I had an MRI today. It wasn't for anything serious - it had just been ordered as a reassurance for me, something to close off a few more of the seemingly endless avenues that I seem to find of worrying about things being seriously wrong inside my head.

I hadn't been scared of the procedure until the day it happened - it didn't sound that bad to me when it was suggested, but it's difficult not to feel that you're doing something very serious when you have to tick through the list of precautionary questions that they give you. And when you see the machine itself, which is a mighty circular device that takes up an entire room and has a tube in the middle that looks only just about large enough to fit a small badger, you realize exactly why they ask you repeatedly if you have claustrophobia.

The door to the scanner room had a huge and unfortunately comical warning about taking any sort of ferrous metal into the room, showing airborne canisters, wheelchairs, pots, pans and other miscellany being attracted to the machine like someone had swallowed a magnet on Tom and Jerry. I had emptied my pockets, but I realized once I was in there that I had forgotten to take my rings off - despite the warning I was told that it was safe to just leave them on a shelf next to the darkened observation window.

I was worried that any sort of metal anywhere in the room would instantly fly at the speed of sound towards the machine and into my face, but this turned out to be a non-issue because during the procedure your head is put in a safe. You lie with your head cradled in the bottom half of a plastic device which is closed over you, and you are then fed gradually into the machine on a conveyor belt. From here on, the nurse communicated with me via a speaker somewhere in the head-safe, and I was given a bulb to squeeze to signal if things got too much.

The actual procedure isn't too bad if you close your eyes and do your best to think about something else, though - the worst part of it is concentrating on keeping perfectly still for spans of a few minutes at a time while the machine vibrates and plays a sort of post-neo-electro-trance remix of the Doctor Who music around you. I had earplugs in and I didn't think they were doing much until the end when I was slid out again and realized I could barely hear anything at all - this thing really is massively loud, and the vibrations you feel are the sound it makes rather than it actually moving.

And now it's a couple of days before the results come back. Nothing is expected to be special about them, but they will indicate once again that my head issues have been caused entirely by anxiety and are controllable. In fact, I have been very hesitant to say this out loud for fear of cursing it, but I've been feeling a lot better since Monday - I've had occasional pangs of fogginess this week, but it's no longer a constant, inescapable, distressing feeling of being out of balance. I just need to keep believing that I can get out of it.