About a month ago, I went to see a naturopath. About ten minutes in, she looked at me and asked quite calmly: “Do you know what your blood pressure is?”
I didn’t.
Now. I am a yoga teacher. I have spent years guiding people to breathe, to listen to their bodies, to notice what’s happening beneath the surface. And I did not know my own blood pressure.
I’ve been sitting with the irony of that all week — because I don’t think it’s actually that unusual. When you’re the person who holds the space for everyone else, who shows up, who delivers, who keeps things moving, your attention flows outward so habitually that the basics of your own physical picture simply stop registering. Not from negligence. From a very particular kind of trained self-forgetting that looks, from the outside, like having it together.
The naturopath was matter-of-fact about it. Not alarmed. Just: this is information you need. And that matter-of-factness was clarifying.
High blood pressure has no symptoms until it has catastrophic ones. It’s a leading precursor to strokes and heart attacks — particularly if cardiovascular disease runs in your family, and particularly if you’ve been carrying sustained, low-grade stress for years. I’ve since bought a monitor — upper arm models are around £25-30 and reliable — and my readings are fine. But I would not have known that without checking.
This connects to something Peter Diamandis wrote recently that’s stayed in my mind. He cited both Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Sir Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind — two of the most credible voices in AI — both saying that AI-driven medicine could solve most diseases within ten to fifteen years. A century of biological progress, compressed into a decade.
Diamandis’s argument, stripped back: don’t die from something preventable before that revolution arrives. His phrase — “don’t die from something stupid” — is blunt and I’ve found it oddly useful.
So here’s what I’m paying attention to now. Blood pressure, obviously. And something called Heart Rate Variability — HRV — which is worth understanding.
HRV measures the variation in time between your heartbeats. Counterintuitively, more variation is better — it means your nervous system is flexible, responsive, and well-regulated, able to shift between states as life requires. Low HRV is the body’s quiet signal that it has been running in a sustained stress state — often for longer than you consciously registered, and regardless of whether you feel particularly stressed right now. It’s the body keeping score while you’re telling everyone you’re fine.
If you wear a smartwatch or fitness tracker, you may already have this data — most devices now track it, often during sleep. It’s worth opening the app and actually looking.
For blood tests, the naturopath’s suggestions included vitamin D, cholesterol and fasting glucose — all worth requesting from your GP, or privately if the wait feels too long. Take care of yourself.
None of this requires a new routine. It just requires paying the same quality of attention to your own body that you already pay to everything else.