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It’s amazing how illness changes your perspective.
There was a time when one of the biggest worries in my life was something I almost never spoke about.
Sweat.
Not the healthy kind after exercise, but relentless facial sweating that seemed to appear at exactly the wrong moment. For nearly thirty years I quietly organised my life around it. I looked for the coolest seat in every room. I always carried tissues. Air conditioning wasn’t a luxury; it was a survival strategy.
I worked hard to hide it. Looking back, I’m fairly sure I wasn’t nearly as successful as I imagined.
The strange thing is that it never stopped me. I still travelled extensively, advised boards, gave presentations and built a career I remain enormously proud of. But behind the scenes I was constantly managing something that almost nobody else knew about.
Then something unexpected happened.
Over the past few months, during one of Israel’s hottest summers, I’ve realised I hardly sweat anymore.
The moment it struck me was wonderfully ordinary. I was sitting outside in temperatures above 30°C and realised I was…comfortable.
No tissues.
No constantly wiping my forehead.
No scanning for the nearest air conditioner.
Just comfortable.
For most people, that would simply be good news.
Living with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP) has taught me that apparent improvements sometimes deserve a second look.
Most people know PSP as a movement disorder, but it also affects the autonomic nervous system, which controls many of the body’s automatic functions, including sweating and temperature regulation. Studies have found that around 80% of people with PSP experience problems regulating body temperature, and objective testing has shown that reduced sweating is a recognised feature of the disease in many patients.
Suddenly something that had puzzled me for months made perfect sense.
For nearly thirty years my body produced too much sweat.
Now it appears to produce too little.
Ironically, where I am today, that’s actually rather convenient.
Could retirement explain some of the change? Perhaps. I travel less, move less and live with less work-related stress than I once did. But the difference is so dramatic that I struggle to believe those factors explain more than a small part of it.
Of course, I also know this story probably doesn’t end here.
Sweating is one of the body’s cooling systems. As PSP progresses, regulating both heat and cold often becomes more difficult. Today’s unexpected blessing may become tomorrow’s challenge.
That’s one of the many paradoxes of this disease.
But perhaps the biggest lesson has nothing to do with sweating.
PSP has changed my sense of proportion.
The things that once consumed my attention often seem surprisingly small now. Not because they weren’t real at the time. They were. They genuinely affected my confidence and shaped countless decisions.
It’s simply that living with a progressive neurological disease has a remarkable way of redefining what counts as a problem.
I’ve also realised something else.
Almost everyone carries something hidden.
For me, for nearly thirty years, it happened to be sweat.
For someone else it might be chronic pain, anxiety, hearing loss, infertility, depression, a stammer or something entirely different. We become experts at coping. We assume nobody else notices. We quietly organise our lives around whatever burden we carry.
Perhaps we talk about these things too little.
Perhaps we’d all be kinder to one another if we remembered that most battles are invisible.
As for me, that particular battle appears to be over.
At least for now.
For once, perhaps the best advice really is…
Don’t sweat it.
