There’s this thing called the parmesan in Newcastle. Affectionately known as the parmo, it’s essentially a pizza – a flat circular object with all manner of cheese and other bits dumped on top.  But instead of dough, it has fried chicken as a base.

I bring this up to underline that when it comes to fast food, Geordies are the real deal.

Americans get laughed out of town with their pitifully sized portions. The ultimate insult to a Geordie is to say “Yo Mama so fat, they could serve her as a takeaway”. If Jesus was from Newcastle and shit out of magic powers, he could still feed the forty thousand with a couple of kebabs and half of last night’s curry.

You put on pounds just being in proximity to these things, and I was in close proximity a lot.

One of the consequences of this was sleep apnoea. Essentially, when you drift off to sleep, all the muscles relax at the back of your throat. If you are both overweight and have an underbite, there’s a chance they relax so much that it causes horrific snoring at best, blocks off your breathing at worst.

Once when I was asleep after drinking too much – another cause of apnoea – I felt a thud in the dream I was in, followed by another, louder thud, then another. It felt like a radar pulse, and each time it pinged, it pinged with greater urgency, shattering the dream world.

I awoke in the darkness drawing a sharp intake of breath, my head pounding, with the pulse quickly fading.

All I could think was that the pulse was urgently trying to wake me up as I was seconds from suffocating in my sleep. Is this the last sensation of someone who’s choking to death? Who’s drowning?

I didn’t go back to sleep that night.

Each time thoughts of my health and the apnoea entered my head, they shot off into realms of pure dread, bolstered by fear of all the long term effects – strokes, heart disease, all the usual good stuff. The foundations of terror had been laid. I’d panic about the apnoea which would make me panic about my weight and drinking which would drive me to eat and drink more which fed the apnoea – all of which circled around the subject of my imminent demise. The mad death loop was never far from my thoughts.

Despite the regular trips to the doctors and hospital, it turned out that sleep apnoea is relatively easy to treat: lose some weight, and sleep on your side. But the damage was already done. Already under great stress from other sources, anxiety had found an outlet for the pressure and it was squarely aimed at my health. It had carved a deep groove of panic in my brain, and I felt immobilised. I struggled and failed to get a handle on my destructive habits, which only ever seemed to increase.

Liam Gallagher says you aren’t a real rockstar until you’ve got tinnitus. If that’s the case, then let me tell you that life as a real rockstar sucks. I developed it about a year and a half ago and it would go on to have a profoundly destructive impact on my mental health. Having a constant buzzing in your ear with no certifiable cause does no favours for your anxiety. Your brain scrambles to find a reason behind the noise you can’t escape, and when you can’t find one, anxiety fills in the blanks.

Tinnitus is music to go mad to; it is an endless circle of audio dickery.

With it, my health anxiety became full blown hypochondria. Everything was out to get me. Every ache, every pain, every twinge was a symptom of something bigger. The Reaper is everywhere.

Living in that state is a perpetual hell. We all know that we are going to die – it’s a fact of life. But constantly having the thought of death front and centre in your mind, pushing everything else to the side, can destroy a person.

What’s worse is that anxiety loves an opportunity. Got some wood, it’s got a match. Got a fire, it’s got a can of petrol. Got half the town alight, it’s got your self-belief and confidence sandwiched by marshmallows on a stick, ready for a roasting.

Fear of dying but no actual aliments? No problem! Headaches, problems with your vision, tinnitus, muscle tightness and spasms, clenched jaw, loose bowels, any sort of pain, sexual redundancy, heart going crazy, itches and rashes, sore throats – you name it, anxiety can make it happen. There’s few things that a constant supply of adrenaline and cortisol can’t accomplish.

It’s a cat chasing its tail. Anxiety creates it, but conveniently forgets about it. When you notice it yourself, you might be like “it’s just a headache, nothing to concern myself with”, but anxiety has already packed your bags, is behind the wheel, and is screaming down the motorway towards the nearest nuclear shelter.

By giving into the fear, you give it power. You dwell on the possibilities, and become immobilised. And if you are perpetually living in the future where your brain is exploding or you are having your limbs hacked off because of diabetes or feeling cancer drain the life from your body, you aren’t living in the here and now where you can actually do something about it.

Anxiety is kind of like a bundle of wires that have got tangled up. If you follow one wire, you’ll see it interwoven with many others. If you pull on just that one wire, all it will do is just get tight and not go anywhere. Sometimes, it’ll make the whole thing worse. Instead, the best strategy is to follow it to its end, see which wires it crosses with, and attempt to unwind them all.

I’ve found this is especially so for health anxiety. There’s all sorts of fears interwoven with it, and there’s poor coping mechanisms which only exacerbate the problem. For me, making progress has required a holistic approach.

There’s techniques that help anxiety as a whole. I spoke about taking a year off booze last week (now at seven weeks in!) and we’ll get onto other broader stuff in future posts. But there are a couple of things that have helped with hypochondria.

It’s always good to go and see a doctor – 99 times out 100, it’ll be anxiety, but if you don’t go, the thoughts will fester and gain strength.

On doctors, also try and keep in mind that they are probably better qualified to say what’s wrong with you than your anxiety. If you really feel strongly that they are wrong, you can always ask a second doctor. But even your anxiety is almost definitely more reliable than whatever you read on the internet.

The internet is catnip for anxiety. I managed to give myself my worst ever panic attack while reading about aneurysms while I had a headache. I should’ve taken some paracetamol. Instead, I took a cerebral asswhooping.

Even if you don’t get mentally curbstomped, it can place some pretty unhealthy thoughts in your mind. It’s like sexually propositioning the Hulk: there is no scenario in which this doesn’t end badly for you.

This goes double for journalists telling you how to stay healthy. I’m a journalist myself, and am fully aware of the irony of me warning you to beware strange hacks on the internet, but check your sources. There’s a lot of good stuff out there, but a large chunk of health pieces in papers are written entirely for the sensationalism and to flog copies. The research most hacks put in is minimal at best, and the studies they base their pieces are about as useful as a paper mache wetsuit.

The main thing though is to not despair. Everything is always in motion, and as anxiety rises, so too can it fall. There have been times where I felt like I really was doomed to feel on the edge of death for the rest of my life. These days, I’m feeling good, and making steady progress. It’s all just small yet steady steps in the right direction.

Starting with saying no to parmos.

#NoToParmos

 

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