The internet teaches you a lot of things. How to bully a stranger. How to survive a
bully a you barely know. Ten things to watch before you die. Ten ways to make a
man fall in love with you. How to make
your life seem more interesting than what it is because YOLO. The internet is
like a cabinet of curiosity, if you open the right drawer, you could end up
being popular or even smarter. But if you happen to be a hypochondriac like me,
you could unleash upon yourself a world of misery or in Web MD’s lexicon, an
“Irritable Bowel Syndrome”, and things only spiral downward from there.
I can’t remember when exactly I began to worry about my
health. It certainly didn’t happen overnight. I wasn’t raised in the shadows of
a hypochondriac. All I remember is waking up in the middle of the night and
breaking into a cold sweat as my eyeballs lurked the dark, grisly corridors of
WebMD and Symptom checker. Tingling hands, bloated tummy, nausea,
day-time headache, night-time headache, pain in the chest, heart palpitations..
The number of tabs kept growing. One night, I would diagnose
myself of multiples scleroses. Two weeks later, it was colon cancer. There came
a point when I could finish a friend’s sentence when she would describe her
illness to me. This was around the same time, I had more doctors on last dialed
contacts than friends and relatives.
What began as a harmless inquiry of symptoms gradually
manifested into something bigger and demonic. The
impact of my health-anxiety came to haunt me with the intensity of Thom Yorke’s
lyrics. It was all-consuming. I began to encounter several of the low-flying
panic attacks, he describes so poignantly. The more I read, the more I
suffered. What the hell, wasn’t it supposed to be vice-versa?
Within minutes, stomach cramps escalated to an exploding
appendix, a headache into a severe migraine attack, palpitations into a cardiac
arrest. I would shake vigorously while picking up the phone to call a doctor,
while making an unsolicited trip to the ER. Needless to say, the entire ordeal
would leave me exhausted and embarrassed in equal parts.
A month and a half back, I was diagnosed of Irritable Bowel
Syndrome. The symptoms: consistent pain in the stomach, an erratic bowel
movement, nausea and bloating. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the gastric symptoms
that led my doctor to raise a red flag. He expressed concern about my mental
well-being. Do you think too much? Are you stressed about
something? Why are you so anxious?
These questions nudged me to sit back and regain the reigns on
my mind. After weeks of introspection, I came to terms with the fact that I’m a
compulsive worrier, a hypochondriac. I have been a worrier all my life. And if
that wasn’t bad enough, I was spending too much time on the internet dwelling
upon unimportant symptoms.
Cyberchondria or hypochondria fueled by a relentless study of
one’s symptoms online, is the bane of modern day technology and access to
unsupervised information ie the internet. According to a recent survey, 1 in 5
people reported escalated levels of medical anxiety after a week’s ingestion of
health related websites. That’s the
corrupting effect of unsupervised information floating on the internet. Who’s
to tell how many of those websites were well-intentioned and not publishing
content for clickbaits.10 foods that can cause you cancer, anyone?
I’m no psychiatrist to have understood the complex ways in
which our minds function. But I do know that the blackbox that resides in our
head musn’t be fed with too much information. Especially, if worrywart is your
middle name. An anxious person running to internet for help is like a drunk man
asking a coke-head to drive him home. I was destined to be damaged.
There’s no easy answer as to why some people are predisposed
to anxiety or at some point would find themselves grappling with inexplicable
worries. However, the most alarming bit about us worrywarts is that we fail to
acknowledge it as some kind of an aberration to the rule.
Reading up symptoms, I thought is nothing different from the
act of folding every single towel that came from the laundromat or insisting on
drinking tea from a cup and saucer. Until recently, I used to laugh about my
symptom-checking urges the way people laugh about their compulsive habits (not
disorders, mind you!). After all, worrying over potential worries sounds like
some kind of a meta joke right?
Here’s the thing about Dr. Google. It works as opium for us
worriers. It lures us into thinking that it’s good for us, that information
snorted in small doses won’t get us hooked to it, that it helps us sleep better
after aching for a long time. To know the extent of its addiction, try stopping
yourself from tapping ebola virus soon after you’re down with fever, which is
unaccompanied by cold and throat-ache.
I won’t say I have forgotten what it is to not obsess over
health but I have stopped surfing in the bottomless sea of discussion forums
and symptom checking websites. I try to disassociate myself from other people’s
sickness, their experiences and to a large extent even my own. I’ve had no
panic attack recently. And on days, I’m running out of things to focus on the
internet, the meme featuring a cat wearing a YOLO cap comes in handy.
(Published in The Hindu: http://www.thehindu.com/thread/arts-culture-society/article8819589.ece)
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