Mark Baker Facebook ad: “I took this on a Tuesday morning”

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I took this on a Tuesday morning after nine hours in bed. My wife had already left for work. This is what nine hours does for me now. I didn't take it to post anywhere. I took it because I'd just caught myself in the wardrobe mirror and I genuinely wanted to see whether it was as bad as it looked, or whether I was being dramatic. Turned out I wasn't being dramatic. I'm forty-six. I manage a distribution depot outside Leicester — twenty-odd years in logistics, most of it on nights before I moved up. Married to Claire. Two kids, one at college and one still at school. I want to be clear about what this is and isn't. I'm not ill. I've been checked. I'll get to that. I'm also not depressed, which was the first thing everyone assumed, and I understand why. I like my life. I like my wife. I'm not sad. I'm just empty. And I didn't have a word for the difference between those two for about three years, so every time anyone asked I said I was fine. Here's what fine actually looked like. Nine hours in bed and I'd wake up like I'd been dragged through a hedge backwards. Not sleepy — I could get up. Just nothing in the tank when I did. There was a wall at about two in the afternoon that I'd started organising my entire working day around. Anything difficult, before two. Anything with numbers in it, before two. My team knew, though nobody said it. Nobody brought me a problem at half three. And I'd get home, eat, and be gone in the chair by nine. And every night I'd say the same sentence to Claire. I'm shattered, it's been a week. And she'd say you said that last week. And I'd say well it's been two weeks then. We both laughed at that. For three years, we both laughed at it. What I didn't notice, because it happened by subtraction: I stopped going to five-a-side. Didn't quit — missed one, missed a few, someone else took my spot. Stopped taking the dog out in the evening and let Claire do it. Couldn't tell you which month that changed. Stopped going upstairs to say goodnight to my daughter, because by the time she went up I was already under. Nothing was ever decided. I just stopped being there, and nobody could point at the day it started, including me. I went to the GP, and I'd tell anyone to do that first. Full bloods, proper panel — thyroid, iron, everything. All in range. Text a fortnight later saying no further action needed. He wasn't wrong and he didn't fail me. He was looking for a disease and I haven't got one, and that's genuinely good news. But I came out with the exact problem I went in with, plus a message saying there's nothing to find. Which somehow made it worse. Because if there's nothing wrong, then either it's in your head or it's just your age — and I'd already decided it was my age about eighteen months before. I tried things too, and I want that on record. Magnesium off Amazon, taken about half the time. Vitamin D, because a bloke at work said everyone in this country's short of it. A greens powder I drank about a third of. Four weeks of getting up at half five to walk before work in the dark, which I hated. A month off the beer, done properly — felt a bit better, put it back, forgot about it entirely. There's a tub of ashwagandha in my cupboard that's been there two years with most of it still in it. Every one of those was a guess. I never once found out what was actually wrong. I just kept throwing things at it and when they didn't work I added them to the pile. What changed it was somebody asking me questions instead of me buying answers. A physio I was seeing about a shoulder, of all things. Bloke called Tony. Ten minutes at the end of a session, and he went through five things in a row. Sleep — not the hours, the quality. Waking in the night, or waking up tired after a full eight. What I'm actually drinking in a week. The real number, not the one you'd tell a doctor. Whether I'm recovering from my work or just accumulating it. What I eat on a normal Tuesday. Not a good week. A Tuesday. And what I'm already taking, how often I genuinely take it, and what forms it's in. Two of those were fine. Three of them plainly weren't. And I could have told you which three at any point in three years, if one person had asked me in that order. Nobody does. You get "how are you," you say fine, and that's the whole conversation. That last question caught me out completely. He asked what form my magnesium was and I said I didn't know what he meant. Turns out most cheap magnesium is magnesium oxide, which is poorly absorbed, where bisglycinate absorbs far better. Same word on the tub. Not the same thing going into you. Same with zinc — oxide against picolinate. So I'd spent two years half-taking the wrong versions of the right things and feeling quite pleased with myself about it. I changed three things at once, which I know is the wrong way to do it. Drink down to weekends. Walking the dog myself again, three or four times a week. And I cleared the cupboard out and replaced it with one thing I take every single day — Zapply T1, fourteen things in three capsules, every dose on the label with nothing hidden in a blend, which after the magnesium business was the only reason I'd touch it. Three at once means I can't tell you which one did what. Anyone who tells you they can is selling you something. Nothing happened for a fortnight. Nothing at all, and that's exactly when you give up, and I nearly did. Then two o'clock stopped arriving. Noticed it on a Thursday at about four, when I realised I'd done a full afternoon without going grey in the middle of it. Then I stopped going under in the chair at nine. That's all I've got. I know what I changed and I don't know which bit was which. I've still got that photo on my phone. I look at it sometimes. Not because I've had some transformation — I still look forty-six, I'm still knackered on a bad week, and I'd be lying if I told you otherwise. But that's a man after nine hours' sleep who's about to organise his whole day around two o'clock. And I did that for three years and told everyone I was fine. So here's what I'd say to you. If you've ever taken a photo of yourself to check whether it's as bad as it looks — you already know. And if you've been to the doctor and been told you're in range, and you came out feeling worse rather than better, I know exactly what that feels like too. You can't fix a thing you've never identified. Three years and a cupboard full of guesses is what that cost me. The people I buy from have put Tony's five questions online as a two-minute thing. Age, sleep, drink, movement, food, and what you're already taking. At the end it tells you which of them are likely to be your actual problem and which aren't. Free, two minutes, doesn't diagnose anything and doesn't pretend to. If it says sleep, then it's sleep, and no capsule fixes that — go and sort your sleep out. If it says the drink, you already knew. If it says what it said to me, at least you'll know what you're aiming at. And get properly checked first if you haven't. I mean that seriously — there are real conditions that look exactly like this, and none of them are fixed by anything I've described here. But if you've been checked, and you're in range, and you're still saying it's been a busy week — Two minutes. I gave it three years and a photograph I still haven't deleted.

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I took this on a Tuesday morning

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