Tiny steps toward true happiness
Changing five per cent of your habits can vastly improve your mood
Launched recently with little fanfare, Rachel Kelly’s Walking on Sunshine, subtitled 52 Small Steps to Happiness (Short Books), is now tipped as a Christmas bestseller after creeping up the Amazon sales chart. 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 steadier, happier waters herself.
“I call it the 5 per cent rule,” says Kelly. “I know from my experience of being unwell that, if you’re feeling fragile, you can’t cope with the 100 per cent 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.
Though she recovered after six months, she “changed nothing — I didn’t want to tell anybody I had been mentally unwell,” and had a second, more seismic episode in 2003, which left her bed-bound and suicidal. “A privileged life doesn’t mean a privileged health,” she notes.
It took a year of hospitalization, medication and therapy to emerge from these depths.
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 crowdsourced from the anxiety and depression workshops she now runs.
“That’s why I feel more confident, in a way,” 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,’— the inevitable ups and downs of everyday life.