I was diagnosed with bipolar in 2011. Years later, that got reclassified as cyclothymic mood disorder, which is basically the same beast wearing a quieter name. I've also spent my whole life around people close to me with mental illness. If you're waiting for me to tell you there was something quirky or interesting buried in that, there wasn't. It's miserable. It's painful. That's the whole story, no silver lining hiding underneath it. The Satellite Thing I saw an exchange online that stuck with me. Someone pointed out that in 1960, one in 200 people were diagnosed as autistic, and now it's one in 30. Somebody else came back with this: there were about 40 near-Earth satellites decades ago; now there's something like 47,000. Do you blame the telescopes for that? The point landed. We're not looking at an epidemic; we're looking at better instruments. Better diagnostic criteria, more awareness, doctors who aren't just handing out one label for everything that doesn't fit neatly. The sky didn't fill up with more objects because we built better telescopes. We just finally started seeing what was already there. I bring that up because the same logic gets used against people with mental illness, except backwards and badly. People treat a diagnosis like it's inflation, like everyone's just calling normal life a disorder now. They don't say that about diabetes or asthma. They save it for the stuff they can't see. The Comparison Problem There is nothing worse when you're struggling with an illness than someone saying "we're all a bit like that" or "we all have our ups and downs." Imagine saying that to someone having an asthma attack. "I had a bad chest once." Imagine saying it to someone on crutches. "I hurt my knee two years ago; it was murder." It sounds like sympathy in your own head, but what actually comes out is a worse version of their story—a billy-better-story. You're not connecting with them. You're competing with them, and they're too polite or too exhausted to tell you that's what just happened.

David Attenborough, aged 100, is out on the African savannah filming a massive, majestic lion with the help of his twenty something cameraman Tony. Filming from a safe distance, the lion turns its maned head, growls at the pair, and starts padding towards them. Attenborough calmly puts on some running trainers and heads off. Tony shouts, "What are you doing? You can never outrun a lion." Attenborough retorts, "As long as I outrun you, Tony, I don't give a shit." At the risk of sounding like a LinkedIn post, this has been a key metaphor for me since I stopped drinking. All you have to do is get a headstart on the person you were yesterday. The Hole Where the Monster Used To Be When you stop an addiction or a toxic trait, you find yourself with a lot of time, more like a large hole in your life where you no longer have to feed the monster. Willpower will get you past a few weeks. Discipline might get you a bit further. But when boredom sets in, you might let the monster you locked up back out of its cage. Stop Calling It a Monster Imagine if you didn't see it as a monster at all. Just a trap you fell into, like a dark pond. Gradually you learn to swim, you get better at it day by day, and eventually you're swimming alongside what you used to think was a monster. Now you see it for what it actually is: a highly marketed, socially normalised trap that charges you far more than it ever gives back. How Long It Actually Takes You'll hear that it takes 28 days to build a habit. That's not true, and it's worth knowing why, because expecting a habit to click into place after four weeks and then feeling like a failure when it doesn't is exactly the kind of thing that makes people give up. The 28 day (or 21 day) claim didn't come from any research on habits. It came from a 1960 book by a plastic surgeon called Maxwell Maltz, who noticed his patients took around three weeks to stop being startled by their new face in the mirror. That got twisted into a habit rule over the decades and it stuck, because it's a nice tidy number.

I wouldn't call myself a Buddhist. There's a fair bit I don't buy into, reincarnation and karma being the main ones. But the bits I do rate are the enlightenment idea in this story, non attachment as a route to being content, and meditation and mindfulness as something I think matters for general health, not just spiritual health. I've been to Palpung Temple in Brynmawr a few times. It's a proper Buddhist centre, not a tourist thing. If you're local or nearby, I'd genuinely recommend going. I've always believed your ability to explain something properly is a decent measure of how much you actually understand it. If you can't put it simply, you probably don't get it yourself yet. That's why I liked this video I came across of a Buddhist monk explaining nirvana, enlightenment, in one story. Five kids playing a wishing game. Wanted to pass it on. The Rules Five children are playing a game. Whoever comes up with the best wish wins. The First Four Kids The first kid says if he had a wish, he'd wish for the latest video game. The second kid says he'd go one better and wish for his own game shop. That way, every time something new comes out, he can just get it. The third kid thinks bigger again. He'd wish for a billion dollars. First he'd buy the game shop, then he'd buy the school. If he owns the school and pays the teachers, he can make sure he gets good grades even if he never does his homework. The fourth kid tops the lot of them. He wishes for three wishes. First wish, the game shop. Second wish, the billion dollars. Third wish, three more wishes. That way he never has to stop. Infinite wishes, forever. Try beating that, he says. The Fifth Kid The last kid wins the game. Not by out wishing the others. By seeing past the whole idea of wishing. His wish was this. He wished he was so content he never needed to wish for anything again. Why He Wins The first four kids are all playing the same game, just with bigger numbers. More stuff, more money, more power to get more stuff. Even infinite wishes is still wishing. It's still chasing.

I came across the idea of the invisible guest a while back. The theory goes that at any party, dinner, meeting, whatever, you walk in thinking you're the one under the microscope. Your clothes, your voice, whether you said something stupid five minutes ago that everyone's still thinking about. Meanwhile the person stood next to you is doing the exact same thing about themselves. Rent's due. Their mam's not well. They've got a difficult conversation waiting for them at home. They are not clocking your shoes. I can't stand this up with a film or a grandmother's wisdom passed down through generations, much as I'd like to. What I can tell you is that it lines up with something psychologists actually study, called the spotlight effect, the tendency to massively overestimate how much other people notice us. I've written about that before in this book. Same idea, different door in. Why this one lands differently Most of the advice about anxiety in social situations tells you to think positive, to remind yourself people like you, to breathe through it. This one doesn't ask you to feel better about yourself. It asks you to notice that everyone else is just as consumed with their own mess as you are with yours. That's not reassurance. That's just accurate. When I was deep in my two year depressive episode, I genuinely believed people were watching me, judging the fact I hadn't showered, judging that I was still in my mam's house at 40 odd. What I know now, and what I didn't have the capacity to see then, is that most people who walked past me on the street that day were thinking about their own overdraft or their kid's school report, not me. The maths of it If you're spending your energy worrying about what the room thinks of you, and the room is doing the exact same thing back at you, then nobody in that room is actually watching anyone. It's a room full of people performing for an audience that isn't looking. Once you see that, the pressure doesn't disappear completely, but it loosens.