Don’t ask me what possessed me, but I decided last month to take down all my dressing room closet doors, glue trim to them and paint them a wild aubergine colour. Inspired by one of those viral “IKEA hack” videos on Instagram, I turned our kitchen into a chaotic carpentry workshop. I sanded, primed, painted, cut and gorilla-glued the trim, then sanded some more.
During the process – repetitive, laboured, meditative – my mind sometimes went blank. I was not checking my phone or thinking about my problems. I was, put simply, happy. Having just returned from a three-week assignment in the Middle East, I definitely needed a mental break from thinking of and reporting on human misery.
My crazy little wardrobe project reminded me that mental health isn’t always about buzzwords and self-diagnosing neuroses but about getting out of my own head. Ignoring both my personal problems and the world’s ongoing apocalypse always gives me a surprising amount of inner peace.
But our social media culture (the same one that told me to paint my closet eggplant purple) is sending a different message: we are flooded daily with the idea that we must spend inordinate amounts of energy self-analysing and openly sharing our fears and self-doubts.
We are called “brave” for broadcasting intimate details about our issues. Tell-all books unfurl dark family secrets, fracturing friendships and long-standing bonds. People flock to self-discovery retreats where days are filled with revelations and breakthroughs, to the point that I sometimes wonder what else is left to unearth.
Now, before anyone pelts me with self-help books, don’t get me wrong: I am not talking here about the very real and very debilitating mental health illnesses that ruin lives. And I firmly believe that being able to discuss mental health issues is a great thing. I have, in fact, benefitted from that freedom several times over the course of my life. Like so many others, I have sought the help of psychotherapists to deal, in my case, with bouts of anxiety. I wrote in my memoir that when I hit perimenopause, I suffered from unexplained panic attacks that were resolved only when I started the right regimen of HRT and sought help from a specialist.
All that being said, I think it’s very easy to go from self-discovery to navel-gazing, and I’m not convinced that marinating in our own thoughts is always good for us. Studies have shown that doing charity work leads to increased levels of happiness in ways that other activities do not. A 2022 study, for example, found that “volunteering may buffer against the negative effect of low self-esteem on wellbeing.” Finding a sense of achievement and purpose in work, whether it’s manual, intellectual or in the service of others, gives us value that is not mired in self-analysis.
“I think there's too much self-exploration,” actress Joanna Lumley told an interviewer last year, “I think we're all as dull as dishwater.”
My friend Nathalie once told me that she stopped being upset about a man she loathed at work when she was given simple advice she’d never considered: Just stop talking about him. “That bully was living in my head 24/7, so I just evicted him,” she told me. And it worked. “Oh, I still hated the guy, I just didn’t let my brain remember that I did.”
In my reporting, I often speak to people who’ve lost everything. In a refugee camp, no one talks about self-exploration. They’re trying to survive. I often remember that when I think of my own issues. I have a bed. I have a family. I’m not in a warzone. The rest can wait. I have closet doors to paint.
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