A story in the news triggered my chronic anxiety about sudden cardiac death and exercise. A football (soccer) player named Tom Lockyer had a cardiac arrest on the pitch a few months ago that he survived. Yet in a TV appearance recently he said that after extensive tests, there have been no actual triggering conditions detected (e.g Brugada syndrome or Long QT). When there are no causes for someone's heart just stopping, I get freaked the hell out.

This story led me down an awful rabbit hole of research into what's known as idiopathic ventricular fibrillation (in other words a killer heartbeat with no known cause). Quite often it comes down to microstructural abnormalities in the heart that conventional imaging tests don't pick up (yes, that's how deep I dove into the scientific literature on it).

Of course, I then convinced myself that this problem is exactly what I also have, so my heart is now a ticking time bomb. Just to do something as simple as workout I had to take some clonazepam this morning to cool down my thought process about dropping dead.

There is probably no help for how bad this anxiety is and also because I have zero control over whether my heart has any abnormality and because the same fears have persisted for years. But I needed to vent about it because it's really hard to deal with.