Mark Baker Facebook ad: “My GP asked me what was actually wrong and I sat there for…”

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I explain things for a living. I've taught secondary school English for nineteen years. I can explain a semicolon to a room of fourteen-year-olds on a Friday afternoon. And I sat in that chair and could not tell a doctor what was wrong with me. He was patient about it. He said, "Are you in pain anywhere?" No. "Sleeping alright?" Yes, mostly. "Any specific symptoms?" And I said the only thing I had, which was: "I just don't feel like I did a few years ago." He nodded. He did the bloods, because he's a good doctor. And two weeks later everything came back in range and I got a text saying no further action needed, and that was that. No further action needed. I want to be clear about something before you decide what this is. He wasn't wrong and he didn't fail me. He was looking for a disease and I didn't have one. That's genuinely good news and I know it. But I walked out of there with the same problem I walked in with, and now I also had a piece of paper saying there was nothing to find, which somehow made it worse. Because if there's nothing wrong, then either I'm imagining it or this is just what forty-seven is. I went with "this is just what forty-seven is" for about two years. Here's the thing nobody tells you about a vague problem. You can't fix a vague problem. You can only throw things at it and see what sticks. And I threw a lot. I bought a magnesium. I bought a vitamin D. I bought a greens powder I drank for about eleven days out of thirty. I did couch-to-5k twice and stopped both times around week five. I tried getting up at six to have an hour to myself, which lasted nine days. I read a book about cold showers and took precisely four cold showers. I wasn't being lazy. I was being unsystematic, which looks identical from the outside and feels worse from the inside. Every one of those things is a solution to a specific problem. I didn't know which problem I had. So I was buying answers to questions I'd never asked. And this went on for two years and it cost me things. It cost me the evenings. I'd get home at half five, and by half eight I'd be asleep in the chair with the telly on. My daughter's sixteen and she'd come in wanting to tell me something and I'd surface halfway through it. That happened enough times that she stopped coming in. She stopped coming in. I want to be honest about that because it's the bit that still gets me. It cost me things at work too, which I noticed less because everyone at my school is tired — it's a staffroom, being knackered is the house style. But I stopped putting my hand up for things. I stopped running the after-school group I'd run for six years. I told myself it was workload. It wasn't workload. I just didn't have it in me and I couldn't have told you why. And it cost me with Rachel, gradually. Not in a dramatic way. She said, one evening, not unkindly, "I feel like I'm married to someone who's very tired all the time and won't say why." I said I was fine. I'm always fine. And underneath all of it was the thing I couldn't say out loud. Which was that I didn't recognise myself. That there had been a version of me — not a heroic one, just a normal one, five years earlier — who did things in the evening and had opinions and wasn't just getting through the day. And that bloke had gone somewhere, and nobody had told me when, and I had absolutely no idea how to get him back or even what I'd be trying to get back. Here's what finally changed it, and it wasn't a supplement and it wasn't a doctor. It was a conversation with my brother-in-law, Martin, who does something in occupational health that I've never fully understood. We were washing up after a thing at his house and he asked how I was and I gave him the fine. And he said, "No, actually. What's the specific thing?" And I said the same sentence I'd said to my GP. I don't feel like I did. And he put the tea towel down and said something that reorganised the whole thing for me. He said: "That's not a problem. That's a feeling about a problem. You've been trying to fix a feeling for two years. No wonder nothing's worked." Then he did something nobody had done in two years, including me. He asked me questions. Not "how are you." Specific ones. In order. How's your sleep actually — not the hours, the quality. Are you waking up in the night. Are you waking up tired after eight hours or after five. What are you drinking in a week. The real number, not the one you'd tell the doctor. When did you last move properly, and are you recovering from what you do or just accumulating it. What do you actually eat on a normal Tuesday. Not a good week. A normal Tuesday. What are you already taking, and how often do you actually take it, and do you know what forms they're in. And what's your stress been like — not "busy," which is what everyone says. Sustained, or in bursts with recovery. It took maybe fifteen minutes. And at the end of it, three of those areas were obviously fine and three of them were obviously not. Fifteen minutes. After two years. I'd been carrying around this enormous unnamed thing, and once someone broke it into parts and asked about each part, it turned out to be three specific, ordinary, fixable things sitting next to each other. Then he said the part that I actually needed to hear more than any of the practical stuff. He said none of this was a character failing. That in your forties you're carrying more than you've ever carried, you're sleeping worse than you ever have, you're moving less than you ever did, and the food most of us eat in a normal week is not delivering what it delivered a generation ago. And that all of those things are individually small and none of them will ever show up on a blood test as a disease. He said: "You didn't let yourself go. Modern life did this. You just never sat down and worked out which bits of it got you." I'm not going to pretend I didn't feel something about that, standing at a sink with a tea towel. Because I'd spent two years quietly assuming this was a decline, and a personal one, and that the old me was gone and I was going to have to make my peace with a diminished version. He wasn't gone. He was buried under three specific things I'd never bothered to identify. Now, what I actually did — and I want to be honest about this because this is where these stories normally start lying to you. I changed three things at once, which is bad science and I know it. I stopped drinking in the week, which was one of my three. I moved properly three times a week — not couch-to-5k, just walking and some weights, because the ambitious version had failed twice already and I know myself. And I replaced a cupboard full of half-used tubs with one thing I actually take every day, which for me is Zapply T1 — fourteen things in three capsules, every dose printed on the label, because Martin was quite firm that if I couldn't see the doses I couldn't judge it. Three things at once. So I can't sit here and tell you which one did what. Anyone who tells you they can is selling you something. I can tell you nothing happened for about two weeks. Nothing at all. If you're expecting something in week one, don't start — you'll conclude the wrong thing and give up. And I can tell you the order things came back in. The afternoons went first. I noticed it because of what didn't happen. Period five on a Thursday, bottom set, the hardest hour of my week, and I got to the end of it still actually teaching rather than surviving. I stood in an empty classroom afterwards feeling slightly ridiculous, because I knew exactly what it meant. Then the evenings. Not dramatically. I just stopped falling asleep in the chair. I'd be awake at nine, then awake at ten, and I started reading again, which I hadn't done in about eighteen months, which is a strange thing to say for an English teacher. And then Ellie came in. She came into the front room on a Tuesday to tell me about something at school, and I was awake, and I listened to the whole thing, and I asked her a question about it. She'd stopped coming in. I'd noticed she'd stopped, and I'd assumed it was sixteen. It wasn't sixteen. That's not a claim about a capsule. That's what happens when a man stops being tired at half eight at night. But I know which two years I lost and I'm not losing more of them. So here's why I'm writing this, and it isn't to sell you what I take. I don't know you. I don't know which of your six areas are the problem. Mine were drink, movement and a cupboard full of things I wasn't absorbing and mostly wasn't taking. Yours might be sleep, and if it's sleep then no capsule on earth is going to touch it and you'd be wasting your money. That's the actual point, and it's the thing I got wrong for two years. I bought answers before I had a question. What I needed was for someone to sit me down and ask me six specific things in order, and then tell me which of them was actually my problem. The company I buy from has put that exact thing online, and I checked it out of curiosity and it's genuinely the same six areas Martin walked me through at that sink. Age, sleep, drink, movement, food, stress, and what you're already taking. It takes about two minutes and at the end it tells you which parts of it are likely to be your problem and which aren't. For what it's worth, they surveyed men going through it and 73% were tired even after a full night's sleep, which was oddly reassuring to read — I'd assumed it was mostly me. It's free. It doesn't diagnose anything and it doesn't pretend to be a medical test — it's a structured version of the conversation I should have had two years earlier. And if it tells you your sleep is the problem, go and fix your sleep and ignore everything else on the page. If it tells you it's the drinking, you already knew and now you've got it in writing. If it tells you what it told me, then at least you'll know, and you can stop guessing and start on one specific thing. Two minutes. I gave two years to not being able to name it. He isn't gone, whoever you were five years ago. He's just underneath something that nobody's ever asked you to name. G. P.S. If you take one thing from this and never click anything: the reason nothing you've tried has worked is probably that you've been treating a feeling instead of a problem. Sit down tonight and go through it honestly — sleep, drink, movement, food, stress, what you actually take. Three of them will be fine. Two or three won't. You don't need me or anyone else to do that for you. P.S. Get properly checked first if you haven't. Thyroid problems, low iron and sleep apnoea all present exactly like this and none of them are fixed by anything I've described. Go to your GP. And then, if you're like me and most men I hear from, you'll be told you're in range — and that's the point at which any of this becomes relevant. P.S. Nothing happens in week one. Nothing should. This isn't a stimulant and there's no mechanism by which it could work that fast. If you're the sort of man who'll write something off at day ten, don't start. P.S. She'd stopped coming in and I'd decided it was her age. It wasn't her age. That's the one I'd change if I could only change one thing, and it's the reason I bothered writing any of this down.

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My GP asked me what was actually wrong and I sat there for about ten seconds and couldn't answer him.

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