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Coping with a health problem during unemployment is determined by both work and health trajectories, and by the health work achieved during unemployment. The notion of health work defines a factual and subjective activity deployed in family, social and personal life in order to recover psychological, physical and social well-being, or to define new well-being norms. Our qualitative research, lead with unemployed people, has consisted in in-depth interviews and peer exchange-groups over several months in order to explore the various forms of health work, as well as the factors that encourage it or make its realization difficult. We attempt to grasp the mechanisms of health work: its purpose and evolving effects on health, its different meanings, as well as the health/work relationship that determines the representation of the future and the psychological and social conditions that lead to building of a professional project.