Free Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before Book Summary by Dr. Julie Smith

Key Insights

Professional therapeutic services are notoriously inaccessible and expensive for many people who are busy or have other important basic needs to fulfill, but Dr. Julie Smith, a globally renowned clinical psychologist famously known for her bite-sized social media videos on the topic, has made it more open to the public through her book Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before. The book covers different topics including mood pitfalls, motivation, emotional pain, grief, self-doubt, fear, stress, and meaningful life. It talks about common tools in clinical psychology that are useful and helpful for addressing common mental health problems such as low mood, anxiety, or depression. These tools include being self-aware, nurturing the feeling of motivation, dealing with emotions, building confidence, and more. 

Although the book is not a substitute for professional therapy itself, it can provide you a preview of it and equip you with the right skills and tools clinical psychologists also use to address different situations relating to mental health. The core and most basic of these skills and tools is self-awareness. By being self-aware, you are taking the first step of recognizing that there is indeed a problem with how you experience moments in your life and that you want to have a better, healthier response to them. Self-awareness is also the key to facing the problem head-on and addressing it by its roots and not through instant relief or distractions. As Dr. Smith said, “Learning how to manage anxiety will open up your life.” When you make use of these tools and practice other skills shared in the book, you will improve your experiences and relationships in a more meaningful and fulfilling way. 

Turn struggle into strength through self-awareness

Most of us experience a low mood without knowing why or without wanting to know why. We accept it as it comes by letting it affect our thoughts, emotions, and behavior for the rest of the day or week. Although mood changes and fluctuations are normal, we should not let it become a vicious cycle that affects our health, work, and relationships. Yet, a common misconception of low mood, anxiety, and other mental health problems is that they have unknown or unfixable causes. This belief has caused more people to feel even more lost and hopeless about their situation and resort to short-term fixes such as numbing with TV or social media or alcohol, drugs, or food. However, Dr. Julie Smith teaches us that low mood is traceable, but we need to practice self-awareness.

There are many reasons why someone would experience a low mood; these could be external events or internal happenings in your body or what Dr. Smith calls as different aspects that make up our experiences: thoughts, motions, behavior, and physical sensations. However, when your low mood turns into a cycle where each of these aspects affect one another, it may become more difficult to determine what the cause is, but not impossible. According to Dr. Smith, the first step to understanding the cause of these problems is to build awareness on the said different aspects. Just as your brain can pick up the signs of your low mood (emotions, breathing, heart rate, and other sensations), your brain can also tweak them to make you more relaxed and change how you feel. Indeed, by stopping and noticing these aspects within your body, you can learn how you got stuck and how to get out. 

Face the problem instead of avoiding it

Oftentimes, even when we know the cause of our low mood, we avoid addressing the problem or fix it with short-term solutions only. This is one of the reasons why we easily fall into mood pitfalls or low mood cycles. For example, when you feel stressed, you “relax” by scrolling through social media. You may get an instant relief, but once you close the app, you realize you still have that low mood or it might have even become worse. As Dr. Smith has learned from years of study and experience as a clinical psychologist, distractions or numbing in the guise of instant relief do not help to manage low mood. Instead, the fear or problem will only grow bigger the more you avoid it or don’t address it directly. This is why the best way to manage low moods and other problems is to face them. This includes reflecting on the way you respond to your emotions, having compassion for yourself and your need for relief, and being honest about which coping mechanisms make such emotions worse or better. 

When you reflect on your emotions, you may realize that it was largely caused by thought biases or patterns that make you think negatively about yourself or a situation. Some common examples of these thought biases are mind reading or assuming what other people are thinking or feeling, overgeneralization, egocentric thinking, emotional reasoning, musts and shoulds, and all-or-nothing thinking. Studies also show that the more you think of a thought, the more you believe it and become it. So, if you constantly think to yourself “I am a failure,” then even when you succeed 99 times and fail only once, you reaffirm your belief and completely disregard your accomplishments. This is a harmful thought process as you invalidate yourself and distort the reality that you are not a failure but in fact amazing for succeeding 99 times.

Although you can’t stop yourself from thinking these thoughts, the fact that you can identify and acknowledge them when they appear helps you to take control, manage how you respond to them, and lessen the negative feelings that might otherwise follow. In other words, you have more power over your thoughts and actions once you realize your original thought is just a thought bias that is not a fair reflection of reality. It may be difficult to immediately recognize thought biases, but Dr. Smith suggests some practices such as building awareness, writing in a journal, having a confidant to call you out when you have such thought processes, or starting a mindfulness practice.

Another possible problem you can address directly is not meeting your needs. Our body thrives on routines and there are feel-good hormones as a result from completing healthy habits. This is why skipping a step in the routine can have a domino effect leading up to low moods. It can be as simple as missing a glass of water, staying awake all night, skipping a scheduled exercise, spending more time on your phone more than usual, or waking up late. Again, you need awareness to know what routines and habits are healthy or not, and you will need self-compassion to forgive yourself for having unmet needs and try again to fulfill them tomorrow or next time.

The Main Take-away

Low mood — a common cause or symptom of many mental health problems such as anxiety or depression — can be due to things outside of our control (such as external events) or within it (such as our routine, body responses, and more). When we are aware of these causes, we can manage our responses and actions to avoid pitfalls and cycles of low mood and have better human experiences with our environment or relationship with others and with the self. 

Indeed, there is power in self-awareness about your brain, body, and environment as it can influence how you feel, but self-awareness is not enough. To really avoid falling into a cycle of low moods, anxiety, or fear, you have to take action and address the cause itself. This can be harmful thought patterns or unmet needs. Various situations will call for different kinds of solutions, but Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before will sufficiently guide you to use the most flexible and basic skills and tools that are applicable in most situations.

However, healthy behaviors are not formed overnight. When you catch yourself in a rut and think of what can relieve you, you have to choose what is efficient and healthy for your well-being. This way, you do not feed your anxiety or fear, and even when you are unsuccessful or if the tools or skills are ineffective, you can feel reassured that you tried and that you can try again. What’s important is you to choose to improve yourself in each opportunity and you face your fears while they are still small or at a manageable size. As you practice using these tools and trying these skills, you will become more brave and confident about experiencing new moments and using them through the good times and bad.

About the Author

Dr. Julie Smith has been a clinical psychologist for more than ten years. As a chartered clinical psychologist registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) and the British Psychology Society (BPS), she has provided professional help to various client and media outlets such as BBC films, CBBC, Good Morning Britain, CNN International, and more. Apart from that, she was the first professional to use TikTok as an educational platform for mental health and therapy. She is also active on other social media networks such as Instagram and Youtube. With the creation of her self-help videos, clinical psychology has become more accessible and understandable not just to her global followers of over 3 million, but to other people as well.