We are fearfully and wonderfully made... our bodies are not really clockwork operating perfectly all the time, glitches happen often, the good part is that it has all kinds of redundancy that prevent something catastrophic from happening. This includes the heart, it doesn't always tick on in perfect rhythm despite the idea we've had implanted in our mind that it does. And that's perfectly normal!
Everyone has PVC's/ectopics... from what I've heard it's actually unusual for someone to have less than 100 in a day... what makes you and me different is that we notice and feel them. That's why they are called 'palpitations', the name itself has nothing to do with an abnormality of rhythm and everything to do with the sensation.
I think the start of breaking the cycle with me was looking back and coming to this realization. I've had palps all my life, but when I was young I didn't pay any attention to them... I didn't even know what they were, or care, really... so they happened very rarely and were beneath my notice. It wasn't until I became middle aged and started developing anxiety about my health that they came on in force... in fact, I can remember the night it happened. I had a bump of three or four of them and thought 'wait, is that my heart'? and then bam... the next night it was off to the hospital with bigeminy/trigeminy and lots of tests, only to be told my heart was fine.
Without having to go into how many times I went through this cycle I'll just say I began to notice the pattern, thanks in no small part to people on this forum and others like it.
The biggest break was last year when I had really aggressive ectopics for about 2 or 3 months. They would come on as soon as I did anything even slightly exertive such as standing up after sitting for awhile. I started challenging the fear that they would stop me from doing anything I enjoyed by doing those things anyway in spite of them.
I picked morning walks in the countryside with music because this is something I knew relaxed me, and anything that brought down my general anxiety level could only help. It was hard at first... going for a walk would cause the bigeminy to kick in big time, but then something odd happened... about 5 minutes into the walk, the palps tapered off and then ended almost completely. The feeling was like heaven, I wanted to dance and sing aloud. It was an unintended side effect at the time, the main thing was I wanted to prove to myself that the palps wouldn't harm me even if I did something that would cause them to come on in force... but what a wonderful side effect it was.! So I started doing the walk every morning. It didn't always stop the palpitations completely every time, but it did seem to reduce them. Eventually though the runs of palps I would get when I started tapered off and stopped happening altogether. The exercise no doubt helped, but what I really credit was facing and defeating the fear.
Now I still get ectopics now and then (think I might have had one while writing this post in fact), but very few and I usually hardly notice them. I've pinned down the pattern of fear, to where if I have an unusually rough bout of ectopics I can't think of a time when I couldn't trace it back to an event earlier, no farther than 2 days, that stressed me out... and I gloss over the palps and treat the stress. When the stress goes away, the palps go with it.
To cite an example... this year I came back to the forum to see how everyone was doing. It made me remember how I felt last year, and just thinking about it made the palps come back. I could have freaked out then, thinking I was going to have them for another 3 months... that thought did pop up, but I realized it was silly and put it out of my mind... and sure enough it stopped after a day or two and never got anywhere near as bad as it did last year. It was probably just a product of the combination of thinking about palps and my monthly cycle.
Anxiety causes palps and makes you more sensitive to things that cause them by cranking up your vagus nerve, and the palps in turn make you more anxious... it's an endless feedback loop. Treating the palps wouldn't work... there were too many different triggers and they're all different for different people too. So I attacked the anxiety directly. My biggest fear was that the ectopics would stop me from enjoying the things I loved to do, so I did them anyway. In addition I also modified my diet and habits to reduce stress physiologically (for me specifically, decaffienated green tea, better and more regular sleep and eating habits, and more "vitamin O"
). I also tied up a few loose ends in my life that were causing me stress... solved things that I feared about that I was capable of solving, and let go of fears I had no control over... always had God to fall back on for that!
I hope this helps... the anxiety is your real enemy, the one you need to beat in any way you can. If it seems like you've got it down and then that one palp comes back to disturb you again, remember it's just one palp...not bad at all, and no reason why necessarily it means you will get a bunch of them. Forget about it. Even if more come, you've had more before and they went away, they'll go away again! Think about what else might be stressing you out and beat that stress from every angle... mind, body and soul.
God bless, and my thoughts and prayers with you!
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RLR / Kalah stopping the merry-go-round (Read 7240 times)
