We present the eighth in a series of interviews conducted by Tom Sykes, author of the new travelogue The Years of Travelling Anxiously. In this instalment, graphic designer and University of Portsmouth academic Dan McCabe discusses his own anxiety journey, how he has helped fellow sufferers and how anxiety has a habit of undermining the travel experience. As an academic and anxiety sufferer, Dan advocates for open discussion around mental wellbeing.
Tom Sykes (TS): To begin at the beginning, when were you first diagnosed with an anxiety disorder?
Dan McCabe (DM): In my second year of university, I started having these panic attacks that seemed to come out of nowhere. I was aged 20 or 21 when that happened, but the signs had always been there. As my parents always say, I was an anxious kid.
I managed to complete my third year, but it was a struggle, as it is for many of the students I teach these days. I think that’s why I am so sympathetic and empathetic towards them – I understand the impact that anxiety and mental health can have on a student’s journey. When I left uni I went to my GP and was referred to the local mental health assessment team. Eventually I was told that I had an anxiety disorder which was tied to OCD.
TS: When you had those panic attacks, what were the symptoms? How did you feel?
DM: It wasn’t so much physical as much as this powerful belief that I’m going to die. So it was more thought-based, which connects to the OCD, as I understand it. I couldn’t understand why I was having these intrusive, terrifying thoughts. I’d feel like I’d lost all control and would get into this downward spiral of panic.
I particularly remember a panic attack in the back of a taxi coming back from a friend’s. I felt like jumping out of the back seat. It was insane.
TS: So was it a fight or flight sensation?
DM: Exactly what it was. I was telling myself, ‘I need to run, I need to hide.’ You will eventually calm down from that, but when the panic attack is happening you can’t persuade yourself of it. And it really is scary because it’s as if your head and your body are working against you. These feelings feel like they aren’t yours, so whose are they? And then you start thinking, am I schizophrenic?
For two or three years after that I tried to get to grips with my anxiety. I had this sense that I was broken – a horrible feeling to have as a kid. Counselling wasn’t what helped me as much as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). It wasn’t necessarily about digging into and trying to understand my past, it was about learning the tools to help me manage the negative thinking patterns.
I also learned that my anxiety wasn’t just about being worried about something. Chemical imbalances in the brain can affect your mood – that can be inherited and therefore unavoidable in many respects. My parents and other family members have suffered from depression and anxiety even if they didn’t call it by those names.
TS: Has that anxiety ever affected you in a travel situation, whether locally, just driving up the road, or further afield?
DM: Travel definitely made it worse. I often think it’s ironic given that I’m now the Associate Head of Global Engagement at my university. That proves how far I’ve come because I can travel now and mostly enjoy it, but that’s because I’ve had to learn over the years to manage my anxiety in various contexts.
Small things can set it off. Mostly it’s triggered by fear of the unknown, being outside of a situation that’s familiar that I can control. That can lead to catastrophising – a key word that I had to get to grips with quite early on in my life.
I’ve been very lucky to be able to travel a lot, like yourself. I’ve always gone somewhere with a view to enjoying it, whether it’s a holiday or a cultural or business trip. When I worked in the design industry I went to see partners in different countries, but part of the baggage I’d take was my anxiety. There’d always be a bit of room in my case for it, as it were.
TS: Was there any particular trip that was very difficult to manage, where you found the anxiety intolerable?
DM: The self-destructive nature of anxiety means that the trips where you are under pressure to enjoy yourself, the ones where you should be having the most fun, are when anxiety tends to rear its head, because anxiety just loves an opportunity to attach itself to something that you love.
So, for example, when I’m travelling with my family this should be the times when the memories are being made, right? But that’s when anxiety can arise, as there is more for it to latch on to. There might be certain pressures that come with travelling solo, but it’s not as challenging as when you’re travelling with others.
The other thing to bear in mind is the impact of your lifestyle. I’ve never taken drugs, but I’ve always enjoyed a bit of alcohol, and alcohol and anxiety do not mix! I’ve learned that in a travel situation it’s never a good idea to have a drink if you’re already feeling anxious – you’re only going to make it worse.
You also have to learn to be honest with yourself about how you feel. When you get older, you start to experience trauma in a much more profound way and you find you have real things to deal with like bereavement. These are rational, more understandable causes of anxiety.
I remember being particularly anxious about my honeymoon around organisation and planning. First World problems, if you like. On another trip with a group of my male friends, we stayed in a big pink house in King Sands in Cornwall. This was the time when I was still struggling to understand what my anxiety was. We were in this beautiful setting, so there were reasons to be joyful despite the darker moments I was trying to get through.
TS: You were dealing with extremes of emotion?
DM: Yeah.
TS: What gave you joy on that trip?
DM: There was one night in the local pub when we got into an interesting discussion with the local women’s darts team. It was a lot of fun as everyone was really connecting and there was a lot of camaraderie. That picked me up out of my anxiety for a while because at that age I had this sense that nobody could understand what I was going through. I had only one friend who was very open about his anxiety, and there were some others I could confide in, but at that time I felt most people just wouldn’t get what I was dealing with.
Over the past 30 years, friends in different countries and even different time zones have phoned me in the midst of panic attacks or contacted me because they have been experiencing a breakdown of sorts, and I’ve always cherished being able to offer support because I understand what’s happening to them.
TS: Which time zones?
DM: I have a friend in Australia whose partner called me when he was in the midst of a panic attack. She asked me to speak to him, as he’d been through a lot recently. While it’s common for anxiety to start to manifest in people who are in their late teens/early twenties, a lot of people start suffering in the midst of their lives when they are tired and stressed out from having a family or a career.
TS: What did you say to your friend in Australia?
DM: I talked him down. I asked him how he was feeling. He said, ‘I can’t breathe.’ I said, ‘You can breathe. Sit down and focus on taking a breath.’ I believe in the old adage of ‘knowledge is power’ – if you can understand what is going on, if you can give it a name, it takes the wind out of the sails of that particular problem. A useful tool that I learned from CBT years ago is acknowledgement. Acknowledge the anxiety, give it a name. Yes, I’m feeling anxious. Yes, I’m panicking about something, but so what? A brilliant CBT therapist described it as a train coming through a station. You might feel compelled to get on the train but it’s better to watch it go by, wave it through. The worst thing you can do is ignore the train or, in other words, try to suppress the anxiety. That just prolongs the problem.
So I helped my friend to put a name on his anxiety at that moment in time. After that he got support and started to get better.
I’ve also talked students down from panic attacks. It might involve physically sitting them down, getting them to blow into a paper bag, asking them to control their breathing. At other times, I’ll just talk to them in a quiet space.
TS: Nowadays if you start to feel anxious in a situation such as going on holiday with the family, do you have a set of actions that you’ll take to calm yourself down?
DM: For many, many years my anxiety hasn’t manifested itself in panic attacks. My anxiety is more physical these days. It might trigger IBS or stress headaches. But then that can sometimes lead to worry. For example, you start to think that this pain in your arm that’s probably a symptom of anxiety could be a heart attack, which in turn brings on the anxiety. When I start thinking about myself in that way it’s usually an early warning sign that I’m stressed and that I need to slow down, have a think and resolve some issue or other.
These days and from out of nowhere my mood can plummet for two or three days, especially in the winter.
TS: Even though that anxiety comes out of nowhere, are you better now at figuring out what is triggering it?
DM: As you get older your stresses are so much more in your face. If you are prone to being an overthinker, which I am, that doesn’t help with settling your mood down. Each time you have to do that acknowledging and that work on yourself. But I can get frustrated, particularly if anxiety hasn’t hit me for a long time and I’m feeling shit when I should be feeling happy. Sometimes it takes someone else, like my wife, to say, ‘Just because you’ve got this going on and you feel like shit, you have to deal with it. As long as you don’t go out and be self-destructive, and if you implement those acknowledgment strategies, you’ll be okay.’
TS: Does what you’ve been saying about anxiety making you lose control and the state of being in conflict or argument with yourself mean that anxiety sufferers have some kind of identity crisis?
DM: I’m not a psychologist, but I do wonder whether it is all tied up with identity. In your early twenties you are in a process of becoming, and I think it’s even worse now with social media constantly giving you messages around status. You’re not this, you need to be that. That’s not right, do it like this. Don’t buy that, buy this. Everything you’re doing is wrong, nothing you’re doing is good enough. It’s no coincidence that we are seeing more and more anxiety in young people because of the society that we find ourselves in, and in the way kids are digesting information, and in how they are communicating with each other.
On the other hand, the connected culture we live in might open up opportunities for getting more support and understanding. But then we’ve got this phenomenon of people leaning into Chat GPT for essentially CBT and counselling. What you shouldn’t do is self-diagnose, which is what a lot of young people are doing now, and that’s leading to all sorts of tragedies.
I would really advocate for CBT but the government needs to improve access to it. There are huge waiting lists for mental healthcare. Counselling services in universities are stretched beyond belief, as you know.
