You won’t get the life you want sat on your sofa. Trust me…I tried.

This week, the woman who is Not Dr. Phil advises a young reader on how to build a life when it’s the last thing you feel like doing.

Dear Not Dr. Phil

I’m a 16 year old guy that has just had to move from the town that I grew up in and love to a town I’d never been to before on the other side of the country.

I’m 6 hours away from everyone and everything I know and I hate it here. It’s been six months and things are as bad now as they were on the day we arrived.

I never wanted to move here. My dad was offered a great new job so it was a done deal — and it happened so quickly. One minute we were living our normal lives and then it felt like the rug was pulled from under me and I woke up in this new town and no one even asked me if it was what I wanted.

I find it hard to describe how miserable I am. I have a good relationship with my family and they’ve tried to help me and encourage me to move on, but it feels like I’m stuck. In my old town, I had friends and I was part of the swim team and I knew where I stood.

This new town doesn’t even have a swimming pool and I haven’t been able to make any friends — I mean who would want to be friends with someone who is so sad and miserable all the time? I just want to curl up under the duvet and not get out of bed — in fact, I would do that if my parents would let me!

My two siblings (aged 8 and 11) are the total opposite — they love it here. They have friends and they are happy. They settled in really well and whilst I’m happy for them it makes me realize how different my world is from theirs.

My school work is suffering. I avoid going to school and I am skipping quite regularly and just walking around by myself or hiding at home hoping no one comes home early so I don’t get caught. I NEED to go to school and get good grades so I can get out of here and move away but I can’t seem to make myself do the work anymore. It’s like I’ve stopped caring, even though I know part of me still does.

My family know I’m miserable but they don’t know how bad it is and I can’t bring myself to tell them because I don’t want them to feel guilty or blame themselves (or yell at me for skipping school!). The thought of this makes me feel physically ill.

I have no one to talk to about this and I don’t know how to get my life back to what it was and feel, if not happy again, at least less sad. I know it can’t be that bad here — lots of people here seem happy and content — so I must be the problem? It’s not a bad place and we’re all fed and safe, so I’m not sure what my problem is.

What should I do?

Sad In A Small Town

Dear SIAST

The house that I live in currently is surrounded by two small fields. One of the fields has been home to a flock of sheep for the last few months. In spring, a bunch of lambs were born and I’ve watched them grow from the tiniest little furballs into sturdy, happy little creatures, frolicking around the pasture and making fun and trouble with each other.

Paints a beautiful scene doesn’t it?

Then last week, out of the blue, the farmer caused utter chaos by splitting the sheep into two fields. One group remained in the original field whilst the other was moved into the deliciously overgrown field right next door full of new grass for them to feed on. Not a big deal right? They should all be happy — more grass for all!

Wrong! Those sheep went ape shit! They were deeply unhappy with the change — and they made their feelings known at all hours of the day and night. You might say they felt fleeced…and were in a baaad mood about it…(*I’m actually very pleased with these puns just so you know.)

I had no idea sheep were so emotional and how god damn vocal they are when unhappy. They spent hours oscillating between sad and angry baa’ing calls to each other. I thought darkness would bring relief from the constant demanding noise of their protest, but, no. Apparently pissed off sheep will continue to be pissed off ALL NIGHT LONG.

It took nearly a week for them to calm the hell down and realise they were absolutely fine and had lots of lovely grass to much on, and now they are scampering around enjoying life just as much as they did previously.

Now, I do want to be clear, I’m not saying you are a sheep and I am not trying to minimise your feelings by comparing your situation to that of a sheep. You are obviously a much more complex, emotional and feeling creature than a sheep (your letter makes that clear!), and I am fully aware that ‘just look up and smell the new grass’ is both obvious and probably very annoying advice, but I think the analogy is helpful nonetheless.

That is to say, it is completely and utterly normal to feel depressed, anxious and very fucking sad in response to being ripped out of your field and dumped into a new one without anyone asking you how you feel about it.

It makes total and utter sense that you feel this way. You’re human and humans tend to react badly when they have to face big changes - especially changes they did not ask for. It’s hard enough to adapt when you actually wanted those changes, so when the inevitable things happen that are totally out of your control then it makes complete sense that you feel horrendous as a result.

So how is all this talk of sheep and feeling bad supposed to help you?! Good question SIAST!

Well, my first piece of advice is simply to recognise that it’s normal to feel the way you do after a huge life upheaval. Just because your younger siblings have settled in doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you — it just means that you had a deeper connection to your old life than they did, precisely because you are older and you had more invested in it than they did.

It seems from your letter like you are ashamed of how you feel and that you think you should feel different to how you do. Well, I can tell you from bitter past experience, you can’t shame yourself from a bad place into a good place — you can only move forwards with kind words and gentle encouragements. You have to show yourself some compassion and acceptance for how you feel right now. Wouldn’t it be weirder if you felt nothing for the life you loved and no longer have?

So, the first thing to do is be kinder and more patient with yourself. Self compassion is a skill that will benefit you throughout your life so I’d highly recommend you spend some time learning more about it and practicing giving it to yourself. It’s very simple advice but it’s actually very hard to put into practice when you’ve spent years feeling ashamed of the feelings you have inside. And trust me when I say learning this at 16 will be much, much easier than learning it at

The second piece of advice I have, if you don’t do this already, is to get the noise out of your head so you can process it better. It’s hard to view your thoughts and feelings with any objectivity when they are a swirling mess inside your head. There are so many ways you can do this and you can do all or some of these.

You can try journaling; writing or typing it all out in words; don’t worry about how it reads and don’t try to edit it, just get it out on the page and see if it helps. I’ve recently been recording myself talking to camera as well as journaling at various times during the day to help me process things by saying them out loud. Talking to a camera feels less weird than just talking out loud (well, it does for me but you do whatever works!).

If you can, and you have the option to do this, I’d recommend that you also see a counsellor. I wonder if you can talk to your parents about this (if you feel comfortable) or potentially go via your school if they offer anything in this regard? It can really help to have someone help you reshape how you are seeing the world as we can get very stuck when we try to do this alone.

Getting things out of your head and onto paper or video or into a conversation can help you to process and question whether the thoughts you are having are really true or if there are other ways you can look at the world (spoiler; there are always other ways you can look at the world — as humans, the majority of the things we believe to be ‘facts’ are actually just very flimsy opinions — well, that’s my opinion anyway). So get your thoughts out and ask yourself if what you think is, objectively, true. What evidence do you have that it is true? Is there also evidence you can find that could show it to be false?

Your thoughts are just thoughts — you don’t need to take them seriously. There are thousands of thoughts you have every day that you pat no attention to and dismiss as being junk. The problem is not that these current thoughts about your life are objectively true, but that you believe them to be true and of great importance. Know that you have a choice to distance yourself from these thoughts and question their reality.

The final piece of advice is also, obviously, very simple…and, also obviously, it is the hardest piece to follow. However, it’s the advice that will give you the greatest results by changing your current perspective of your life just by virtue of getting up and doing it.

So what is this amazing, hard to follow advice that will change your life in the way it changed mine if you can follow it?

In order to get the life that you want you have to leave your sofa and go and do things outside of your home.

That’s it. It is that simple.

No, really. It is that simple.

I can 100% guarantee (also from bitter past experience) that the life you want will not suddenly show up at your sofa one day whilst you are crying your despair tears into your ice cream tub. You will not look up one night from your unwashed duvet hole and suddenly find a whole new life just waiting right there for you to just slip into. That’s not how life works my little lamb.

Your new life is not going to drop by an audition to see if it fits with what you are looking for. Annoyingly (and it is annoying and really hard) you have to put the ice cream down and, would you fucking believe it, actually go outside and participate in the world.

In my case, the night after I had this revelation I jumped up, went outside, found my amazing new life that I love just like that and then skipped off into the sunset. The end.

Ha. No. Obviously, it did not happen like that. And, yes, the process of actually building a new life was hard and I cried a lot. Thanks for asking.

At least, it was hard to begin with. And not because of the people I was meeting, or the things that I was doing, but because, like you SIAST, I was really, really fucking sad. There is nothing that anyone or anything in the world can do to make you less sad if you want to be sad. You have to make the conscious decision that you no longer want to be sad and commit to trying anything and everything you have to achieving that — even when you feel really, really sad.

I was sad, lonely, hurt and in a lot of pain and it took every ounce of energy in my soul to get up off the sofa and go out into the real world, and to keep doing it long enough for that pain to lessen and get better and for my life to start getting better.

Doing this when you are sad is really hard, but there is no way around it because as we have already discovered, the antidote to sadness is not contained within your sofa.

I started just doing small things, like going for a walk. Literally, I would just put headphones on and walk with a coffee by myself, then I would go home and cry again. Slowly I started walking more, and then slowly I joined the gym and started going to classes. Eventually, over the course of many months I tried lots of things. I had no idea where to start so I thought it would be good to try things I’d liked as a kid so I joined different things like a badminton group (which I fucking hated), a girls hiking group (which I loved and made great friends at), started swim training with my local club (loved), I went to pottery classes (loved), I went travelling (loved mostly, hated partly), I reached out to old friends (loved and hated) and caught up for coffees, I started dating. I stopped doing things that were really bad for me, and I started doing more and more things that were good for me.

Then one day, after many months, I remember waking up one morning and thinking ‘hey, I didn’t cry at all yesterday!’. Slowly, slowly, it started to come together.

Most of the time, in the early days, I hated it. I did not feel good. I was anxious, full of self hatred and had no compassion for myself or anyone else. I assumed people disliked me, that they could feel my sadness and desperation. I often disliked them for no reason other than I disliked myself. I constantly questioned whether I was enjoying the things I was doing.

I kept doing it though. Not because I had a clear idea of what happiness looked like and a plan to find it, because I had no idea and no plan. No. I kept doing it because deep down inside I knew that I had zero chance of finding any semblance of happiness if I stayed on the sofa waiting for it to find me. I knew that if I went outside and participated then there was at least the possibility that I would have a good time, whereas if I stayed on the sofa I knew I was guaranteed a bad one.

I became more scared of spending my life crying on the sofa than I was of the idea of going out into the world and learning to be a human in it.

And I promise, if you start small and keep going it will get better. It does not have to feel good all the time. It doesn’t have to feel fun. It just has to be different to what you are doing now. One of the big things I learnt about myself during this time was that I can feel shitty and still do things. I can still go out into the world whilst feeling like crap — it’s an option — and I now know that doing something whilst feeling shitty is better than doing nothing whilst feeling shitty. You still feel shitty but at least one option means you tried.

I feel so bad that you are going through this at such a young age, but I also think that if you can learn and cope with this at a young age then this will set you up with the skills and resilience you need to deal with the inevitable rug pulling life necessarily deals you at the moments you least expect.

What you are experiencing is not unique — I know it feels like it because sadness and depression make us feel like we are alone — but know that you are not. There are people 3, 4, 5 times your age with lives that most people would give their right arm for that feel exactly the same way you do — and 99.9% of people figure out a way through and are better people as a result. Better equipped to handle life and get through the tough times.

And if there is one thing I really want you to take away from this letter, it’s that happiness is not an accident. Happiness is a choice. Happy, content people are that way because they have chosen to be and they do the work necessary to find it and maintain it, and they have often had to contend with their own sheep fields in order to get there. I don’t think I have ever met a truly happy person that has not also suffered for the life they have built.

Happiness cannot magically appear from sadness — it’s not a switch that is flipped. As cliche as it is to say, happiness is a journey and everyone knows that to go on a journey you have to take the first step.

So as hard as it is SIAST, get up off the sofa and go and do something — anything! Just break the cycle you are in. You have to act first and the rest will follow.

Start small. And if you feel shit doing it then accept that it feels shit and keep doing it. Keep trying. Afterwards, know that if you want to go home and cry then go home and cry. God knows, I cried a lot. But keep doing it.

And when it all feels overwhelming and like it will never work, always remember that as long as you are doing something then there’s the possibility that things will change, but doing nothing guarantees that it won’t.

I promise, soon enough, if you just keep trying, you’ll start to see the new grass growing.

I’d love for you to send me an update in a few months time and tell me how you’re coping and if you followed my advice? I’d love to hear that you got up off the sofa — even if that’s all you do for now.

Yours,

Not Dr. Phil.