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The reason that you can bring about this type of palpitation upon deep inspiration is because the vagus nerve innervates the lungs as well as the heart, GI tract and other areas. It is the largest mixed type nerve in the body.
Under normal circumstances, this activity goes largely unnoticed, but when chronic anxiety is present, the body's fight or flight mechanisms sort of remain turned on all the time. You have to realize that what you're experiencing is exactly the same thing that occurs when you are suddenly started or frightened. Surely you've heard of people say that something scared them so bad that it made their heart skip a beat, or that they nearly passed out, or scared stiff, or that it caused them to suddenly gasp or inhale and a host of other responses.
These experiences occur as a consequence of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system responding to danger or fear by invoking what is commonly referred to as the fight or flight response.
What happens in people with anxiety is that they become anxious or fearful of an unidentifiable source, that causes this system to remain chronically active, albeit to a lesser extent. The parasympathetic nervous system controls the vagus nerve and represents the brakes, so to speak, of the fight or flight response. The sympathetic nervous system is analogous to the gas pedal and activates systems necessary to respond physically by either fighting or fleeing.
So in the case of the vagus nerve, together with the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, anxiety and panic disorder promote a dysregulation that you sense as physical symptoms such as rapid heart rate alternated with slow pounding heart rates, feeling too hot one moment and too cold the next, tingling sensations, changes in vision or voice, weakness or tremulousness, dry mouth or over-salivation, coughing, trouble sleeping, and so on.
All of these "symptoms" are actually the very same ones invoked by the nervous system in response to imminent fear. The reason that people don't ordinarily make the connection is that when frightened, your attention is upon the source of the fear rather than how you're body is responding. Only in cases of clinical anxiety and panic disorder does the afflicted person suddenly take note of these physiological changes occuring in the absence of an imminent or unidentifiable threat. Consequently, it is believed that these changes are symptoms of something physically wrong because from an early age, it is both inherent and part of social training to take note of physical symptoms as the anticedent to illness or disease.
Once this perspective is adopted, it becomes extremely difficult to extinguish because the continued presence of the symptoms are reinforcing the false belief that something is physically wrong. And since the belief is that something is physically wrong, medical attention is sought and testing performed in search of the underlying cause. It invaribly results in frustration and even more fear because diagnostic testing fails to detect anything wrong.
All sorts of things begin to take place at this point, most particularly cause & effect thinking. For example, if a person with this disorder experiences symptoms while undertaking a particular task, they conclude that it has a direct link or causal relationship which may not be the case at all. Hence, people begin acting out of character and avoiding certain places or certain types of food, etc. hoping to terminate the underlying cause. They take vitamins, supplements, potions, yoga and many other consumables and activities believed to bring about a cure. The anxiety stricken individual also become panic-stricken rather easily because the symptoms represent a loss of control and a potential source of helplessness if an attack were to occur in a public place.
Do you begin to see how all of this begins to coalesce in the minds and actions of the anxiety-stricken person? The answer is actually found in understanding your disorder from a logical and objective standpoint and taking measures to diminish its effects upon your well-being.
There is no physical disorder associated with this type of physiological symptoms because it is a normal physilogical response by the body to fear, which has become chronic in the presence of anxiety. It can emulate the sensation of extreme illness and yet other than fatigue, it is entirely harmless to the body from a physical standpoint.
Again, the approach to the answer is not to force a direct relationship between the physical symptoms you are experiencing and some type of physical disease. Testing in this manner will always yield a negative result. It is about accepting the fact that anxiety can produce overt physical symptoms that have no basis in disease or illness whatsoever. It is about learning to better understand your body and how it reacts to anxiety and determining ways to alter errors in thinking that almost always make matters worse.
We'll talk more.
Best regards and Good Health
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