Dr Sophie Mort, the guru of Insta-therapy

Mort speaks out about the stigmatisation of normal human experiences, such as feeling down

With its nurturing notes to the reader signed “Dr Soph xx”, its trigger warnings, and its sections on advertising, social media and structural inequality, it resonates with a youthful demographic. I can’t wait to give it to my teenagers — but her advice on relationships will teach you more about yourself, whatever your age.

As she says, over Zoom, from her home in London, “You have Haynes Manual for cars, but there’s no equivalent for the most fundamental experience of all — being human. We aren’t raised to understand ourselves.

“We’re all taught that happiness is the emotion we’re meant to feel. That we’re meant to put on this personal brand, where we’re always fine, always succeeding. And so the moment we face any of the stresses and strains that are inevitable in life, we don’t just not know how to support ourselves. We stigmatise the very normal experiences of being human.”

In a decade in the NHS, she saw the consequences of this — an endlessly flowing stream of people of all ages who felt ashamed, stupid, crazy, abnormal and a failure for feeling bad.

Again and again, she’d spend precious long-awaited NHS therapy sessions giving people basic psychological information to help them to understand their distress. Some, after being listened to and given the knowledge to develop healthy coping skills, didn’t need further therapy. If only this stuff about how our minds work were taught.

Finally, in March 2018 she decided to embrace social media and give away information “before people need it” rather than “when we’re at rock bottom. It’s a much harder job to bring yourself back from the edge than buffer yourself when you’re just in the early stages of distress.”

Her private work — solely via Zoom to make therapy more accessible — funds her Instagram, blog and app work. She closed her client waiting list in 2019 because she had so many requests. She’s in her mid-thirties, elfin, blonde, with a tiny nose ring and a few tattoos — quite Nordic-chic — and she says when her readers’ self-critical inner voice drips poison, she hopes they’ll invoke her soothing words as the antidote, that Dr Soph will be the “good angel’’ on their shoulder. It’s a description that feels apt.

“Millennials and younger have been exposed to social media from almost day dot,” she says. It increases the pressure we put on ourselves, “adds to anxiety and low self-esteem and eating disorders”. They’re bombarded with information, some of it brilliant, but there’s so much misinformation and “un-nuanced blanket statements” — “some of it is sending people into this black and white way of thinking”.

Mort: “Underneath we’re connected by the same fears”

Plus, she says, “Whilst it’s helpful to understand your psychology, if you think about it all the time, that’s what we call rumination.” Brood on every thought and action, and you’ll feel more distressed not less.

One social media bugbear of hers is “toxic positivity”. Posts such as, she adopts a bright shiny tone, “Just think positive, good vibes only!” She says it feeds into “happiness is the emotion I’m meant to strive for so if I don’t feel happy does this mean I’m doing something wrong? No, it means you’re human. All your emotions have a purpose. We need anger, we need fear, we need anxiety — it’s how we’ve survived as a species.”

Yet Mort was no different from the majority when she experienced her own mental health issues, panic attacks aged 18. She thought she must be One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest nuts and that her life was over. The panic attacks were “a mixture of overworking myself, perfectionism, and if I’m totally honest, having quite a wild time at university”.

For someone who’d always been self-reliant and fixated on success, it felt catastrophic. But months of breathing exercises, a mindfulness course and therapy were transformative. “I wasn’t just independent and surviving, I was like, ‘I know how to look after myself, cope and thrive’.” It made her determined to study psychology to help others.

Her training helped to understand herself as well, that after her parents separated when she was two, and her father moved abroad, she’d developed an “avoidant attachment” style — where you’re wary of forming close relationships because you don’t entirely trust people to stick around.

She was brought up by her mother (“kind, caring, always there for me”) and her “brilliant” stepdad. They married when she was seven. And she was in touch with her father. But she says, attachment styles “arise so fast, the first few years of life”.

These days we all think we’re mental health experts, but a little knowledge, gleaned from a glib post on social media, is dangerous, she says. Because Love Island seems like Instagram come to life I explain the TV show to her (she hasn’t seen it) — scant self-awareness, maximum self-obsession, shouting out your feelings and buzz prases like “speaking my truth”, and so thoughtless about everyone else. “Yes, yes,” she says, beams.

It’s, “ ‘This is just my boundary! If you can’t take it, you’re gone!’ Actually, there are lots of reasons someone would struggle with your boundary,” she says. “Maybe your boundary is a form of control.” (Say, forbidding people to drink if you’re not.)

In fact, “Boundaries are the personal rules and requests we have around how we wish to be treated, and where we are willing to put our time and energy,” she says. “When psychology or self-help ends up being solely about the self, it can lead us to focus just on our experience, without taking that extra step. OK, now you know this about you, what can you do to help other people in your life?” Some people, she says, get stuck on “me me me”.

This behaviour is rampant on dating apps, in habits such as ghosting. (Please, she says, just send a text.) Part of the issue is that “people with anxious attachment styles are likely to spend more time on dating apps”. These are people who learnt early on that they couldn’t predict when someone was going to be there for them or not, and so would initiate contact as often as possible, knowing it would work sometimes.

“So they almost became like a puppy — hey, hey, pick me, I’m over here.” In adulthood, in dating, that translates as the more you feel anxious about being rejected, the more you chase.

Alas, they’re most likely to meet people with an “avoidant attachment style” (still swilling about the dating pool because they catch fright if you get too keen) “who learnt early on that other people reliably couldn’t be trusted to be there for them, so they became hyper-independent”, like cats.

“ ‘Don’t get too close to me because I’m going to wander away’,” Mort says. “They’re more likely to cycle in and out of relationships because when things get too close they need to push away for a bit.” Meanwhile, all those with a “secure attachment” who don’t feel threatened by relationships have paired up and settled down.

It’s easy, she says, to vilify both the avoidant — “often they come across as selfish because when they need space they just walk away” — and the anxious — “often they’re given labels such as ‘needy’.” But, as in her book, she’s compassionate, explaining that these were simply ways we adapted to our situation as kids to survive. For example, that “neediness” is a “very smart way of keeping people close”. As for the avoidant, she says, faux-seriously, “there’s nothing wrong with us. We are still normal, good people.”

Remember, she says, in adulthood and in dating “even though we all respond differently on the surface, underneath we’re connected by the same fears. The fear that someone else will not want to or can’t be there for us.”

Plus, the two types can get along, just “get really bloody good at communicating what you need” then compromise. So “if you are with someone with an anxious attachment style and you need more contact, just tell them”, she says. “You find a way to meet both people’s needs.”

You can also heal. “We call it earning secure attachment,” she says. “I have definitely earned secure attachment.” She’s no longer a perfectionist either. “I used to believe I needed to be perfect in order to create those connections.” Now “I totally trust that I have a support network around me who will absolutely be there when I need it.”

The point of good therapy, or accurate, nuanced psychological information, says Mort, is that “you don’t just help people understand why they’re distressed, you also help them realise that there’s something you can do about it”. When we grow up, we no longer need that once longed-for approval of those people from childhood. “You’ll want it, but the best thing is, you can adult yourself now,” she says. “None of us are set in stone, ever.”
A Manual for Being Human by Dr Sophie Mort (published on July 8, by Gallery UK (Simon & Schuster)