What you're worrying about probably won't ever happen

And even if it does, you'll be able to cope

My cousin’s wedding in Tuscany in 2010 was supposed to be an idyllic family weekend full of love, laughter and good times. And it would have been had I not received a letter from the Inland Revenue the night before I left and gone absolutely batshit crazy.

At the time, I was 35 and the editor of Heat magazine. I was well paid, had a secure contract, owned my own house and was married with a two year old daughter. Everything in life was going great. But the night before we were set to fly out to Italy, I found a brown envelope on the doormat emblazoned with the chilling letters ‘HMRC.’

My heart leapt up into my mouth, my stomach fell into my arse and my bollocks basically dropped off completely.

Why? My tax affairs were as dreary and straightforward as the next dickhead’s. I was hardly stashing millions in the Cayman Islands or investing in dodgy movie projects with Gary Barlow. I had nothing to hide. But I was a neurotic when it came to anything to do with money or admin.

More than that, I had a scary belief in arbitrary karma. I believed that the universe was programmed to punish excessive happiness with occasional bouts of intense sadness.

My mind buzzed with this irrational narrative, whereby any lengthy period of good fortune would have to be counterbalanced at some point by a huge dose of bad luck. I claimed to be a devout atheist - I thought that made me sound clever - but, in fact, I secretly believed in the existence of a sadistic God who punished you for being happy by chucking a bucket of shit on your head every once in a while.

So whenever life seemed good, I was always on the look out for something bad to happen.

The letter inside the brown envelope informed me that my accountant was under investigation for some sort of iffy practices. I didn’t really understand what the accusations were; in fact, I didn’t actually finish reading beyond the first paragraph. If I had, I would have realised that I personally was under no scrutiny whatsoever and that this letter - sent out in identical form to the accountant’s hundreds of other clients - was just a courtesy heads-up from the revenue.

But the words ‘your accountant’ and ‘investigation’ were enough to send me into a mental tailspin. Within ten minutes I was calling everyone else I knew who used the same accountant to compare notes and strategise a collective legal defence. It being a Friday night in August they were all either on holiday or out having fun - not sat at home working themselves into a frenzy over an imaginary scenario in which they would have to sell their homes to avoid white-collar prison.

But that was exactly what I was doing. I managed to get a friend’s husband on the blower - a barrister - to discuss the situation. He was a good bloke who politely attempted to allay my fears. But at the end of the day, he was a barrister used to defending violent criminals in court. Not a tax lawyer, much less an accountant. He should have really just laughed and told me I was mental. It probably would have helped.

My wife, the only person who had stood between me, my constant irrational worries and a full nervous breakdown for the previous ten years, tried her best to contain my sudden meltdown.

She says now that it was the worst she had ever seen me. I was frantic, pacing the living room floor with the letter clutched in my fist, rambling about receipts and invoices and bookkeepers and legal teams and the cell conditions at Ford Open Prison.

None of this is an exaggeration. It is the only time I have seen the intensity of my anxious ravings penetrate my wife’s zen-like rationality. She ended up crying that night out of frustration and fear. But that was just the start.

The next morning, having not slept the entire night, we arrived at Gatwick departures with me speaking at a hundred miles per hour down the phone to an understandably bewildered accountant - the friend of a friend - who I had never met but had managed to contact at home on a Saturday morning in order to seek a second opinion.

On the plane, I was still pressing the mobile to my ear, demanding reassurances from this poor bastard while my wife and various flight attendants ordered me to end the call because we were about to taxi.

Once in Tuscany, at the old farmhouse where everyone was staying, I was greeted by dozens of relatives - many of whom I hadn’t seen for years. It was sunny and beautiful. But I was fucking bananas. My older brother arrived in high spirits with his wife and children and I immediately collared him, dragging him into a side room to pour out my utterly batshit theories about the accountant, what he had been up to and how it was going to land me destitute, imprisoned or quite possibly both. Because my brother is a nice bloke he, just like everyone else I had subjected to this line of mad babbling, was polite and gently reassuring. Looking back, I think what I really needed was for someone to grab me by the shoulders, tell me I was being insane and a shake some sense into me. But it’s hard for people to know how to respond when they are confronted by someone behaving so strangely.

At the wedding disco the next night I remember being on the dance floor, a little pissed, jumping about to Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 and starting to feel just a tiny bit better, when I spied my cousin Joe on the other side of the room. We were close when we were little kids but I hadn’t seen him much over the past decade. I knew that he was now a big shot corporate lawyer. I made a beeline straight for him; before he could offer to shake my hand or ask me how I was I had launched into a really long, detailed monologue about the letter from HMRC. What made it worse for him was that the music was really loud so he only heard every fourth or fifth word I was shouting at him: ‘Dividends…self assessment…prison food…’ He looked back at my mad, bug-eyed face and tried to formulate a response. Luckily for him, my wife spotted what was going on and ushered me away politely. I was sent back to our bedroom alone to reflect on things. It didn’t help.

There was more weird behaviour that went down on that beautiful, criminally wasted weekend in the Italian sunshine that I could tell you about. But you get the picture. I was mad. I had been triggered into an elongated panic attack by the arrival of a letter that turned out to be of little consequence whatsoever. I had a serious problem. But it wasn’t with my tax affairs - it was with my brain.

I had always been a worrier

But I had learned how to hide it because shitting yourself about life’s daily challenges was not really compatible with the hard-drinking, loud-talking Super Lad image I had been cultivating since I was about 4.

My brain was busy all the time - I decided during the early stages of adulthood that the only way of avoiding any problems in life was to be on the lookout for them 100% of the time. That way, you could spot them before they actually happened and take measures to fend them off. In other words, if you low-key shit yourself about stuff constantly then bad things will probably never happen. What a fucking demented design for life that is.

Shrinks call it catastrophizing.

It is tied into other forms of panic-attack: like those times I would wake up in the night convinced that the small throb in my balls meant certain cancer or the stubborn zit on my back was an inoperable tumour.

If I wasn’t worrying about something it meant I wasn’t taking life seriously. It meant I was being complacent about the future and that something awful would inevitably happen to me because I had taken my eye off the ball.

I’m not entirely sure why my brain worked this way for so many years. But it doesn’t anymore. That’s because I gave up drink and drugs. Ironically, these were the substances that I thought could combat constant worry. And while they sometimes chilled me out in the short term they always made the worry come back twice as bad.

But more importantly, it was the lessons that sobriety taught me that helped. In therapy or AA or wherever else you seek help, you will learn three simple lessons that redefine your worldview: 1. Identify the stuff in life that you cannot control. 2. Let go of worrying about that stuff. 3. Take one day at a time.

This is why, in many ways, I consider my descent into problem drinking in my late thirties as a bit of a result.

Had I not reached the desperate point at which I had to seek help from people who knew about this stuff and had been through it themselves, I would never have learnt those three lessons. I would have continued trying to wing my way through life. I would have continued to waste time worrying about what the future might bring, flying from one set of anxieties to the next, trying to navigate my way through with the numbing accompaniment of Kronenbourg and charlie.

Turns out, the big lessons of life had been staring me in the face all along. They were there hidden in the lexicon of football - where managers challenging for league titles repeatedly say that they are ‘focussing on their own form…and taking each game as it comes.’

That is all you can do. The manager of Manchester United cannot control the form of Liverpool or Man City. Ole Gunnar Solksjaer will gain nothing from staying awake all night fretting about the form of Liverpool’s front three. It would be pointless. All he can do is coach his own players the best he can. And there is no point worrying about what might happen in three, four, or six game’s time. He can only prepare his players for the next fixture. Everything else is wasted mental energy.

If I had a time machine to go back to that weekend in Tuscany in August 2010, I might go back and tell myself that I should just read that letter from HMRC properly and not speculate about what it might mean. I might tell myself that the conduct of my accountant was out of my hands and that all I needed to do was make sure my own affairs were in order. I might even grab myself by the shoulders and say: ‘You are fucking barmy mate! You are doing everyone’s head in! Pack it in and stop being so self-absorbed!’ But, probably, I would just tell myself not to bother opening the letter in the first place. To just go to Italy and have a good time and worry about that bullshit when I got back. What difference do a couple of days make to anything anyway?

I can’t go back and fix past mistakes.

But I can use the lessons of sobriety to help me through current challenges. I have been lucky to have got through the Covid crisis unscathed. I am in a more privileged position than most. But I have managed to keep my head straight, my mood calm and my smile in tact by falling back on these lessons: don’t worry about future problems that will probably never arise; have faith in your ability to deal with shit if it ever does happen; and just try to focus on today. Look at the smaller picture, not the bigger one. The wider your perspective, the bigger scope there is to worry.

I hope you never have to experience problems with drink or drugs. But I do think everyone can learn valuable lessons from the process of recovery. Fuck tomorrow, it only really exists to mess with our minds.

Don’t forget to listen to the Reset Podcast.

The first episode was published this week, featuring my mental health chat with Shaun Ryder from the Happy Mondays. There will be a new episode on Wednesday, with another very special guest.

What I Am Reading At The Moment

If you enjoyed my recent piece about arguing online about politics and why it is a waste of time, you might be interested in Why We Are Polarized by Ezra Klein. It is a very readable and dead smart explanation of why partisan politics is a contrived system of control that only serves to make us all hate each other while stopping any real progress. It might make you less angry with the dickhead next door who votes for a different party than you.

Some services, links and phone numbers to help you through the tough times

https://www.samaritans.org/ Tel 116 123

@calm 0800 58 58 58

@YoungMindsUK 0800 018 2138

@ChairtySane 0300 304 7000

https://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/

https://cocaineanonymous.org.uk/

https://andysmanclub.co.uk/