Dead beat: How working long hours can damage your health

I've been on my feet for long stretches of time lately while waitressing in a busy restaurant the length of an Olympic swimming pool. This doesn't just involve humming around like a blue-bottomed fly but is also very stressful.

I enjoy waitressing enormously but have to work twice as hard as my colleagues as my mind can drift — I can charge someone £31 for a £351 lunch and then have to chase them down the street with the chip and pin. This all depletes energy resources, previously recharged — a little — when I did a job that involved sitting at a desk. Figures released recently show that Londoners work some of the longest hours in the UK, with an estimated one in six people putting in more than 48 hours per week.

For me, the effect of being on my feet for up to 15 hours a day finally began to take its toll. The first signs were obvious — fatigue and aching legs. The aching was alleviated by me lying in bed with cushions under my feet, thus lifting my legs above my heart to drain the blood pooled in my limbs. But then my heart started fluttering. At first I thought it was just the coronary adjustment you get after a sigh or a sneeze but it continued, giving me a vertiginous feeling that was far from pleasant. I thought it was a panic attack, perhaps induced by my increased caffeine intake.

My emotions also seemed perpetually close to the surface, liable to overflow at any moment and in any form. Adrenaline surges saw me jittery and high, cackling like a hyena one minute, crying the next. I couldn't stop sobbing after getting the order wrong on table 10. I resorted to hyperventilating in the wine cellar until the head waiter came and peeled me off the Chianti Classico rack. He told me to take a stroll along the river and to breathe, which helped me gain a modicum of perspective.

My general feeling was one that will be familiar to many stressed Londoners, of being under the cosh and unable to cope. I couldn't sleep either, despite throwing myself down like a slab of dead meat on my bed every night. Instead of sweet dreams I got floppy hands and feet. I was anxious and my heart was following an unfamiliar beat. Perhaps I was going to die?

It was with this doomy thought hanging over me that I decided 50 quid would be money well spent on a reflexology appointment. The one-hour session was initially uncomfortable as tender points in my feet indicated pressures and strains elsewhere in my body, but I gradually felt myself unfurl from tip to toe. Afterwards Kia, the skilled reflexologist, alerted me to what was wrong with my body — strained right knee, poor circulation, hormones and thyroid all over the shop, generally run down. She suggested I stop drinking coffee and start taking a vitamin B complex. Your body sops up vitamin B when you get stressed apparently, so it is very easy to be deficient.

I've never particularly believed in popping vitamins in bullet form — the preserve of American tourists who wear socks and sandals and monitor the passing week courtesy of a different pill for every day. Instead I've tried to eat a fairly balanced diet —enough greens, fruit and nuts to offset the chocolate fixes and the rich tarts and cakes at work. But I Googled vitamin B complex anyway and discovered it's a funny cluster of distinct vitamins that are often found together in the same foods — bananas, Brazil nuts, avocados, oats, beans, lentils, liver, nuts, meat, seaweed, potatoes, beer (well, brewer's yeast, anyway).

Then I made a further foray to see how a deficiency might feel and it was like reading the last chapter of my biography — heart arrhythmia, numb hands and feet, erratic emotions, rashes, even thoughts about dying.

I told my friends and family about all this, to prove I wasn't simply a fruitcake, as they'd begun to believe. The guy I'm seeing was thrilled that there might be an end in sight to the floppy feet. Naturally I immediately bought a pot of vitamin B complex, unnervingly large and orange, and within three days I was feeling a bit better, not least because now I could throw my hang-ups over an alphabet letter, like kids do jackets at playschool. I still felt tired but was less likely to cry just because someone asked me if the rash on my hand was fake tan.

Armed with this new information I felt the need to pass it on to everyone who seemed a bit below par and convert them to this new miracle cure for London's overwrought. I was surprised at how many of my friends were already taking some form of B supplement, notably those who had previously suffered from glandular fever or ME.