing a novel about that was a way to get over
[1:03:19] that by realising that it's just unknowable.
[1:03:24] We're always a first draft. We're always just one line for
[1:03:28] our life. We can't be every branch and the
[1:03:33] only real way to waste life is to waste yourself in regret and,
[1:03:39] you know, wishing for something but you you didn't do.
[1:03:43] You can change the future, but you can't change what was
[1:03:46] behind. Which type of star do you prefer
[1:03:48] writing? Well, the reason I've written so
[1:03:51] many different is because I always want to feel like I'm
[1:03:55] doing something new every time. And I don't know if that's ADHD,
[1:03:58] but I, I feel like for me, the best way to write a book is to
[1:04:02] always imagine you're writing the first book.
[1:04:07] And so you've just been through that situation with your real
[1:04:09] first book. And in a weird way, I always
[1:04:13] want to be back where you are because I feel like that is kind
[1:04:17] of there's AI know, it's terrifying.
[1:04:19] And I'm not, I'm not belittling that.
[1:04:21] But it's kind of freeing to sort of put yourself out there who
[1:04:26] you are in that moment because it comes harder as you go on to
[1:04:30] realize the kind of writer you are.
[1:04:32] So you sometimes think, OK, I'll do something completely new.
[1:04:35] So I'll write a children's book. I don't have any ideas left for
[1:04:40] children's books, for instance, because my children are now 18
[1:04:44] and 16. So unless I want to get inspired
[1:04:48] by Resident Evil, I'm not. Oh, you know, Tyler, The
[1:04:54] Creator. You know, it's different to
[1:04:57] writing about what I was writing about 10 years ago.
[1:05:00] Do. You know something that I
[1:05:01] absolutely loved hearing you say, Hey, first of all, was that
[1:05:05] your favorite self help book or no?
[1:05:06] You think the wisest self help book is Winnie the Pooh?
[1:05:11] Yes, when it is definitely my comfort book.
[1:05:15] Winnie the Pooh is, you know, because I often, especially
[1:05:19] since after writing about mental health, I get asked for my
[1:05:22] favorite mental health book, my favorite self help book.
[1:05:26] And it's genuinely the Winnie the Pooh books because they
[1:05:30] represent every single aspect of mental health condition.
[1:05:37] So the character I possibly relate to most is Tigger,
[1:05:41] because, you know, it's got a lot going on.
[1:05:43] It's got ADHD definitely. You've got Piglet with anxiety,
[1:05:53] you've got Al who's definitely dyslexic, but it's got other
[1:05:58] sort of neuro diverse things going on.
[1:06:00] You've got Eeyore who's depressed and grumpy and feels
[1:06:07] like I used to feel. And I would say Winnie the Pooh
[1:06:15] is an addict to honey and gets into all sorts of problems.
[1:06:22] And, you know, I feel like Winnie the Pooh has that kind of
[1:06:30] lust for life that an addict can have, but then ends up stuck in
[1:06:35] a hole or a tree. I'm getting stung.
[1:06:38] And who else is in Winnie the Pooh?
[1:06:40] Oh, and then you've got Christopher Robin, haven't you?
[1:06:44] Who's hallucinating everything. So it's all going on in
[1:06:48] Christopher Robbins mind and he probably needs help.
[1:06:51] So yeah, Winnie the Pooh. I just feel like it is like and
[1:06:55] I think it was conscious. I think a a mail knew what he
[1:06:57] was doing because he was well not about the terms in terms of
[1:07:00] neurodiversity, but he was writing about the mind because
[1:07:02] he was traumatized from war and shell shock and what wasn't yet
[1:07:08] called PTSDS. So he was writing his way
[1:07:11] through that. And I often think that like
[1:07:15] people expect, because I wrote a book once called The Comfort
[1:07:18] Book, and people expect you to be this very sort of soft,
[1:07:24] gentle, easygoing person. If you write a book like The
[1:07:27] Comfort Book, often you're writing about comfort and Winnie
[1:07:31] the Pooh or easy things or children's stories because you
[1:07:33] feel the opposite of that. So you're writing your own
[1:07:37] therapy, you're writing what you want to be at that moment.
[1:07:43] And I've always tried to be honest about that because I
[1:07:46] think there's a danger with the whole concept of self help in
[1:07:50] the sense that people expect or even imagine that they have the
[1:07:57] answers. And I think that's a dangerous
[1:08:00] role for a person to feel. There's a quote by the novelist
[1:08:06] David Foster Wallace who says the most dangerous part of
[1:08:11] himself is the part that feels he's special or different to
[1:08:15] other people. And I think as soon as you are
[1:08:19] put in or put yourself in that situation, it's not healthy for
[1:08:23] you or for people around you, so.
[1:08:27] I felt like ego, right? I felt like a very heavy ego and
[1:08:31] shadow self. Yeah, and it's a very lonely
[1:08:34] place to be. And I will be honest that after
[1:08:38] I wrote Reasons to Stay Alive, I was often put in and putting
[1:08:42] myself in that kind of role. I've always feeling like I had
[1:08:47] to say something wise, as if I was Socrates or Yoda, you know,
[1:08:55] having to churn out like, wisdom because people would come to
[1:09:00] you, like, expectantly. And it's like, you know, beyond
[1:09:04] what I wrote in that book, I have nothing else really to say
[1:09:08] on that topic because as I said, I'm not a doctor.
[1:09:12] I'm just someone who went through that.
[1:09:14] But I think I think there's an interesting middle ground where
[1:09:18] you can know you're being helpful to someone via your own
[1:09:23] imperfections, via your own limitations.
[1:09:27] If you're honest enough about what you don't know and what
[1:09:32] you're not good at, that in itself, paradoxically, can be
[1:09:36] helpful. Well, I guess that's the
[1:09:38] illusion on social media right now, right, Is that there's so
[1:09:41] much self help, there's so many gurus, there's so many people
[1:09:43] that if you do XY and Z, you will become this state.
[1:09:48] And I guess that's the difference.
[1:09:49] You know, you can read someone's story, you can feel seen.
[1:09:52] I think the biggest power in what you did and reasons to stay
[1:09:55] alive is you've got people just to feel seen and to start
[1:09:58] exploring themselves more and starting to relate to
[1:10:00] themselves, but also giving them hope to there's something more
[1:10:03] out there. And there is a really important
[1:10:06] language, just how you speak to people, how you approach people,
[1:10:10] that can make people feel that they can open up and not shut
[1:10:13] down. That's a really important like
[1:10:15] moment in someone's life. If you say something that can
[1:10:18] offend someone or feel like they're being judged, you shut
[1:10:21] someone off immediately. But if you feel that something
[1:10:24] is very open and unjudgmental and curious, then you can try
[1:10:28] and help that person feel a little bit more seen.
[1:10:30] And I think that's the difference.
[1:10:32] But on social media doesn't always come across that way.
[1:10:36] And so there's that kind of illusion that if I do this thing
[1:10:40] or I buy that product, I will become XYZ.
[1:10:43] And that's the dangerous landscape.
[1:10:46] I feel, and I see a lot in other people and I'm deliberately the
[1:10:51] opposite of this now, but I see on social media a lot of people
[1:10:56] becoming brands of their own misery.
[1:11:00] They turn like the most painful experience into life, and
[1:11:03] obviously the one that gets a lot of attention because a lot
[1:11:06] of people understand it and it's useful.
[1:11:09] And I believe that people who start off very authentically
[1:11:14] talking about something very real to them, but seeing the
[1:11:16] response feel a kind of obligation or desire to stay in
[1:11:22] that pain and to almost market your own pain to a point where
[1:11:29] it's hard to tell where reality ends and your own sort of self
[1:11:34] branding begins. So whatever it is that you've
[1:11:38] got going on, it's a thing that didn't really exist pre social
[1:11:41] media, but that that self branding of experience and what
[1:11:48] it does to you is kind of interesting.
[1:11:50] And I felt it was having a negative effect on my mental
[1:11:54] health. Just the sheer act of going out
[1:11:56] every night, talking about depression and talking about
[1:11:59] that moment in Ibiza where I nearly died every night in a in
[1:12:05] a way that wasn't, you know, in front of the crowd.
[1:12:08] So you're kind of performing it. It was like, not helpful.
[1:12:14] Yes, it's good to talk, but is it good to talk every single day
[1:12:17] about the same terrible thing over and over in a way where it
[1:12:21] becomes a kind of script and you become very sort of detached
[1:12:24] from yourself? Which is why, like, after I did
[1:12:28] those mental health books, I wrote children's stories about
[1:12:31] Father Christmas. I wrote a novel about an
[1:12:34] immortal human. I just did very sort of
[1:12:36] fantastical things. And The Midnight Library was a
[1:12:40] kind of return to mental health, but in a very fantasy way.
[1:12:44] And then with a person that clearly wasn't me because there
[1:12:47] was a woman and it was, you know, different situation,
[1:12:51] location, age, everything. And that was easy to do because
[1:12:55] it was fiction. And I think in a way, for me,
[1:12:59] writing fiction I find more free because I can actually be more
[1:13:02] truthful about myself via a character.
[1:13:07] So while we're on social media, I've got to talk to you about it
[1:13:09] because I found it quite funny that you wrote a couple of weeks
[1:13:14] ago, which is actually when I reached out to you about because
[1:13:17] then I saw your, your new book that's coming out.
[1:13:20] But you said losing followers in 2026 is the equivalent of
[1:13:24] gaining followers in 2016. It feels like an improvement.
[1:13:28] Yeah, it's like exfoliation. It it feels good.
[1:13:35] Tell me more about that. Well, stupidly, I had in my
[1:13:39] head, like, in fact, it's really embarrassing to admit, but I
[1:13:42] did. I used to be obsessed with like
[1:13:43] follower counts and things like that.
[1:13:45] And I'd found ways to do it. I'd found ways for me where I'd
[1:13:50] post a certain thing. I know that's an extra 1000
[1:13:53] followers. That's an extra 2000 followers.
[1:13:55] And you start repeating and think and, and after a while it
[1:13:58] felt like a trap, felt like I was trapping myself into
[1:14:01] becoming this person who would say certain things and get a
[1:14:06] certain response, but none of it was real because I was just
[1:14:08] saying it to get that response. And so now I try and be, I mean,
[1:14:13] I'm probably still as fooled by the algorithm as much as anyone
[1:14:16] else, but I try and be myself as much as possible.
[1:14:21] I'm not repeating myself. So as with books, I'm trying to
[1:14:25] do new things where possible. And so if I want to talk about
[1:14:29] music, I'll talk about music. You know, I'll try and treat my
[1:14:33] social media now like the way people in 2008, the way you
[1:14:39] aren't treated Facebook or. Twitter.
[1:14:43] Yeah, or Twitter and just sort of be really amateur and real
[1:14:48] and which is good because I'm quite naturally amateur and
[1:14:52] people will wonder why I'm published when my spelling is so
[1:14:56] bad and. That makes me feel so much
[1:14:59] better as a dyslexic. Well, I think, I think dyslexic
[1:15:05] and, and just people with crap spelling like me.
[1:15:08] I'm not dyslexic, but I am for a writer.
[1:15:10] I'm, I'm quite sloppy with grammar and very much needing
[1:15:13] editors. But I think 10 years ago there
[1:15:17] was a perfectionism everywhere in every sense, in terms of
[1:15:21] looks, in terms of style, in terms of lifestyle.
[1:15:25] And I feel like there's such a backlash to that in some ways.
[1:15:30] And I mean, it's partly AI because we're never going, you
[1:15:34] know, if AI becomes absolutely perfect and all knowing and does
[1:15:39] everything faster than we can, is better and wiser and more
[1:15:43] knowledgeable than we are, then what are we?
[1:15:47] If we're aiming for that, if we're aiming for perfection and
[1:15:50] speed and looking like AI, the perfect people, then we're not
[1:15:57] going to be able to compete with that.
[1:15:58] So we have to embrace the flawed side of humanity, the imperfect.
[1:16:04] And I think people, I've noticed people were responding to that
[1:16:06] more. I feel like I lose followers.
[1:16:09] I certainly don't gain social media followers anymore like I
[1:16:13] used to, but I feel like I've actually made more like friends
[1:16:18] on social media and it feels more real.
[1:16:21] So that to me feels better. I mean, it's easy for me to say
[1:16:26] like at this point in my career where I'm not trying to grow or
[1:16:30] anything. But for me mentally, it just
[1:16:32] feels nicer to just have real conversations with people and
[1:16:35] just talk in a real way rather than overthinking everything.
[1:16:42] And I think that's the danger with social media.
[1:16:43] If you have a social media thinking, you can't enjoy a view
[1:16:46] without thinking, oh, I should post that sunset.
[1:16:49] Or you can't have a thought without thinking.
[1:16:52] How could I shape that into a tweet?
[1:16:55] Or, you know, you can't have a little moment to yourself
[1:16:58] without thinking. How do I publicize myself?
[1:17:02] And I think it's just nice to just keep aspects of yourself to
[1:17:08] yourself. And when you put yourself on
[1:17:10] social media, you're actually not trying, you're just being.
[1:17:16] Does the losing followers side affect you?
[1:17:18] Is that because you're very kind of outspoken politically that
[1:17:20] you think that you use followers?
[1:17:22] Or do you think it's? What do you think it is that?
[1:17:24] Well, definitely, I mean the political thing can go both ways
[1:17:28] because you can get a lot of followers as well by being
[1:17:31] political. Because especially now in our
[1:17:34] sort of like hyper divisive times, I actually find sometimes
[1:17:38] the political posts are the ones that you know, where you do
[1:17:41] actually gain more than you lose.
[1:17:44] But. What do you think makes you lose
[1:17:46] the followers? Total inconsistency and just
[1:17:49] like people following you for one thing, and then you're
[1:17:51] giving them another thing, which I'm like an anti brand and like,
[1:17:57] so they, they think, oh, like I'm following Matt Hague because
[1:18:00] he's so optimistic and inspiring.
[1:18:04] And then I'll be there saying I think there's going to be a
[1:18:06] nuclear war next week. I don't, I don't follow him for
[1:18:09] this, you know, so I'm like very confusing.
[1:18:14] I think, I feel like to be human is to be confusing.
[1:18:17] So the more like, and I feel like social media encourages us
[1:18:21] to simplify ourselves. So I feel like it's it's I like
[1:18:26] people who are very clearly themselves.
[1:18:32] Do you struggle with the comparison side of social media
[1:18:35] and like, how do you deal with that?
[1:18:37] Well, I, I'm getting better at it.
[1:18:41] I used to be really bad and I used to deal with it by being
[1:18:51] quite insecure and sort of like, you know, I don't know, you talk
[1:18:57] about some achievement or you you'd, you'd seek validation and
[1:19:04] which only ever makes you look more insecure.
[1:19:10] So I think I deal with it by understanding that the rest of
[1:19:17] life is better and elsewhere and the good things in your life.
[1:19:23] And certainly like as you get older and like your parents have
[1:19:27] health issues or your in laws have health issues and you lose
[1:19:31] people along the way. Your priorities, you don't even
[1:19:35] have to try. Just time and ageing itself
[1:19:38] gives shifts you towards a sense of time and how, you know, lucky
[1:19:47] we are to be here and that if you spent your 20s and 30s
[1:19:54] worrying about things like social media followers or
[1:19:58] status, then you don't want to stay doing that forever.
[1:20:04] You want to sort of like, I don't know, phone your mum?
[1:20:08] That's good for your mental health.
[1:20:09] That's a tool for your mental health and for her.
[1:20:12] Actually, yeah. So like, you've got kids who are
[1:20:14] 16 and 18. How do you talk to them about
[1:20:18] this? Well, you know, I don't know,
[1:20:21] I've got, you know, I think every generation tries to
[1:20:25] correct their parents and their parents generation and ends up
[1:20:29] making exactly the same amount of mistakes.
[1:20:31] And I think I'm very proud of like being open with my kids
[1:20:36] about mental health and stuff. But then it's a balance between
[1:20:43] being open but not giving them any sense of a self fulfilling
[1:20:47] prophecy for them to know that just because their father went
[1:20:52] through something, it doesn't mean that they're going to go
[1:20:54] through something. But one thing I think is
[1:20:57] brilliant about a lot of this younger generation is that they
[1:21:02] don't beat themselves up about things that my generation used
[1:21:07] to. Like my son, when he was
[1:21:10] diagnosed with autistic, it wasn't a thing that swung him
[1:21:14] either way. He wasn't like proud of being
[1:21:16] autistic, but he wasn't embarrassed of being autistic.
[1:21:19] He just simply knows he's autistic, hasn't changed him in
[1:21:23] any way. He's still who he is.
[1:21:26] Whereas for me, that would have been such a issue.
[1:21:30] And so I think there's an acceptance of things which I
[1:21:34] really like. I think, I don't know, I think
[1:21:36] you, you try your best and before you have kids, you
[1:21:40] imagine all sorts of things. You imagine you're never going
[1:21:43] to give them technology until like 25?
[1:21:49] 60. Yeah, so they're 16.
[1:21:52] And then, you know, there comes the point where they're out and
[1:21:56] their friends have all got a phone because, you know, it's
[1:22:00] safe. You know, they want to be able
[1:22:02] to contact you. So you get them a phone and then
[1:22:04] then their friends are all on this.
[1:22:05] And so you have that and but I also think what I love about
[1:22:11] kids and what I don't understand as they get older is it's a two
[1:22:14] way street. I feel at this point I'm
[1:22:17] learning more from them than they are from me.
[1:22:20] I'm like, they are very wise instinctively and they've got a
[1:22:25] lot to give. And I feel like the biggest
[1:22:27] parenting mistake is to not listen to your kids or to
[1:22:30] realise they've got stuff to give.
[1:22:32] And a lot of education and a lot of growing up is actually taking
[1:22:36] yourself away from yourself. And so the job of a parent isn't
[1:22:39] just to change these creatures into something else for society,
[1:22:43] it's to keep hold of what they've got instinctively.
[1:22:47] And I think, you know, I'm very proud my kids that we've managed
[1:22:51] to do that. But yeah, and we home school as
[1:22:55] well, which has been quite challenging at times.
[1:22:59] Imagine, I think, people connected to that and prove it
[1:23:02] and everyone. Yeah, exactly.
[1:23:03] And that gives you an extra pressure because you don't have
[1:23:06] that option of blaming the school.
[1:23:09] You know what I mean If they're failing at something over got
[1:23:12] some dysfunction going on, you can't say well it's just the
[1:23:15] teachers fault. It's everything is you.
[1:23:18] But yeah, no, it's, it's great having teenagers because it's
[1:23:24] impossible to become too up in the air or too arrogant when
[1:23:32] you've got two teenagers trolling you from breakfast
[1:23:35] onwards. You just have to satellite, stay
[1:23:37] in your place. They don't let you, I feel.
[1:23:39] Like you took on your mum's role who was a head teacher to now
[1:23:41] doing that partly yourself. You're like the head.
[1:23:43] Teacher in the house. Yeah, well, I, we don't, you
[1:23:46] know, they're at the point now where they're doing it all
[1:23:48] themselves. And Lucas is no longer in sort
[1:23:52] of proper curriculum education. He's doing his own stuff.
[1:23:56] And my daughter, she's just sort of like she wants to pursue
[1:24:00] music and she's going all out on learning the drums, guitar,
[1:24:03] piano and everything and often teaching herself by YouTube.
[1:24:06] So they're very sort of like self styled.
[1:24:08] So our job is kind of done now in terms of that.
[1:24:11] And it's just more. Yeah, it's just, it's just
[1:24:16] interesting. You're kind of always grieving
[1:24:18] for them being younger, but you're also excited for what's
[1:24:22] to come so. I was thinking about this before
[1:24:25] I talked today and I was like, there's so much to talk to you
[1:24:26] about. And also you sent me an amazing
[1:24:28] list of all the different things that you wanted to touch on
[1:24:30] today. And then I had this thought.
[1:24:32] I was like, from all the interviews you've done, from all
[1:24:35] the things that you feel that you've kind of accomplished,
[1:24:38] what's the one question that you wish someone would have asked
[1:24:40] you that that they've never asked you?
[1:24:42] I don't know if it's like one question, but I feel like I feel
[1:24:47] like it's always nice to be asked as you asked right away
[1:24:52] how you're feeling because I think it's quite different to
[1:24:57] how are you where it's just polite and you expect how are
[1:25:00] you feeling is something that as soon as you're asked it, you're
[1:25:03] put into a space of like, how am I feeling?
[1:25:06] And like it makes you sort of mindful of yourself.
[1:25:09] And I feel like with my fast mind, I don't think about that
[1:25:14] enough. So I think you've already asked
[1:25:16] it. Oh.
[1:25:17] That's great, very complex. But this podcast, I connect a
[1:25:22] lot to that because I think when I was reading, you know, you
[1:25:26] said earlier, you know, I didn't ever want to do therapy and then
[1:25:29] you ended up going to therapy and you said, I thought I'd go
[1:25:33] there and I'd just blame my mum for everything.
[1:25:34] And actually what I realised is that it wasn't that it was my
[1:25:37] neurodiversity. Yes, it was me and it was my
[1:25:41] mind. And even if it was, you know, my
[1:25:46] mum, it was sort of like stuff beyond her control.
[1:25:49] It was just genetics and, you know, things your parents passed
[1:25:53] down. My mum was adopted, so she's
[1:25:55] never known who her parents are. I don't know who my biological
[1:25:58] maternal grandparents are. And so I think my mum has always
[1:26:03] struggled with that. And I think I, I've had that
[1:26:06] passed down to me. She doesn't really know her.
[1:26:08] She's always struggled with place in society.
[1:26:12] But even in terms of like, you know, what her role should be,
[1:26:15] what class she is, what everything, she's just doesn't
[1:26:18] know. And so I've had a lot about
[1:26:20] insecurity myself. But all of that, you know, I
[1:26:24] feel like we all inherit stuff from our parents, but Freudian
[1:26:30] like psychology, pinning it all down and blaming it all and
[1:26:34] directing it all to your mother is just such a sort of limiting
[1:26:38] idea because you're just in this chain of being from going back
[1:26:42] generations. That's everyone is just a
[1:26:44] creature of a context. And especially nowadays where we
[1:26:47] have, you know, we're living such an unnatural world to how
[1:26:51] we're not meant to live that I feel like any sensitive person
[1:26:56] at some point is going to feel insane in an insane world.
[1:27:00] And I don't think that's to do with my parents.
[1:27:04] I feel like me with my brain in any upbringing would have hit a
[1:27:09] crisis at some point. Because I say that because when
[1:27:11] I was having therapy, and I had it quite young, because I used
[1:27:15] to live in New York when I was modelling and when I had my
[1:27:17] first career. And I remember going to a
[1:27:19] different party and everyone at their dinner party was like,
[1:27:22] who's your therapist? Who's your therapist?
[1:27:24] Because the Americans are very thought coming in therapy.
[1:27:26] And I felt so uncomfortable as an English person.
[1:27:29] And I was like, what do you mean I don't have a therapist?
[1:27:31] And it was like this huge stigma shock for me.
[1:27:34] And so it actually kind of allowed me to dip my feet in and
[1:27:36] become curious because I was like, well, this is when I'm
[1:27:39] this socially awkward one that doesn't have therapy, whereas in
[1:27:42] the Uki would be the socially awkward one that did have
[1:27:44] therapy. So it made me like dip my feet
[1:27:47] into go, well, let me explore this.
[1:27:48] Like, what is this? But then what I realised is the
[1:27:52] part that therapy missed for me was the somatic work, which is
[1:27:56] about like feeling in your body. And I think understanding ADHD,
[1:28:01] you can be very cerebral when in your mind a lot, but you kind of
[1:28:04] disconnect a lot from how you're feeling in your body, like the
[1:28:07] sensations. So like the big thing for me was
[1:28:10] going back to body work and actually that was way more
[1:28:12] therapeutic. Well, that's yeah for me.
[1:28:15] Like, how are you feeling today, isn't it?
[1:28:16] We say that rather than how are you thinking today, Like how are
[1:28:19] you feeling today is mental and physical all at once.
[1:28:22] My big thing. And it's just something I came
[1:28:24] to on my own thinking in terms of my own experience of
[1:28:27] depression. And the big surprise for me
[1:28:29] about when I became I'll was we have this thing called mental
[1:28:34] illness, but it's all physical. Like it's all, I mean, even if
[1:28:39] you think it's just fine to above your neck, your brain,
[1:28:42] what is if it's not physical, everything's physical.
[1:28:45] Your nervous systems partly in your gut anyway.
[1:28:48] And ever you know, the symptoms I was having, but I described to
[1:28:52] a doctor were often physical. It was aching, it was
[1:28:57] palpitations, it was irregular heartbeats, it was sweating, it
[1:29:03] was breathlessness, it was tight chest headaches, you know, it's
[1:29:08] physical. So it was all physical and the
[1:29:12] mental stuff around it was also physical.
[1:29:16] And this very clear sort of line we have and we've had sort of
[1:29:21] like since the Enlightenment between mind and body is just
[1:29:26] sort of breaking down, I think. And I, I just think it doesn't.
[1:29:30] And I, I, I had some pushback actually when I was talking very
[1:29:34] personally and very subjectively about things that helped my
[1:29:37] mental health because often it was physical things.
[1:29:40] It wasn't like stereotypically medicinal things.
[1:29:44] It wasn't pharmaceuticals. And I've never, you know, judged
[1:29:50] and in fact have been jealous of people and know people where
[1:29:53] they've had the pills and they were the right for them.
[1:29:56] And it worked. But for me, my route back was
[1:30:01] often physical. I mean, getting out panic
[1:30:03] attacks. That was simply for me via
[1:30:06] running every morning. My dad was a runner.
[1:30:10] He's still alive, but he's got bad knees.
[1:30:13] So he's a swimmer now, but he was a runner and I.
[1:30:16] Suppose he's got bad news. Yeah, exactly.
[1:30:19] Exactly. But he he still looks very, you
[1:30:23] know, he, he well, every time I put a picture of me and my dad
[1:30:26] up on the Internet, they say, how old's your brother?
[1:30:29] And I was like, you know, he's, he, he we did a half marathon
[1:30:33] together just at the very start of COVID, before things had
[1:30:37] closed down and I was struggling to keep up with my dad.
[1:30:40] So my dad was always very healthy and he was always a
[1:30:42] runner and but he made me go running because I was back
[1:30:47] having a breakdown, living with my parents.
[1:30:49] And the one thing, the one intervention he did was told me
[1:30:52] to go running. And I felt dreadful after the
[1:30:54] run. I felt so heavy and drained and
[1:30:57] that I kept somehow doing it because when you've got no
[1:31:01] options, you just take what's there.
[1:31:02] So I kept running every day. And then slowly I realized it
[1:31:06] was sort of alleviating things, even if not permanently.
[1:31:12] While I was running, I couldn't have a panic attack because I
[1:31:14] was having the symptoms of a panic attack while I was
[1:31:16] running. Because your brain knows why
[1:31:19] you're breathless, your brain knows why you're sweating, your
[1:31:21] brain knows why your heart's going 100 miles an hour.
[1:31:24] So you know, and it's kind of makes sense.
[1:31:28] And just physical things like going outside or eating right or
[1:31:34] having your routine boring, boring things to talk about are
[1:31:40] so revolutionary and overlooked. 100% I mean, when I had, I think
[1:31:47] I actually spoke to you about him before I sat down, Doctor
[1:31:50] Andrew Hanson, Andrews Hanson, he says that, you know, when you
[1:31:54] run, you increase your blood flow to your brain by 20% to the
[1:31:58] prefrontal lobes. So that's actually why it's
[1:32:00] helping you because it's bringing more oxygen, it's
[1:32:01] bringing more blood. And he says whenever you have a
[1:32:04] hard task to do, like writing or doing an exam, go for a run
[1:32:08] because that hour afterwards is when your brain is the most
[1:32:11] prime to focus and be calm because of the increased blood
[1:32:14] flow. I basically relate to that.
[1:32:17] Like when I'm in like full blown novel mode, I have to run, I
[1:32:20] have a treadmill and I have to just do 5K in the morning and
[1:32:23] then I can write. And it's, yeah, definitely a
[1:32:28] thing I've noticed. And other things like, I think,
[1:32:35] I think we were talking about it before, but you, you've done
[1:32:37] another podcast, haven't you, where you're talking about what
[1:32:41] you think about health and how that makes health.
[1:32:44] Like if you think something's healthy, it becomes healthier.
[1:32:47] Yeah. Who are you talking to?
[1:32:48] Was that? I that was really me saying it
[1:32:51] too. That's in the conscious of my
[1:32:53] book. Yes, of course.
[1:32:54] That's my book, and so that was probably me giving my theories
[1:32:58] too. I totally relate to that in in
[1:33:01] some ridiculous ways, like even very healthy foods sometimes I
[1:33:05] used to get convinced were bad for me because like if I'd had
[1:33:07] like a panic attack after eating a banana, I think it's the
[1:33:11] potassium in the banana has given me a panic attack.
[1:33:15] And then you'd associate that with that and then you sort of
[1:33:19] realise it's not true and that's that sort of disordered thinking
[1:33:23] which you can get into and you have to break out of.
[1:33:25] But also, you know, just having water.
[1:33:30] I never used to drink water. And just things like that keeps
[1:33:33] me sort of like alert enough to not sort of like have that mid
[1:33:38] afternoon slump. Yeah.
[1:33:40] Well, one of my favorite podcasts I did was with a
[1:33:43] neuroscientist doctor, Lisa Feldman Barrett from Stanford,
[1:33:46] and she talks all about the body budget.
[1:33:48] And actually she so her daughter really suffered with depression.
[1:33:52] And so she was kind of at her wit's end.
[1:33:54] And she was like, is it pharmaceuticals that I do or is
[1:33:57] it like other things? And she was saying about like,
[1:34:00] actually everything runs on a budget.
[1:34:02] And so if you are deprived instead of nutrients, if you're
[1:34:05] deprived in exercise, that your body is taking this budgeting
[1:34:08] into elsewhere of the muscles and it's being deprived from
[1:34:11] your brain. And so if you are not in a part
[1:34:13] with like your sleep, your movement, the right nutrients,
[1:34:16] your brain is in a deficit. And your brain is amazing at
[1:34:19] like using other things to pull it out.
[1:34:22] And so when you should be looking at depression as a
[1:34:23] treatment, you've got to be like, am I giving it the right
[1:34:27] type of thing so it's not on a deficit?
[1:34:29] And so when you have good sleep, you're kind of like bringing
[1:34:31] that back to the to the base level.
[1:34:33] Yes. And it was a really interesting
[1:34:35] concept for me to think about actually, when we think about
[1:34:38] mental health as a whole, like it is about like body budgeting.
[1:34:42] Yes, and ADHD as well, because that's dopamine production,
[1:34:46] isn't it? And exercise can help with that.
[1:34:49] And yeah. And not using social media
[1:34:52] because that's a dopamine like reward centre.
[1:34:56] And also the blue lights just from the screen.
[1:34:59] Definitely, definitely for me, exercise has been very sort of
[1:35:02] medicinal. And also I just think like doing
[1:35:09] an activity that's away from your laptop, away from your
[1:35:12] work. It doesn't even have to be sort
[1:35:16] of exercise with a capital E, but just like walking the dog or
[1:35:21] doing something that you have to do outside the house helps and
[1:35:25] makes you more productive when you get back inside the house.
[1:35:27] Because one thing I've always had a problem with is this sort
[1:35:30] of work life balance. Because being a writer, you're
[1:35:35] sat on your sofa, you know a lot of the day, and that's also the
[1:35:42] place where you wind down on an evening where you watch TV.
[1:35:46] So your life becomes your work and your work becomes your life,
[1:35:50] and you don't know how to sort of get out of that.
[1:35:53] So dog walking, exercise, running, socialising activities,
[1:36:02] sometimes go to a film quiz on a Thursday evening.
[1:36:06] Something that uses your brain, but in a way that's not your
[1:36:09] work. Because I think you know, the
[1:36:12] danger when you have a job and it's at home is stepping away
[1:36:16] from that. Because otherwise you just get
[1:36:18] into a pattern where you sort of neglect your life for a bit.
[1:36:23] And you know, I found that way to step back in.
[1:36:25] Well, this was like a perfect time because I always end, I'm
[1:36:28] sure maybe you might know this with the question, same question
[1:36:30] to everyone, but it feels like it actually ties into the entire
[1:36:33] concept of our full conversation today.
[1:36:37] And I asked this question because I think we've done now
[1:36:40] 450 or 500 episodes. We've done a lot and there's,
[1:36:44] this has only been repeated twice the same in the whole
[1:36:48] time, which to me shows that this is exactly what health
[1:36:53] really means, that it's so individual, similar to like
[1:36:56] success. Everyone has their own
[1:36:57] definition. So Are you ready?
[1:37:00] As I'll ever be. Let's go.
[1:37:03] Matt, what does live well be well mean to you?
[1:37:07] Other people is the response that comes to mind in the sense
[1:37:10] that being present enough for my children and life around me and
[1:37:15] the stuff, you know, that connected to the world in the
[1:37:20] same way that being unwell was like being trapped inside
[1:37:25] myself, being well is sort of connecting to other people.
[1:37:30] Such a good definition, because that is exactly how you feel
[1:37:35] when you feel really bad. I suppose, I suppose, yeah.
[1:37:40] And I feel like, yeah, I suppose, yeah.
[1:37:43] Because like that distance you feel when you're like ill or
[1:37:47] depressed. And I used to have this feeling
[1:37:49] like with my mum and dad with with my girlfriend, I feel like
[1:37:54] they're right there, but I'm like 1000 miles away and closing
[1:38:01] that gap. You know, we're very much
[1:38:04] encouraged, I think to sort of like improve ourselves.
[1:38:08] You know, we literally call it self help, but very often the
[1:38:11] way out of yourself when you're I'll is via other people.
[1:38:17] You can't get out of yourself via yourself.
[1:38:20] You have to connect and care about the world outside
[1:38:25] yourself. So for me, my definition of sort
[1:38:30] of Wellness is escaping myself and caring about things outside
[1:38:37] of myself. Yeah, I love that.
[1:38:39] That's that's why it connects so much to that analogy of
[1:38:42] loneliness. You can be in a room full of
[1:38:44] people but yet feel hyper alone. Yeah.
[1:38:47] That's kind of what that felt for me.
[1:38:48] Yeah, and often I felt my most alone in a in a room full of
[1:38:52] people. And so often that feeling of
[1:38:55] connection you can have physically on your own.
[1:38:59] Like I can be on a dog walk on Brighton beach and feel very
[1:39:03] connected, but I'm not actually having a conversation with
[1:39:05] anyone or talking to anyone or looking at anything.
[1:39:08] I'm just sort of like feeling in my place in the world and, you
[1:39:16] know, satisfied with just being a human on planet Earth and not
[1:39:21] thinking of what I'm not or thinking what I've got to
[1:39:24] achieve, but just sort of being in that moment.
[1:39:27] Yeah, well, the moment that's coming up, because we have the
[1:39:29] same release day and I couldn't leave without making sure that
[1:39:32] we talk about your book. I mean the I love that we
[1:39:35] actually have. The same competitors, aren't we?
[1:39:37] We are no friendly. Competitors.
[1:39:39] Yeah, we release dates are so important as well because people
[1:39:44] like publishers really have to think about when you're
[1:39:47] releasing a book and like, well. They didn't divide very well
[1:39:52] with me, didn't they? They put me against you.
[1:39:54] No, they didn't because well, for a start, we're in different
[1:39:56] categories. You're non fiction, I'm fiction.
[1:40:19] Written something like, it's quite, you feel very old when
[1:40:23] you open a book and you see this very long list of books you've
[1:40:28] written. I've written something like 26
[1:40:30] books or something stupid and so, and I've literally had every
[1:40:34] type of publication from total failure to international
[1:40:40] bestseller and everything in between.
[1:40:43] And you, you kind of know that actually the best part of
[1:40:49] writing is the bit that stays the same, and the bit that stays
[1:40:52] the same is the writing. And I feel like the best way to
[1:40:57] cope with having something new come out is to get on with the
[1:41:03] one after, to get writing is the way to cope with the pressure of
[1:41:08] what people will think about your writing.
[1:41:10] And it's hard to do. And you're encouraged to look
[1:41:13] around and worry about these external things beyond your
[1:41:15] control, like book sales and everything else.
[1:41:18] But if you want to be a writer, you have to enjoy writing.
[1:41:22] And so going back to writing is always the thing that keeps me
[1:41:25] sane. Like when I was I after my third
[1:41:28] book, I was dropped by my publisher.
[1:41:31] And it couldn't have been the worst timing because we just had
[1:41:34] our first child and we, we still were in quite a lot of debt.
[1:41:42] We'd stupidly got on the property ladder.
[1:41:44] So we had a mortgage that we couldn't afford.
[1:41:46] And we had all this thing going on.
[1:41:48] And that was the moment Random House, as it was, then dropped,
[1:41:56] dropped me. And I had at that point very few
[1:42:00] contacts. And I just thought, what am I
[1:42:03] going to do? And then I thought, well, to do
[1:42:06] anything, I'm going to need to write something.
[1:42:08] So it was quite therapeutic to just go back and try and write
[1:42:12] the the book of my life to sort of like get published again.
[1:42:16] And so it's always been my safe space.
[1:42:18] It helped me get over a breakdown.
[1:42:21] It helped get my career back when I needed to to.
[1:42:24] So the the way to deal with the sort of angst of being a writer
[1:42:29] is to keep writing. So my advice to you, if it gets
[1:42:32] too angsty around May is when we come out.
[1:42:36] Yeah, we both come out just to remind you of your pump day.
[1:42:39] What is the exact? Public May the 28th May.
[1:42:41] The 28th OK if it gets if we're. I'm going to call you and have a
[1:42:45] break. Exactly, and I'll tell you, just
[1:42:47] get writing. Get writing healthy.
[1:42:50] Shouldn't be this hard. The sequel.
[1:42:52] Yeah. What's your book called that?
[1:42:55] The Midnight Train, which is it was, I put a lot of pressure on
[1:42:58] myself because I put Midnight in it like Midnight Library
[1:43:00] Library. And it's not really a sequel.
[1:43:02] It's kind of a sibling to the Midnight Library.
[1:43:04] And it's happening. A little argument with the
[1:43:05] Midnight Library, but hopefully, yeah, hopefully, yeah, people
[1:43:11] will like it. But if they don't, I'll just
[1:43:12] hide under a rock and write something else.
[1:43:14] OK, well, we're going to put that in the show notes.
[1:43:17] OK, so everyone to free order. Oh, lovely.
[1:43:19] Thank you. And it will do wonderfully.
[1:43:23] So will your book as it sounds really interesting.
[1:43:25] Thank you. Thanks Matt for coming on.
[1:43:27] Thank you, Sarah. Thank you.

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