I don’t worry about my health. It’s a failure of imagination, I think, plus I’m busy worrying whether I use excess exclamation marks in emails and other important stuff. The last time I saw my GP, my blood pressure was high, but that wasn’t surprising, since it was debilitating anxiety that brought me there. When I went back, several months later, to do a self-check in a little booth in the waiting room, I assumed it would have returned to normal. My first reading was in the “possibly dying, do not leave the surgery” zone; the second and third went down to “come back tomorrow so we can check you’re not dying”. After that, I had to leave the booth because a queue was forming.
Since then, I have spiralled. Not into health anxiety – I remain unpersuaded my regime of sedentary living, self-induced stress and enough salt to fell a slug army is fundamentally problematic – but into a dumb but entertaining obsession with my blood pressure. Can I hack my way out of high readings without making any lifestyle changes? I have squirrelled away the household blood-pressure monitor (not my purchase) in my office to experiment. Would breathing exercises lower it (research has shown they can)? How about a walk round the garden (studies suggest interacting with nature can help)? A little blast of yoga (yes, also research-backed) or classical music (that can work, too)?
You may think you know where this is going – me accidentally improving my health by gamifying blood-pressure monitoring – but no. The results to date show no pattern at all (and before anyone starts to really worry, all my measurements have been normal: I suppose I originally succumbed to white coat hypertension, despite no white coat being involved). My lowest recent reading came in the anxious half-hour before an interview; my highest after doing corpse pose in yoga. Whenever I think: “Ooh, I’m nice and relaxed,” and check, it’s on the high side. What’s happening? Either I have no self-knowledge whatsoever, or the monitor’s faulty. Both highly likely.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
