Health-care magazines both disturb and reassure their readers – they may even seek to soothe the very anxieties they have created. Within their pages, communal and individual problems are interwoven, and complicated affiliations are created between writers, readers and their surrounding world. This article examines the twelve issues of the GDR health-care magazine Deine Gesundheit published in 1984 to illustrate how existential and banal concerns together formed an all-permeating apprehension. Two topics that appear throughout the issues of 1984 are (1) the threat of nuclear war and (2) yoga. They formed the two ends of a discourse of apprehension by GDR advisors that had begun in the 1970s and peaked in 1984. Drawing on James Carey’s theory of ritual communication, this article illustrates the political use of such a discourse to rally readers around the flag, but it also raises the pitfalls of such attempts at community building, for advice media tended to individualise health problems.