Well, many patients opt for trying distraction or avoidance but I can tell you that the mind simply doesn't work that way. Most times, working to avoid unwanted thoughts or worries typically brings them forth with a good deal of rumination.

You already express that the palpitations are harmless and indeed evidence within your own historical references prove this to be the case. What you have to do is determine whether you truly believe this to be the case. The plain medical fact here is that these palpitations have nothing to do with your heart at all. The heart is merely responding to the vagus nerve and nothing more. They can never harm you or bring about circumstances wherein you are at risk.

Most moms in your position develop anxiety in these situations because they innately fear for their family and what would happen to them if something sudden and tragic were to occur with regard to your health or any other issue that suddenly stripped you from their lives.

It also generates anxiety in instances where moms feel absolutely so elated over their fortunate circumstances with their family that they fear it is too good to be true and that something inevitable is about to befall them but yet cannot be identitfied or predicted.

You need to strive for more self-confidence that everything is going to be alright and calamity will not strike you or your family down. Life is indeed supposed to be good and filled with elation. Everything will go fine and before you know it, you'll be at your children's graduation from school and onward to new frontiers.  

The key is not permitting your fears and apprehensions to guide your life, but rather simply understand them as irrational thought patterns that are common among young women with a new family. It's not necessary to try and eradicate the fears from your thoughts, but merely understand that they have no place in reality and should not be acted upon. Anxiety is advance preparation of what people perceive to be future consequences, but in actuality hold no basis in fact but merely irrational fears.

You'll be fine. Take a breath and live for the day rather than in a future context where you are powerless.

Best regards and Good Health

Well, understand that my description only hits the mark because I've dealt with countless patients who expressed very similar difficulties.

It's critical to realize that certain persons who encounter circumstances that they regard as life-threatening or produce sufficient psychological trauma can cause lingering effects. A common example of this would be soldiers returning from combat, wherein their lives may have been placed at imminent risk, producing a residual effect known as post traumatic stress disorder. While this example represents the extreme, it's important to understand that much of what you are experiencing is sort of a mild version of that same characterization.

Your circumstances produced a sense of vulnerability that you're unable to ignore because the risk was entirely unpredictable. It produces an uncertainty and feeling that life is suddenly not as indestructable as previously thought. Understand, however, that this is a perception and not fact. It nevertheless produces a fear that becomes chronic and is measured by the overwhelming loss one would suffer when considering one's family.

The key to actually placing distance between you and the precipitating circumstances is to realize that everyone faces risk and when it passes, it must no longer establish the forerunner of your daily life decisions and considerations. Nothing is going to happen to you and you must mark this point in time with relief instead of apprehension.

Constant ruminations about the uncertainty have caused your brain to perceive that the threat is still imminent and present, placing your body in a position physiologically to either fend off the threat or escape from it. Do you understand? In doing so, these physiological changes are being misinterpreted as symptoms of a problem, even possibly connected to your former health complications during the pregnancy described. This is the impass which affects so many persons with anxiety or stress disorder. They are unable to forge any conclusion other than the physical symptoms they are experiencing are the direct result of an underlying physical disease or disorder and this is altogether a case of mistaken identity. Yet the presence of the symptoms tend to provide reinforcement that the patient is correct and it produces a vicious cycle. They even come to mistrust medical diagnostic tests, since the result is always negative. Do you begin to see how a person can forge a pattern that is resistent to change based upon their interpretation of the evidence? In other words, if the symptoms would only abate, then the patient could lend more trust to the notion that everything is going to be okay and that they are well.

In such cases, however, it is the reinforcement of the symptoms that reinforce to the patient that they are correct in their presumption that something is wrong. Therefore, they cannot get past the nagging gut instinct which tells them to remain on guard, for something terrible is about to commence and the fact that their symptoms will not abate is proof. Since the patient is producing the physiogical changes as a consequence of fear, it is necessary for them to first come to trust that it is all a misperception based upon historical rather than contemporary circumstances. The ability to do so will result in a commensurate reduction in the "symptoms." Do you see how it works now?

You must now come to trust that the risks have passed and that you are once again on safe ground. You've made it through the gauntlet and you and your family are safe. You've encountered difficulty but it was unable to defeat you. It's about re-establishing the confidence that existed prior to the difficulties. You must exchange the thoughts which are irrational and highly improbable for those which exist in the here and now.  

Things are going to be wonderful for you.

Best regards and Good Health