This year, my partner and I have decided to gift each other the same thing; we have purchased Oura rings with a year’s subscription to their health app to devote some energy to the project of feeling as physically well as we possibly can in 2026.

2025 - Sepsis, PTSD and losing mobility

This is off the back of a very difficult end to 2024, where I was gravely ill and hospitalised with septic shock and the ongoing impact of sepsis. It has taken me all of 2025 to return to the point where I can do many of the things that I ended 2024 with. I was on intravenous antibiotics for some weeks, followed by an incredible cocktail of medicines upon discharge from the hospital, and unfortunately, I went on to develop PTSD and health anxiety as a result of my experience.

Last year, I was lucky to spend Christmas at home with my partner and baby, but I was severely weakened by my infection and had lost the ability to walk. I was in a wheelchair for some months and then on crutches for longer. I have only really regained the ability to “walk” in the last few months, and my energy levels have begun to return to normal (though what is normal with a toddler remains to be seen!).

I remain impaired physically and cannot walk for long periods without pain. I can’t participate in exercise or sport the way I used to, and driving long distances can be difficult. My life has been profoundly changed, and so have those of my partner and child. I mention all of this to contextualise my decision to go “all-in” on this innovative health tracking device and focus so much attention on my wellbeing in 2026.

What impact on mental health?

It wouldn’t be like me to only focus on physical health, for without my brain, I am lost, and with everything that it went through over the last year, I am keen to treat it kindly and do my best to support it. Working through the PTSD of post-sepsis syndrome was difficult, and the health anxiety that came with it has now, thankfully, been processed. But I’m really interested in how this health data impacts how I feel about myself. Will it marry with the scores that Oura gives me? Will I be able to tie good mental health to certain outputs and make feeling good feel more predictable? Will having so much data at my fingertips mean that I pore over the numbers and obsess over metrics? Time will tell.

Tracking my wellbeing

I’ve had my Oura ring for a week now and have been wearing it comfortably without noticing it in my everyday tasks - bar showering or bathing my son. For me, this element is important because for health monitoring to really become something that I integrate into my routine, I’m the kind of person who really needs to not notice it. As someone who doesn’t usually wear a watch, this is where the jewellery format of this tracker piqued my interest. If I can forget that I’m doing something good for myself (until I reap the benefits), so much the better.

I’ve already had some sleep readings and activity readings that make the act of living feel a little more gamified. As a former avid gamer, I really enjoy being scored and feeling challenged to improve my numbers - so for a person who is extremely competitive with themselves, this works well! However, I can see that if our personality has a tendency to focus on this kind of data with a negative lens (i.e. our inner critic takes hold and uses this data as a means of admonishing us for our shortcomings), then I can see that this level of information could potentially be problematic.

Interaction with health anxiety

One of the principal concerns with sepsis is that the infection that has become blood-borne will have travelled to major organs, including the heart, and have begun to damage the tissues there. As I have a family history of heart issues, this is something that concerned me greatly, so the combination of this pre-awareness, coupled with the vulnerability of the situation and the worry that swirled around me in the hospital, eventually manifested in some overdeveloped concerns in my brain once I was back home and convalescing.

Developing health anxiety - even for a relatively short period, such as I experienced - was exhausting and very consuming. Fuelled by the fact that I had not recognised the grave nature of my symptoms and the shock at my diagnosis and urgent hospitalisation, did some work to undermine my confidence in my body and in my ability to recognise when it was in danger. Essentially, this and living through a deeply traumatising hospitalisation and a great deal of physical pain made me the ideal candidate for this kind of suffering.

How Oura is helping me to push back on anxious thoughts

I’m very lucky to be able to say that I am no longer struggling with this. Over time, my confidence in myself returned, and as my health improved, my belief that I would be okay eclipsed the fears that I might not. One of the ways that I decided to put data to good use in support of this recovery is to have a device do the work of monitoring my well-being for me. At the time, I began to use my old Fitbit Charge to track my heart rate. I have experienced periods of having an irregular heartbeat several times in my life, and there has usually been a precipitating factor linked with it, so when I started to notice a few off-beats, I decided that I needed something less subjective to monitor my heart whilst I waited for an appointment with my doctor.

The act of giving the task of monitoring to an unemotional, unbiased machine, such as the Fitbit or Oura ring, means that I can delegate the task of paying attention to it, and for me, it is the burden of noticing, which can feel so weighty. I cannot - naturally - always trust myself to be an unemotional, unbiased reader of my own data. But I can trust these devices to do so (to a degree, I would always advocate that a medical professional would be the ideal data interpreter, but they can be difficult to come by), and they are available at any time to respond to my needs, truly what a brain with an anxious propensity can benefit from.

So does this mean guaranteed good mental health in 2026?

Here’s hoping for a better twelve months to come in terms of both physical and mental health in 2026. I’m going to be rounding off my year with some good intentions and plans in place for supporting myself the best I can. I’m going into the new year with more information, more confidence in my body’s ability to heal, and more awareness of how profound the mind-body link impacts us deeply. I’ll be checking in with my own mental health needs as the year progresses and being sure to maintain my journaling practice, which is the cornerstone of how I proactively take care of how I think and feel. I'm going to dive into my Oura data when it feels right to, and use it to encourage me to build positive physical habits, including significant periods of rest, which can be hard to come by as the parent of a toddler, to support my brain to be the most well it can be, whilst also being kind to myself.

What are you planning for yourself in 2026? Perhaps now is the time to note your intentions? Will you be investing in a device? Journalling? Going to therapy?

Let me know in the comments.
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• This is an unbiased and unsponsored article which has received no remuneration for the mention of the products of brands therein - all opinions are authentically my own.  I include my referral code here if you would like to try Oura 4 with a 10% discount.

Anxiety is one of the most prevalent and damaging mental health issues impacting our society today. I have spent my career working with those suffering from anxiety on various levels of the spectrum of suffering, and all humans experience anxiety to some degree.

Typical anxiety happens to us all, and in the modern world, we usually experience it to some degree every single day in small doses. Sometimes we suffer from longer circumstance-induced bouts of anxiety, and some of us seem to have anxiety written in our genes - it’s the model with which we came to understand the world, and it underpins how we react to the things we find in it.

The human brain is extraordinary

It never ceases to amaze me how human brains find new ways, methods, and behaviours to manifest anxious feelings, and it can be extraordinarily distressing to those who suffer from it when the symptoms begin to become debilitating. This post is not for those who are suffering from the “anxiety impacts my whole day” variety of struggles. For those people, self-managed interventions are, in my experience, more difficult to make work, and I would wholeheartedly suggest seeking and speaking to someone who can offer you direct support and guidance in how to work with your debilitating anxious feelings and behaviours. It doesn’t have to be like this, and there is absolutely no shame in seeking help for it.

For those who feel like their anxious thoughts are more frequent, but perhaps annoying or frustrating, I would like to offer a quick therapy tool that I use with those who are presenting mild anxiety symptoms. It’s a logical question that we use to analyse the thoughts that we are having and make a judgment on how useful it is. An example is:

The situation and the tool

I’m late for a dentist appointment and I’ve just got in my car to realise that I have no fuel. I will definitely need to refill before I get to the clinic, and that will no doubt add extra lateness to my arrival time. My anxiety kicks in, and my heart rate increases. My hands become sweaty, and I get hot. I’m having a physical reaction in the moment to my panic that I’m going to be late for my appointment and maybe admonished or ignored by the dentist. I hate to be late; I find it crushingly embarrassing. What will they think of me? My dad always scolded me for my lateness, and I haven’t changed at all...

Time for analysis, not self-judgement

We look at the circumstances to see if the situation allows for any wiggle room or change in outcome. If I cannot change the outcome - i.e., I’m going to be late no matter what and there’s nothing I can do about it, then we have to accept that these thoughts are “pointless ruminations”. This means that the thoughts and consequent feelings of this event have no impact on the outcome and only serve to encourage us to spiral further into distressing or unpleasant feelings.

It’s at this point we can acknoweldge the thought directly with something like “thanks brain, I can see this is something that I can’t change and I’m going to have to stop ruminating and concentrate on calling ahead to the clinic to let them know I’ll be late, or just getting there as soon as I can, and stop this thought cycle before it takes up any more of my time and peace”.

This allows us to stop spending any further time descending into unnecessary stress and rumination on the perceived consequences. What is the point of spending time grieving something that we can’t do anything about? If something is unchangeable, then perhaps we can permit ourselves to move into pragmatism and cut off the shame spiral before it gets worse.

Adapt, improvise, and overcome

However, what if our analysis concludes that there is something we could do about the situation?

What if I realise my car has no fuel and I’ll be really late if I refill it before getting to the dental clinic, but if I quickly order an Uber or minicab straight there, then I can forget my fuel gauge. Plus, since I will no longer need to find parking, I won’t be as late as I feared and will ultimately be able to keep my appointment.

This kind of response recategorises the initial thought as “useful worry”. It’s the kind of stress that kicks us into the “adapt, improvise, and overcome”* part of our brain. This is the kind of stress that drives us to be extra early for a train, or to make sure we have our passport for our flight, or, as recently happenned to me, have the ability to think quickly and book an alternative form of transport out of a city when trains are cancelled and suddenly hundreds of stranded passengers are looking for a way home (thanks Bla Bla Car!).

If you can sit with your anxiety in the moment, analyse it and reframe it as “pointless rumination” or “useful worry” then you might be able to transform your relationship with your sometimes anxious brain and bring back online the parts of it which allow you to flow through the world and its eventual ups and downs with a little more ease and peace.

Questions to ask yourself

• Is there anything that I can do about this?
• Will continuing to think about this only serve to make me feel worse about the situation?
• If I can do something, will it affect the outcome in a way that makes the situation better?
• Is this worry useful? Is it helping me to be on time or prepared for an event?
• Are these thoughts ruminating? Am I going over the same thing repeatedly without resolution?
• Can I thank my brain for trying to protect me, but push back against the “pointless rumination” and move on to something else? (an activity, a distraction, a task)
• Can I thank my brain for converting the stress of a situation into actionable steps and use the feelings as “useful worry”?

What next

These are some of the ways I encourage my clients to challenge the data that their brain presents them with. Of course, these are innocuous examples, and I hope that your own anxieties are manageable and work with this kind of tool; however, as I said before, if they do not, and you cannot manage them alone, then do not be afraid to talk about them with someone, a friend, a therapist, or a trusted third party. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, and there are many ways to work with these difficult feelings; it can just feel really hard to do so from the confines of our own thoughts.

Book a free 30-minute introductory session to talk about these feelings with me, a BACP-accredited counsellor and talking therapist, here.







* Unexpected thanks to Bear Grylls for this phrase!