The tiny steps that can lead you to happiness

IT IS perhaps unsurprising that a book offering simple solutions to what has been dubbed our “modern anxiety epidemic” – which has only been amplified by the horrific events of the past few weeks – should currently be flying off the shelves. Launched with little fanfare earlier this month, Rachel Kelly’s Walking on Sunshine, subtitled 52 Small Steps to Happiness, is now tipped as a Christmas bestseller after creeping up the Amazon sales chart.

Having hit the number four spot last weekend, it is already on its sixth reprint; now that a copy has been spotted in the hands of One Direction’s Harry Styles, it seems reasonable to expect more runs will be required. The real surprise lies between its short pages: in a year in which it feels we’ve been sold a million “magic bullets”, from meditation apps to gratitude diaries, there are no quick-fix secrets or one-size-fits-all formulas for happiness here. Instead, it is a seasonal pick-and-mix of tips, tools and reflections which, in less heartfelt hands, could have been a humdrum series of suggestions to breathe, bake or take the time to stop and stare. Beautifully and truthfully written, the book’s modest methods belie both its greater goal (helping people make the incremental changes that can make a huge difference to their mental health) and the squalls of depression from which its author has used those methods to drop anchor in happier waters herself. “I call it the five percent rule,” says Kelly. “I know from my experience of being unwell that, if you’re feeling fragile, you can’t cope with the 100 % wholesale ‘You’ve got to change your life’ approach of going on this course, adopting mindfulness, running round the block 10 times, taking this life-changing drug. “You just need a tilt of the rudder, something small, something very doable that you can build into your routine.” Kelly’s “experience of being unwell” was, in fact, almost a decade bookended by two depressive episodes as deep as they come. The first floored her, suddenly, after the birth of the second of her five children, in 1997 – and was all the more shocking given that she “supposedly had it all”: a west London mansion, successful journalistic career and happy marriage to a high-flying banker. She recovered after six months, but “changed nothing – I didn’t want to tell anybody I had been mentally unwell”, and had a second, more seismic episode in 2003, after the birth of her two youngest children – twins – which left her bed-bound and suicidal. It took a year of hospitalisation, medication and therapy to emerge from these depths, which she details in her first book, Black Rainbow. “People said to me after the book came out last April: ‘Well, you seem OK, you seem fine.’ I was very ill, but I do feel recovered, I do feel calm and I do feel, on the whole, well. But it’s been a long old ride – one that’s taken almost 20 years.” It was the diary she kept, recording the methods that kept her on track, which forms the basis of this book: a “salad bowl” of strategies that have worked for her, and others that have been crowd-sourced from the anxiety and depression workshops she now runs with a mental health charity, Mind. “That’s why I feel more confident,” she says. “It isn’t just what helps me, it’s what has been tried and trusted and helped a lot of people. All of the steps are things that you can incorporate into your day.” They are not, she counsels, for anyone currently hounded by the black dog of serious depression, but for those, like her, “keeping it on a tight leash” – and anyone (which is to say, almost everyone) experiencing “what Freud called ‘ordinary human unhappiness’”, or the inevitable ups and downs of everyday life. “A lot of people who you’d think might not be suffering from anxiety actually are,” she adds. “They seem to be functioning: they’re working hard, they’ve got the job, they’ve got the family. “On the outside, people wouldn’t think they’ve got anything to worry about or be anxious about. “Actually, there’s a huge, huge cohort. “I do feel everybody needs to put together their own toolbox. ... I like the idea of not being too prescriptive, do this and it’s going to sort it out. If you do that, you’re setting vulnerable people up for failure.” While excited that the book’s success suggests some of the stigma surrounding anxiety and depression is finally shifting, Kelly is as wary of getting caught up in the numbers game as she is on prescriptions for happiness. “There’s a thing in the book I really always hang on to: find your midpoint,” she says. “The idea is that you’re valid as you are. “You’re not suddenly more valid when things go well. “Because if you buy into that, then when things go badly, you’re going to crash.” Describing her anxious nature as something she now manages “as you might diabetes”, Kelly is quick to point out that feeling equipped to avert such crashes doesn’t mean she is walking on sunshine at all times. “There’s a lovely line in a Raymond Carver poem: ‘Happiness, it comes on unexpectedly’,” she says. “I absolutely don’t believe you can go out and grab happiness. “I think what you can do is create conditions in which it’s more likely to flourish as a by-product of what you do and what you think. “I came at it the hard way,” she concludes. “I do think that depression, though an illness, happens in a context – and I had put myself in a context where it was more likely because of the stresses and the world I was in. “Equally, I think that if you can be calmer, happier and more grounded with the help of some of these strategies, it means you may never have to climb the mountain, like I did.” — The Daily Telegraph