Excerpts-

• From the cover A STRESSED-OUT MIND IN A STRESSED-OUT WORLD
  
  A conversation, about a year ago
  
  I was stressed out.
  
  I was walking around in circles, trying to win an argument on the internet. And Andrea was looking at me. Or I think Andrea was looking at me. It was hard to tell, as I was looking at my phone.
  
  "Matt? Matt?"
  
  "Uh. Yeah?"
  
  "What's up?" she asked, in the kind of despairing voice that develops with marriage. Or marriage to me.
  
  "Nothing."
  
  "You haven't looked up from your phone in over an hour. You're just walking around, banging into furniture."
  
  My heart was racing. There was a tightness in my chest. Fight or flight. I felt cornered and threatened by someone on the internet who lived over 8,000 miles away from me and who I would never meet, but who was still managing to ruin my weekend. "I'm just getting back to something."
  
  "Matt, get off there."
  
  "I just-"
  
  The thing with mental turmoil is that so many things that make you feel better in the short term make you feel worse in the long term. You distract yourself, when what you really need is to know yourself.
  
  "Matt!"
  
  An hour later, in the car, Andrea glanced at me in the passenger seat. I wasn't on my phone, but I had a tight hold of it, for security, like a nun clutching her rosary.
  
  "Matt, are you okay?"
  
  "Yeah. Why?"
  
  "You look lost. You look like you used to look, when . . ."
  
  She stopped herself saying "when you had depression" but I knew what she meant. And besides, I could feel anxiety and depression around me. Not actually there but close. The memory of it something I could almost touch in the stifling air of the car.
  
  "I'm fine," I lied. "I'm fine, I'm fine . . ."
  
  Within a week I was lying on my sofa, falling into my eleventh bout of anxiety.
  
  A life edit
  
  I was scared. I couldn't not be. Being scared is what anxiety is all about.
  
  The bouts were becoming closer and closer. I was worried where I was heading. It seemed there was no upper limit to despair.
  
  I tried to distract myself out of it. However, I knew from past experience alcohol was off limits. So I did the things that had helped before to climb out of a hole. The things I forget to do in day-to-day life. I was careful about what I ate. I did yoga. I tried to meditate. I lay on the floor and placed my hand on my stomach and inhaled deeply-in, out, in, out-and noticed the stuttery rhythm of my breath.
  
  But everything was difficult. Even choosing what to wear in the morning could make me cry. It didn't matter that I had felt like this before. A sore throat doesn't become less sore simply because you've felt it before.
  
  I tried to read, but found it hard to concentrate.
  
  I listened to podcasts.
  
  I watched new Netflix shows.
  
  I went on social media.
  
  I tried to get on top of my work by replying to all my emails.
  
  I woke up and clasped my phone, and prayed that whatever I could find there could take me out of myself.
  
  But-spoiler alert-it didn't work.
  
  I began to feel worse. And many of the "distractions" were doing nothing but driving me further to distraction. In T. S. Eliot's phrase from his Four Quartets, I was "distracted from distraction by distraction."
  
  I would stare at an unanswered email, with a feeling of dread, and not be able to answer it. Then, on Twitter, my go-to digital distraction of choice, I noticed my anxiety intensify. Even just passively scrolling my timeline felt like an exposure of a wound.
  
  I read news websites-another distraction-and my mind couldn't take it. The knowledge of so much suffering in the world didn't help put...

About the Author-

• Matt Haig is the internationally bestselling author of the New York Times bestseller The Midnight Library, Reasons to Stay Alive, along with several novels, including How To Stop Time and The Midnight Library (coming soon from Viking Books), and several award-winning children's books. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Reviews-

• Audiobook listeners, are you feeling overwhelmed at work and at home? Anxious? Weary of keeping up with your social media, email, and entertainment accounts? In emotional turmoil? Then the information herein--short, punchy, usable lists of how to cope on a daily basis--is for you. But sadly, as an audiobook, it might do you more harm than good. Author Matt Haig narrates his own work, and although he has an engaging voice and British accent, his approach is morose. True, he is talking about the negative effects of contemporary society on our behavior, but this is a self-help book. We need some hope, and Haig, through his gloomy tone, gives us precious little of that. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

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