or I feel a lump or get a sharp pain in my head. Then I explained the less helpful news, that now I am dealing with hypothyroidism. It was quite the shock to her, and quite the conversation we had. At least our work together has come into use.

To end with some humour, I had a one-off booster CBT session in September, three months after I had finished up therapy for health anxiety. Fair to say quite a bit had changed since our last video-call. I started with the positives: yes yes, I no longer freak out the moment my heart rate increases,

but equally I am now prone to times where I have no energy, brain doesn’t work, and eating becomes a battle. More explicit has the idea become that health is a means, not an end. And what do I want to do with the opportunity that good-enough health affords? And what do I want to Be?

then I was informed I have a lifelong condition which will require daily medication. I am actively working now to expand my conception of health, because it is both true that I have worked to become a man in good health, and generally speaking I’m able-bodied and can even run for the bus,

Then, a few months later, I’m met with genuine health concerns and that’s why it’s been so hard for me to accommodate this news. One moment, I was sitting in the experience of trusting my body for the first time in years, acknowledging that I am actually in the best physical health I’ve ever been —

I’ve scarcely talked publicly about how health anxiety dismantled my life, how much time and energy it has consumed. It was only the start of 2024 that I began to break the cycle and overcome the dusty beliefs, the automatic thoughts that arise when the next unpleasant physical sensation arrives.

And in 2019, this underlying belief met my health drive, met my recognition of how much damage I had caused my body through substance misuse and the like. For half a decade my life was reduced to cycles of panic attacks and reemerging to put myself back together.

Then my grandfather, a very healthy man, died to a heart condition after having a pacemaker fitted in his fifties. My teenage development involved a growing fear of cancer and heart problems. I was convinced that I would not be here long.

I got into the gym and over years made a number of dietary and lifestyle changes. This felt really good, until my health anxiety skyrocketed in 2019. I had a predisposition for health anxiety from my teens; my first real confrontation with death was a close friend dying of brain cancer aged 11.

Through my twenties, I became fixated on ‘health’. A side-effect of overcoming my adolescent depression and death drive was a transformed relationship with my body. I wanted to be Here, wanted to live a long and vitalised life.