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 am going to try to tell the story of how I got the most ill I have been in my adult life — properly ill, not "a bit under the weather" ill — and then do what I would do with any client who presented with that history: work backwards from the event through the biological terrain that preceded it and ask what was actually happening.

I want to be clear about what this article is and what it is not. It is not a political article. It makes no claims about viruses, vaccines, governments, or media. Those debates have been had at enormous volume by people far more invested in them than I intend to be here. What I am interested in is the psychoneuroimmunology — the documented, well-researched, mechanistically understood relationship between psychological state, social environment, HPA axis activation, and immune function. That is the story. The rest is context.

Let me start with the embarrassing part.

What I Wrote — Before I Forgot to Apply It

In May 2020, during the first wave of pandemic restrictions, I wrote an article titled "Stress, Anxiety and Their Connection to Lowered Immunity." In it, I explained the cortisol mechanism clearly: when the stress hormones are switched on, the immune system is switched off. I described the HPA axis, the fight-or-flight cascade, the diversion of biological resources away from immune surveillance and toward immediate survival. I used the term psychoneuroimmunology — an area I had encountered in my undergraduate degree and returned to throughout my clinical career.

Sixteen months later, in October 2021, I was sitting in my house with a pulse oximeter on my finger watching the reading sit at 95, 94, occasionally 93. I was using a nebuliser with saline twice a day. My wife had added NAC and sodium ascorbate dissolved in saline to the protocol. I was not leaving the house. I was missing my best friend's wedding — the wedding I had been looking forward to for years, the one event in that entire dark period that represented something normal and joyful and forward-facing.

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

The Illness — What Actually Happened

I want to describe the illness accurately, because the severity matters to the point I am making. I had whooping cough at 14. Some of the coughing fits were so severe I pulled a muscle that felt like a broken rib. I struggled to breathe between fits, let alone during them. I did not go to hospital. I have been physically ill before.

This was different. The breathing difficulties were present every day for approximately three weeks. The pulse oximeter — which I was checking regularly because I was monitoring myself clinically — was routinely under 96, sometimes touching 93 or 94 on difficult days. Anyone working in clinical practice knows that 95 is where you start paying attention and 94 or below is where the conversation about hospital begins. I was having that conversation with myself. I was genuinely uncertain, for the first time in my adult life, whether I might need to go.

I missed the wedding. I could not travel. I could barely leave the house. And I found myself in the peculiar position of someone who had spent years — publicly, vocally, and with genuine conviction — speaking about health as personal responsibility, about the body's capacity to manage exposure when the terrain is right, about stress as a primary driver of immune compromise — lying on the sofa unable to walk the dog, watching a pulse oximeter, and wondering where I had gone wrong.

The Terrain — What Was Actually Happening in My Biology

Let me now do what I would do for any client. Let me map the terrain in the eighteen months before October 2021 and ask what was actually depleting it.

The Habit Disruption

For roughly thirty years, my daily structure had been built around physical work — early starts, driving to clients, training sessions, the natural rhythm of a body that was up at 5am, physically active from early morning, and tired by a reasonable hour at night. That structure was not simply a schedule. It was a biological container. It regulated my sleep timing, my cortisol awakening response, my meal timing, my light exposure, my social contact, and my exercise load — all simultaneously, without me having to think about it.

Lockdown removed the container. I was no longer driving at 5:30am, which meant the 5am wake was gone. I was rolling downstairs to a Zoom call instead, which was not the same thing at all. The work was still there, and the concern about whether the work would survive the transition to online was its own stressor. But the physical scaffolding that had regulated my biology for thirty years was suddenly absent — and what replaced it was the worst possible substitute: more evening time, more screens, more exposure to the fear narratives running at full volume from every direction.

The Sleep Architecture Collapse

Not getting up early meant staying up later. Staying up later meant reading more — and the reading material available in late 2020 and through 2021 was not conducive to parasympathetic tone. It was a relentless, competing stream of fear: from mainstream sources, fear of the virus and the unvaccinated; from alternative sources, fear of the vaccine and the vaccinated. Both narratives were running simultaneously, both were amplifying constantly, and both were available at 11pm on a phone that I was looking at in bed.

Sleep is when the immune system performs its maintenance. Sleep deprivation — even partial, even cumulative — measurably suppresses natural killer cell activity, reduces antibody production, and increases susceptibility to infection. I knew this. I had written about it. I was doing it anyway, because the external noise was loud enough and compelling enough to override the knowledge.

The Supplement Error

There is a specific clinical error I made in this period that I want to name directly, because I see versions of it in clients regularly and it took me considerable honest reflection to acknowledge it in myself.

I was, by mid-2020, taking more supplements than I had taken at any point in my clinical career. Zinc, Vitamin C, NAC, Vitamin D, sweet wormwood, HOCl throat spray, and others. Not because I had tested and identified deficiencies or therapeutic indications. Because I was frightened, and supplementing was something I could do. It was action in the face of uncertainty. It felt like clinical practice. It was not. It was anxiety wearing a clinical costume.

The specific error is this: I was loading antioxidants and immune-modulating agents while simultaneously running an HPA axis under sustained activation. This is not a neutral act. The pro-oxidant/anti-oxidant balance is a finely regulated system. Overwhelming it with antioxidants without addressing the driver of the imbalance — the sustained cortisol — does not restore the balance. And more critically: I was under-supporting the stress physiology entirely. The one intervention most clearly indicated by everything I knew was the one I was not doing, because naming the stress as the primary problem required me to admit the fear, and admitting the fear required me to engage with what the fear was actually about.

The Stressor — What Was Actually Driving the HPA Axis

This is the part that required the most honest reflection, and the part that I think has the most clinical value for anyone reading this.

I was not, primarily, afraid of the virus. I had made a reasoned assessment of my personal risk and was not significantly concerned about the pathogen itself. What I was carrying — what I had been carrying continuously for eighteen months — was a different kind of fear entirely. It was the fear of non-compliance and its consequences. The fear of what happened to people who did not subscribe to the prevailing ideology of the moment. The fear of social ostracism, professional consequences, the loss of freedoms that I had taken as fixed features of my life. The fear of what was happening to people I cared about.

Robert Sapolsky's work on glucocorticoids and social threat is directly applicable here. The HPA axis does not distinguish between a physical predator and a social one. Chronic social threat — sustained uncertainty about status, belonging, and the consequences of non-conformity — produces the same sustained cortisol elevation as chronic physical danger. The immune system cannot tell the difference. It just sees the cortisol and acts accordingly.

I was also carrying an identity-level stressor that I underestimated at the time. My entire professional philosophy — thirty years of clinical work built on health as personal responsibility, body autonomy, the primacy of individual biology over population-level prescription — was under sustained external challenge. Not just disagreed with, but actively delegitimised in the public discourse. The man who had spent his career saying "take responsibility for your own health" was being told that individual health choices were selfish, dangerous, and socially unacceptable. That is not a trivial stressor for someone whose identity is built around that philosophy. It is an existential one.

The Competing Fear Narratives — A Specific Amplifier

One aspect of that period that deserves particular attention from a psychoneuroimmunological perspective is the specific effect of competing, irreconcilable fear narratives arriving simultaneously.

The mainstream narrative generated one type of fear. The alternative narrative generated a different type. Neither was internally coherent — even within the alternative space, the positions ranged from "no virus exists" to "deadly virus but no worse than flu" to "take ivermectin" to "don't take ivermectin, it's still made by pharmaceutical companies" to fear of shedding and various other positions. The result was not clarity but a specific cognitive and physiological state: one where you cannot determine which direction is safe.

This is clinically significant. Uncertainty and unpredictability are among the most potent activators of the HPA axis. Sapolsky's primate research is unambiguous on this: an animal that knows a shock is coming can mount an adaptive stress response and recover. An animal that cannot predict whether, when, or from which direction threat will arrive maintains a continuous low-grade activation that is far more damaging over time. The competing narratives produced exactly this — not one clear stressor to respond to, but a pervasive, directionless threat that could not be resolved by any action.

"The body cannot adapt to a threat it cannot locate. Diffuse, directionless fear — the kind produced by competing narratives each claiming to reveal the hidden danger — is one of the most physiologically damaging states a human nervous system can occupy. You cannot fight it and you cannot flee it. You can only stay activated."

October 2021 — The Straw

The straw that broke the camel's back is a clinical framework I use regularly. The idea is that dysfunction rarely has a single cause. It has a cumulative load — straws added gradually, each individually manageable — and then a final straw that breaks the tolerance threshold. The last straw gets the blame. The camel had been walking bent for months.

October 2021 was heading into winter — a season when, even in the absence of a pandemic, Scottish immune function is challenged by reduced daylight, reduced outdoor activity, reduced vitamin D synthesis, changes in sleep pattern and food availability. Add to that the specific media narrative building around what was predicted to be a devastating winter for the unvaccinated. Add the approach of the wedding — an event I genuinely wanted to attend, in an environment where I knew I would be the only unvaccinated person in the room, at a time when the social pressure around vaccination was at its most acute. The anticipated social gauntlet — the eyes, the judgements, the potential need to defend a position I had stated publicly and repeatedly — was its own anticipatory stressor loading the system before the event even arrived.

The camel had been walking bent since March 2020. In October 2021 it sat down.

The Lesson — And Why I Am Telling It

I am not telling this story to be confessional, although there is an element of that. I am telling it because it is the most clinically instructive thing I have experienced in my own biology, and because the lesson is one that cannot be conveyed adequately in a clinical framework without the personal account to anchor it.

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

I had written about psychoneuroimmunology. I understood the cortisol pathway. I knew that sustained HPA activation depletes immune function. I knew about the primacy of sleep. I knew about the dangers of supplementing from anxiety rather than from evidence. I knew all of it. And I still spent eighteen months doing the opposite — because the external forces creating the biological disruption were sufficiently powerful, sufficiently pervasive, and sufficiently identity-threatening that clinical knowledge was insufficient protection against them.

This is not a unique failure of mine. Kiecolt-Glaser's research on medical students showed that wound healing slowed measurably during examination periods — in people who, presumably, knew about stress physiology. Cohen's cold studies showed that chronic stress tripled susceptibility to clinical infection in people who were not, by any reasonable measure, uninformed about the relationship between stress and health. The mechanism does not care about your understanding of it. It operates regardless.

What I Would Do Differently

If I were to encounter that eighteen-month period again — knowing what I know, both then and now — the intervention that was most clearly indicated and most clearly absent was not a supplement, not a dietary change, and not a testing protocol. It was structure. The same kind of structure I prescribe for clients whose HPA axis is dysregulated: fixed sleep and wake times regardless of whether there is anywhere to be, physical activity at a consistent time of day, deliberate reduction of news and social media exposure (particularly in the two hours before sleep), and — most importantly — the honest acknowledgement that the primary stressor was identity-level and social, not biological, and therefore required a different kind of intervention than zinc.

The DUTCH Plus would have shown the cortisol pattern clearly — the flat curve of an exhausted HPA axis, or the elevated evening cortisol of chronic sympathetic activation, depending on where in the eighteen months the test was taken. The GI-MAP would have shown the depleted secretory IgA that is the stool-test correlate of sustained cortisol suppression of mucosal immunity. The blood chemistry would have shown the inflammatory markers that accompany this pattern.

The data would have made visible what I was not willing to see from the inside. Which is, in the end, the entire argument for testing rather than guessing.

One Final Observation — On Mass Psychology and Shared Biology

There is one aspect of that period that I find genuinely fascinating from a biological perspective and that connects to a much larger question about how humans affect each other's physiology.

The hysteria — and I use that word in its clinical sense, not pejoratively — was palpable in a physical way. People stepping sideways into bushes to avoid walking past you on a footpath. Neighbours posting publicly that the unvaccinated should not receive treatment. The specific quality of the social environment in which I was living was not merely psychologically stressful. It had a physical, sensed quality — a density of fear in the social field that was different from anything I had experienced before.

Stanley Milgram's work on obedience and authority, and the broader literature on collective behaviour and social contagion, describes the mechanism through which social fear spreads and amplifies. But there is also a growing body of work — from the pheromonal research on menstrual synchrony through to biophoton research on cellular light emission — that suggests human biological communication operates through channels we do not fully understand and cannot measure with a blood panel. We are not closed systems. We are continuously broadcasting and receiving biological information from the people around us.

I am not arguing for any specific mechanism here. I am noting that the social environment of that period had a biological quality — a measurable, experienced effect on the physiological state of people within it — that the standard clinical model of individual biology in isolation does not fully capture. And that getting sick in that environment, at that time, in that social context, is not a coincidence that I can dismiss with a shrug.

Getting sick is rarely as simple as someone coughing on you. That is the lesson of the psychoneuroimmunology literature. It is also, as it turned out, the lesson I had to learn in my own biology.