Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit. There's something heavy on your mind, a result you're waiting for, a letter you haven't answered, a marriage that's gone quiet, a child who isn't right, a mistake at work that nobody's found yet, and you haven't told anyone. Not because there's nobody. Because telling them would land it on them, and they've got enough, and you should be able to manage this yourself. So you've managed it, alone, for weeks.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that carrying it makes sense from the inside. The people you'd tell do have enough on. You are a capable person. And there's a real fear that saying a thing out loud gives it a shape it didn't have. The second is that the belief that telling would burden them runs the wrong way, and there's research that measures how wrong. People underestimate how willing others are to help and how good it feels to be asked. They judge their own vulnerability far more harshly than anyone else does. And carrying a worry alone isn't a matter of keeping it out of conversation. It's a matter of the mind going back to it, dozens of times a day, and that going back is the thing that wears you down and that telling interrupts. The third is practical. When you've carried a worry for more than a week, you tell one person, in one sitting, and you let them help. Chapters 20 to 23 cover how.

This book doesn't ask you to tell everyone, to share things that aren't yours to share, or to stop being a private person. It asks for one conversation, with one person, about the one thing.

Three cautions, and please read them.

If the worry includes thoughts of ending your life, or of harming yourself, that isn't a habit and this isn't the book. It's urgent. Samaritans are on 116 123 at any hour, NHS 111 is there for urgent help, and if you're in danger now, call 999. Please tell someone today.

If the worry is about someone else's safety, especially a child's, the person to tell isn't a friend. It's the police or social services, and the telling shouldn't wait for the end of a chapter.

And if the weight has become a low mood that's there most of the day and has been for two weeks, or nothing has felt good for that long, see a GP, or in England refer yourself to NHS talking therapies without going through one.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.