I can barely remember a time when I didn’t worry about my health.

“Hurt my knee” was reportedly the first sentence I ever strung together. As a child, I always felt a deep affinity with Beth, the sickly sister from Little Women, despite being robustly healthy by all medical assessments. Family meals out were often derailed by my ‘funny turns’, during which my mum would let her food go cold while she nursed me through sudden bouts of nausea in the restaurant loos (as soon as we got home, I would magically recover).

After I saw Moulin Rouge for the first time, at age 13, I became convinced I had consumption.

“I can’t breathe,” I told the family GP. “It feels like my insides are being compressed and turning to mush. As though I’m wearing, like, a whalebone corset, even though I’m not.”

The doctor sent me away with an inhaler and a stern warning about the lurid influence of Baz Luhrmann. But it wasn’t long before I was back (suspected water intoxication, after too many ‘hydrate your way to clearer skin’ tips). And again (suspected brain tumour; diagnosis: too-tight scrunchie). 

The pattern has continued throughout my adult life: rarely a month goes by when I’m not panicking about some mystery symptom or fending off some new strain of plague. There’s a common misconception that hypochondriacs simply imagine that we’re ill all the time, but the truth is we feel it – in our stomachs, our sinuses, our woozy heads and our aching legs. I’m hugely privileged to live, for the most part, in a healthy and able body. But your email rarely finds me ‘well’.

In recent years, as our collective understanding of mental health has deepened, I’ve seen more and more anxious heroines given a platform in popular culture. But health anxiety isn’t often represented, despite it being so ripe for material (what’s funnier than ending up in A&E with a suspected tapeworm that turns out to be an undigested noodle?) and so common.

Defined as “a fear and preoccupation with the belief that one has, or is in danger of developing, a serious illness”, one in 20 people are diagnosed with health anxiety, though psychologists believe the number of sufferers could be more like one in 10. Recent research points to an increase in the condition over the past three decades, chalked up partly to ’cyberchondria’ – our reliance on the internet for medical advice – and that’s before we even get into the damage that living through a global pandemic has wrought on Dr Google’s most regular patients.

As a lifelong sufferer, I wanted to write a book that explored this particular strain of anxiety and its most physical, visceral side effects. My new novel, Probably Nothing, has two protagonists: one has suffered with health anxiety her whole life, the other had never really worried about her health… until she started trying to get pregnant. There are echoes of me in both characters: I knew I had health anxiety before having a baby, but motherhood kicked things into overdrive.

Firstly, the process of pregnancy makes it virtually impossible not to think about your body more than usual. There are so many new sensations and strange unknowns, so much pain and discomfort is chalked up as ‘normal’, and so many twinges that could be cause for concern (or merely gas). We are told repeatedly to ‘trust our instincts’ as mothers and parents, but what if your instinct says that everything is definitely a catastrophe? I became such a common fixture in the maternity triage room that I ended up with a favourite chair.

Then there’s the ever-growing pressure to optimise ourselves – to not just have a healthy pregnancy, but a perfect one. To eat the rainbow and drink enough water, do all the yoga and get all the sleep (now, while you can!). If you’re of an anxious disposition it can become a full-time job – scanning ingredients lists for sinister chemicals, researching which drugs you can safely take for your cold, panicking over the carcinogenic properties of burnt toast and falling deep, deep into online forums discussing, for example, the relative benefits and risks of papaya enzyme as a natural heartburn remedy (my midwife shrugged).  

That the whole business is still so under-researched doesn’t help. Less than 2% of medical research funding is spent on pregnancy, childbirth and female reproductive health. If you’ve ever been pregnant, you’ll probably have had at least one query met with the all-purpose response of “Hormones! We think.” It’s hardly surprising that many of us turn to alternative remedies or start obsessing over sulphates in our shampoo.

I had hoped my health anxiety might take a backseat once my baby was here and I was too busy to worry, but it turns out worrying is one activity that can be fitted in easily around the demands of new parenthood. It just has a new focus. A tiny, vulnerable one. Suddenly the world was a dangerous assault course of invisible disease, falling pianos and strangers with cold sores who might try to kiss her on the bus. Factor in sleep deprivation and postpartum hormone chaos, and those early months were a veritable carnival of neuroses, midnight googling and panicked trips to the doctor.

Being preoccupied with your child’s wellbeing is part and parcel of parenthood – some might say it’s the definition. And it’s no bad thing that each generation has access to more health and safety information than the one before it, as any thread on boomer parenting habits will confirm. But the continual onslaught of advice and warnings can be overwhelming, even terrifying, making it hard to find the line between ‘responsible parent’ and ‘having a meltdown because she may have inhaled a puff of cigarette smoke at the bus stop’.

Once again, we’re told to trust our instincts; you know your child best, after all. But in the newborn trenches, you don’t necessarily feel like you do know your child best. Not yet. You’ve only just met them.  

One bleary dawn, when we were still counting her age in weeks, not months, I phoned 111 in a panic that my baby’s temperature was too low. “She seems fine but Google said it could be hypothermia,” I told the operator. She asked me to take my own temperature – also shockingly low – and gently suggested that our thermometer might be broken. It was.

Since then, we’ve seen many more bleary dawns and medical adventures. There was the meningitis rash that turned out to be irritation from my husband’s beard, the cough that might have sounded like a barking seal if I’d ever met one to know and the time she puked up a leaf (yes). Weaning was a white-knuckle ride, and starting childcare was every bit the procession of lurgy people promised it would be. Each time she’s been genuinely ill, my mental health has been put through a mangle, but I’ve survived. And she has thrived – something I never take for granted.

Most of the doctors and nurses I’ve dealt with have been kind, reassuring me I’ve done the right thing in being cautious. But what I’ve needed, more often than not, is for someone to tell me to take my temperature again; figuratively if not literally. Just to ask how I’m doing too.

At first, it felt completely natural to transpose all my health anxiety onto my daughter, swapping out my wellbeing for hers. But in hindsight, I realise how jarring it was to put my body through the biggest trial of its life and then watch the world switch its focus to a whole other person, as though I was merely the packaging she came in. So when I see new mums these days, I always try to make my first question about them. How are they feeling? What do they need?

She’s now a boisterous and opinionated 17-month-old, and as time has passed and our bond has strengthened, I’ve found my anxiety easing. I do know my child now. I know that when she ‘seems fine’, she probably is. Though I still creep into her room from time to time just to check she’s still breathing. 

And yes, I worry about ending up in some kind of Munchausen by proxy situation. I worry about passing all this worry onto her, rather than helping her grow up happy and secure in a body she’s grateful to have. I worry about worrying.

But I also know that I will crouch with her in any number of restaurant toilets, letting my lunch go cold. I’ll kiss every single hurt knee better and never laugh it off if she does a school project on the Middle Ages and believes herself to have bubonic plague.

I dearly hope she’ll grow up in a world that values women’s health enough to fund it – not just our reproductive organs, but our mental health too. And if I never make it to the status of ‘chill mum’, one with a working thermometer will just have to do.

Probably Nothing by Lauren Bravo (Simon & Schuster UK) is published on 4 July.

Frame Of Mind is Stylist’s home for all things mental health and the mind. From expert advice on the small changes you can make to improve your wellbeing to first-person essays and features on topics ranging from autism to antidepressants, we’ll be exploring mental health in all its forms. You can check out the series home page to get started.

If you or someone you know is struggling with their mental health, you can find support and resources on the mental health charity Mind’s website and NHS Every Mind Matters or access the NHS’ list of mental health helplines and services.

If you are struggling with your mental health, you can also ask your GP for a referral to NHS Talking Therapies, or you can self-refer.

For confidential support, you can also call the Samaritans in the UK on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org. In a crisis, call 999.

Images: Lauren Bravo; Lalla Redin