About Me

"A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once."

My Goal

You may occasionally find symptoms on this website that mirror your own experience, and understanding them can be helpful. But let's be clear: I'm not here to replace a doctor. If you have genuine concerns about your health, see a professional.

But if, after a couple of doctor visits, you notice they're looking at you over their glasses and suggesting "a walk in the park" or "maybe seek mental health support", then this site might be just what you need. (Take the mental health support if you can, by the way — it works wonders.)

This is a place where you'll feel understood, reassured, and maybe even amused while realising that sometimes, our bodies are just weird. We are not perfect, and that's just fine. Over time, you will normalise having weird symptoms - and that is actually the path to healing.

I once read that we are made up of 90% water, so basically, we are cucumbers with anxiety. As you might have imagined, I looked it up, and can confidently tell you this is not exactly the case - cucumbers are actually 90% water, but we are only 60%! But the message stuck with me. Sometimes we place so much pressure on ourselves and forget that life doesn't need to be as complicated as we want (or try to make it) to be.

So welcome, my little cucumber! Pull up a chair, pour yourself some calming jasmine tea, and let's navigate the weirdness together. 🥒✨

What You Will Find Here

• My journey and the many weird symptoms I've met along the way.

• Homemade "Mattical" terms like the Nose Noticing Threshold (NNT) (do I need a trademark for that?).

• The bizarre things anxiety makes our bodies do (seriously, what's with the random brain zaps and tingles?).

• Practical ways to calm down without falling into the Google (or now AI) rabbit hole.

• Healthy habits that soothe the inner self.

• Some personal reflections on spirituality, death, and consciousness (surprisingly helpful stuff).

• Positive news and joyful updates (yes, especially medical ones).

• Tools, apps, and books that actually help.

That feeling of helplessness and ultimately loss flipped my curious mind into overdrive. Suddenly, my analytical skills, combined with heightened anxiety, started working against me. Forgetting the old wisdom "ignorance is bliss", I began googling my weird symptoms. And as everyone knows, with great knowledge, comes great anxiety.

I found myself countless nights typing things like:

• "Why do I have a stabbing chest pain from time to time?"

• "Why do I feel something vibrating around my diaphragm?" (I did have that feeling, and found out the reason 😊)⁠⁠

• "Is that a rotating orb in the corner of my eye?"

And inevitably, I convinced myself it was either: (a) a brain tumour, (b) an aneurysm, or (c) something equally rare and catastrophic my anxious brain could conjure up.

It took years of therapy, support, and reflection to calm my mind again. And that's how My Weird Symptoms was born: a space for people like me (and maybe you) who deal with health anxiety — or any anxiety or mental hiccups — and want to turn the scary spiral into something a little lighter.

While I'll share some of the weird symptoms I've experienced over the years, and a few allegedly "rare" conditions I spotted in myself, the aim of this site isn't to scare you. On the contrary, it's to remind you that none of us is perfect — and we don't need to be. Everyone has "rare" quirks in their body to some extent, and that's okay.

We die a thousand times in our heads before anything actually goes wrong. I know, because I've done it more times than I'd like to admit.

Hi, my name is Matt. So happy to have you here! 🤗

First things first: I'm not a doctor, and I don't play one on the internet. But I have spent an embarrassing amount of time online, searching for my symptoms, trying to diagnose conditions, and following medical news. Enough to qualify me as a witch doctor in some remote village, or at least a few centuries ago.

I've always had a curious mind. Combined with my engineering degree, this taught me how to read, analyse, and (usually) make sense of what I found online. I trusted my analytical thinking to put things into perspective… until life threw me a curveball.

I lost a family member to one of the deadliest cancers out there: glioblastoma. (To save you from googling, it's a rare brain tumour. And seriously, don't Google it. That's the whole point of this site!) She was young, lived a healthy life, stayed active, ate salad the whole day, took vitamins, avoided cigarettes and alcohol… and still, it happened. The worst part was knowing there was no cure back then. Thankfully, today there are promising therapies. But at that time, we had nothing.

— Shakespeare, Julius Caesar.