I am obsessed with my blood pressure. Can I hack my way out of high readings? | Emma Beddington

Whether I'm relaxed, stressed, doing yoga or ingesting enough salt to kill a slug, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the figures

I don't worry about my health. It's a failure of imagination, I think, plus I'm busy worrying whether I use excess exclamation marks in emails and other important stuff. The last time I saw my GP, my blood pressure was high, but that wasn't surprising, since it was debilitating anxiety that brought me there. When I went back, several months later, to do a self-check in a little booth in the waiting room, I assumed it would have returned to normal. My first reading was in the possibly dying, do not leave the surgery" zone; the second and third went down to come back tomorrow so we can check you're not dying". After that, I had to leave the booth because a queue was forming.

Since then, I have spiralled. Not into health anxiety - I remain unpersuaded my regime of sedentary living, self-induced stress and enough salt to fell a slug army is fundamentally problematic - but into a dumb but entertaining obsession with my blood pressure. Can I hack my way out of high readings without making any lifestyle changes? I have squirrelled away the household blood-pressure monitor (not my purchase) in my office to experiment. Would breathing exercises lower it (research has shown they can)? How about a walk round the garden (studies suggest interacting with nature can help)? A little blast of yoga (yes, also research-backed) or classical music (that can work, too)?