Book Review: Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig

People in the world are always looking for solutions to solve challenges in their lives. Such is the case with success. Everybody wants to achieve greatness in life. Tactics, strategies, plans, habits and formulas have always helped many people to succeed.

Current challenges in the world pose the need to look for creative opportunities and approaches to overcome them. Times are getting harder. Some tactics are slowly becoming obsolete. Those who get successful have probably endured pain, sorrows, sorry states and desperate situations without giving up.

Journalist, author and novelist Matt Haig worked on a masterpiece that will challenge your life. In his novel and memoir ‘Reasons to Stay Alive’, he talks about his experiences living with depression and anxiety disorder and what he learned. Today, UpeoHub Digital will not focus on the details of his experience. We will delve into some of the 40 pieces of advice that he shared.

The pieces of advice that Haig will definitely catalyse your efforts in whatever you do and help you to succeed or move closer to success. Here are some of them:

1. Sip, don’t gulp.
2. Be gentle with yourself. Work less, sleep more.
3. There is absolutely nothing in the past that you can change. That’s basic Physics.
4. Don’t feel guilty about being idle. More harm is probably done to the world through work than idleness.
5. Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.
6. Look at the sky. Remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity, in order to see the smallness of yourself.
7. Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim.
8. Do not watch TV aimlessly. Do not go on social media aimlessly. Always be aware of what you are doing, and why you are doing it. Don’t value TV less. Value it more. Then you will watch it less. Unchecked distractions will lead you to distraction.
9. Don’t worry about things that probably won’t happen.
10. Live. Love. Let go. The three Ls.
11. Alcohol maths. Wine multiplies itself by itself. The more you have, the more you are likely to have. And if it is hard to stop at one glass, it will be impossible at three. Addition is multiplication.
12. Beware of the gap. The gap between where you are and where you want to be. Simply thinking of the gap widens it. And you end up failing through.
13. No drug in the universe will make you feel better, at the deepest level, than being kind to other people.
14. You don’t need the world to understand you. It’s fine. Some people will never really understand things they haven’t experienced. Some will. Be grateful.
15. Remember that there is nothing weird about you. You are just a human, and everything you do and feel is a natural thing, because we are natural animals. You are nature. You are a hominid ape. You are in the world and the world is in you. Everything connects.
16. Three in the morning is never a time to try and sort out your life.
17. Don’t believe in good or bad, or winning and losing, or victory and defeat, or up and down. At your lowest and at your highest, whether you are happy or despairing or calm or angry, there is a kernel of you that stays the same. That is the you that matters.
18. Don’t worry about the time you lose to despair. The time you will have afterwards has just doubled its value.
19. Be transparent to yourself. Make a greenhouse for your mind. Observe.
20. Read anything you want. Just read. Books are possibilities. They are escape routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a home for an uprooted mind.