Why I Got Properly Ill —
And What I Think Actually Caused It

This is a personal article. It is also, I hope, a clinically useful one. I'm going to tell the story of how I got the most ill I've been in my adult life, properly ill, not "a bit under the weather" ill. Then I'll do what I would do with any client who brought me that history: work backwards from the event through what had been happening in the months before, and ask what was actually going on, and what would have helped.

Let me start with the embarrassing part.

What I Wrote — Before I Forgot to Apply It

In May 2020 I wrote an article titled "Stress, Anxiety and Their Connection to Lowered Immunity." In it, I explained the cortisol mechanism: when the stress response is switched on, resources are diverted away from repair and immune surveillance and towards immediate survival.

Reading that back, I'd soften it: the stress response doesn't switch the immune system "off", it shifts how it behaves. But the direction is supported by research I'll come to.

Sixteen months later, in October 2021, I was sitting at home with a pulse oximeter on my finger watching the reading sit at 95, 94, occasionally 93. I was not leaving the house. I missed my best friend's wedding, the one event in that whole period I had been looking forward to for years.

I had read my own article and not applied it. More precisely: I had applied it with my head, and then spent eighteen months doing almost the opposite with my nervous system.

The Illness — What Actually Happened

It started like a head cold: sneezing, a cough, tiredness. I assumed I'd shake it off and carried on working. By the second week I had a fever that lasted about seven days, no appetite, and breathlessness and dizziness with any exertion. Walking the dog slowly was about the limit. The breathing difficulty lasted around three weeks.

I had whooping cough at 14, with coughing fits so violent I pulled a muscle that felt like a broken rib. This was different. It was the first time in my adult life I wondered whether I might need hospital.

I didn't test, so I can't tell you whether it was COVID-19. Other people in the house had been ill first. More on what that means below.

At home, I used a nebuliser with saline twice a day. My wife added NAC (N-acetylcysteine) and sodium ascorbate to the saline. That is what we did, not a recommendation. Inhaled NAC can trigger bronchospasm, a tightening of the airways (Fischer 1986), and a review of inhaled mucus-thinning treatments found the effects of NAC unclear (Tarrant 2017). Home-made solutions also aren't sterile or tested for inhalation. If you're struggling to breathe, that's a medical decision, not a kitchen one.

The Obvious Explanation First

Before I give you my interpretation, here's the one most doctors would reach for. If it was COVID-19, autumn 2021 was the Delta period. UK data from that time showed two vaccine doses were still about 80 to 92% effective against hospitalisation 20 or more weeks later (Andrews 2022). I hadn't been vaccinated, and the simplest explanation for how ill I got is the virus itself, in someone without that protection.

I can't rule that out, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What I can do is ask the question I'd ask for any client: given the exposure, what else was loading the system? Exposure sets the risk. The state of the person changes the odds within it. Both can be true at once, and the second part is the part we can do something about.

The Terrain — What Was Happening in the Eighteen Months Before

The structure went

For roughly thirty years my day had been built around physical work: early starts, driving to clients, training sessions, a body that was up at 5am and tired by a reasonable hour at night. That structure was more than a timetable. It set my sleep timing, my morning light, my activity and my daily contact with people.

Lockdown removed it. The 5:30am drive became rolling downstairs to a Zoom call. The work was still there, plus the worry about whether it would survive moving online. But the physical scaffolding that had regulated me for thirty years went almost overnight.

Sleep slipped

Not getting up early meant staying up later, and staying up later meant reading the news on my phone in bed: a constant stream of alarming and contradictory information, from every direction, late at night.

The research here is reasonably solid. In a laboratory study, losing part of one night's sleep reduced natural killer cell activity the next day (Irwin 1996). People who sleep under six hours are more likely to develop a cold when deliberately exposed to the virus (Prather 2015). Grade: consistent experimental and observational findings; no trial has shown that sleeping more prevents infection. I knew all this. I did it anyway.

The supplement error

By mid-2020 I was taking more supplements than at any point in my career: zinc, vitamin C, NAC, vitamin D, sweet wormwood, a throat spray, and others. Not because testing had shown a need, but because I was worried and supplementing was something I could do. It felt like clinical practice. It wasn't; it was anxiety wearing a clinical costume.

I used to say this "disrupted my antioxidant balance". That's a mechanistic idea I can't test in myself, so I'll put it more simply: the supplements were aimed at the wrong target. The thing most clearly needing attention, my stress load, was the thing I wasn't addressing.

The stress load

I wasn't, mainly, afraid of the virus. What I carried for eighteen months was a different kind of strain: uncertainty about work, about family, and about how my choices would land with the people around me. There was also a long run of not knowing what was coming next.

That uncertainty matters physiologically. In classic animal experiments, rats given the same shocks developed more stress ulcers when they had no warning signal and no way of controlling them than when they did (Weiss 1971). Robert Sapolsky describes this work in Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. Grade: animal experiments; the human parallel is reasonable but not directly tested. In people, Cohen's virus-exposure studies found more psychological stress went with more infections and more colds (Cohen 1991). And a small study of dental students found mouth wounds took about 40% longer to heal during exam time than during the holidays (Marucha 1998).

Then came October, heading into a Scottish winter with less daylight and less time outdoors, and the run-up to a wedding I was dreading as much as looking forward to. It felt like the last straw on a camel that had been walking bent for months.

How sure is this reading? It's one person's history, read with hindsight: n=1, and untested. Each link is supported by research in groups of people or animals. Whether those links explain my illness, rather than the virus alone, I can't know.

The Lesson

The lesson is this: knowing the mechanism does not protect you from the mechanism.

I had written about it. I understood it. And I still spent eighteen months doing the opposite, because the pressures creating the disruption were loud and constant enough to override what I knew. That isn't a unique failing. The dental students in the wound-healing study presumably knew exams were stressful; their mouths still healed more slowly.

What I Would Do Differently, and What I Do With Clients Now

If I met that eighteen months again, the most clearly needed intervention wasn't a supplement or a test. It was structure. It's the same thing I now build with clients who come to me run down, getting ill repeatedly, or simply carrying a long stretch of stress:

• Sleep and a fixed day. The same wake time whether or not there's anywhere to be, daylight early, and no news or social media in the last hour or two before bed. Short sleep is one of the better-evidenced risks (Prather 2015).
• Movement at a set time. Regular moderate exercise, not punishing sessions. People who exercise most days report fewer days with cold symptoms (Nieman 2011, observational). For me, losing the daily physical work was a bigger change than I realised.
• Food first. Regular meals built on protein, vegetables and fibre, enough to meet what the day demands. That matters more when appetite and routine are both slipping.
• People. Deliberate contact, in person where possible. People with more types of social tie were less likely to develop a cold after the same exposure (Cohen 1997).
• Name the stressor. The honest version for me was that the main load was social and personal, not biological. You can't change what you won't name.
• Supplements last, and targeted. Test for the things that have clear meaning, such as vitamin D, iron status and B12, and correct what's actually low. Anything else gets a time-limited trial with a reason and a stop date, not a cupboard full of hope.

Where testing fits. A DUTCH test shows the daily cortisol pattern, a GI-MAP shows gut findings including secretory IgA, and blood chemistry shows nutrient status and inflammation. I used to write that these "would have shown" what was happening to me. That claim goes too far. No trial has shown that testing well people this way prevents infections, and a low stool sIgA hasn't been shown to predict illness. Grade: not trial-tested for this use. What testing does is give a starting point that isn't based on guesswork, and something to measure change against. That's how we use it in the TDG programme: test, plan the food, sleep, movement and stress changes around what we find, add supplements only where there's a reason, and retest.

Getting ill is rarely as simple as someone coughing on you, and it's never as simple as "it was all stress" either. Exposure matters. So does the state you're in when it arrives. The second part is the one we can work on.

Sources

• NHS Oximetry@home: pulse oximeter patient information (North Yorkshire CCG), v1.1, 2020. PDF
• Andrews N et al. Duration of protection against mild and severe disease by Covid-19 vaccines. N Engl J Med 2022;386:340–50. PMID 35021002, doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2115481
• Fischer JF, Scheuler D. Comparative studies on the mucolytic effectiveness of Mucosolvin oral and Mucosolvin inhalant. Z Erkr Atmungsorgane 1986;167:96–102. PMID 3765720
• Tarrant BJ et al. Mucoactive agents for chronic, non-cystic fibrosis lung disease: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Respirology 2017;22:1084–92. PMID 28397992, doi:10.1111/resp.13047
• Irwin M et al. Partial night sleep deprivation reduces natural killer and cellular immune responses in humans. FASEB J 1996;10:643–53. PMID 8621064, doi:10.1096/fasebj.10.5.8621064
• Prather AA et al. Behaviorally assessed sleep and susceptibility to the common cold. Sleep 2015;38:1353–9. PMID 26118561, doi:10.5665/sleep.4968
• Weiss JM. Effects of coping behavior with and without a feedback signal on stress pathology in rats. J Comp Physiol Psychol 1971;77:22–30. PMID 5166077, doi:10.1037/h0031581
• Cohen S, Tyrrell DA, Smith AP. Psychological stress and susceptibility to the common cold. N Engl J Med 1991;325:606–12. PMID 1713648, doi:10.1056/NEJM199108293250903
• Marucha PT, Kiecolt-Glaser JK, Favagehi M. Mucosal wound healing is impaired by examination stress. Psychosom Med 1998;60:362–5. PMID 9625226, doi:10.1097/00006842-199805000-00025
• Nieman DC et al. Upper respiratory tract infection is reduced in physically fit and active adults. Br J Sports Med 2011;45:987–92. PMID 21041243, doi:10.1136/bjsm.2010.077875
• Cohen S et al. Social ties and susceptibility to the common cold. JAMA 1997;277:1940–4. PMID 9200634