Very nice and thought-creating post, Typer!
Really some constructive attempts to understand what anxiety is, and how people cope with it.
Thank you!
Martin

No, but have you ever had a crash or an accident in a car before? I'm willing to bet that if you had, you'd probably be anxious about it from that point on.

You don't have anxiety over it now because you have nothing which to base a fear on because you've had no bad experience. The anxieties over heart palpitations stem from having perceived "bad experiences" with our hearts. That is to say, almost no one on the forum genuinely thought to themselves "Oh, that's nothing to worry about" when they first experienced palpitations. The oppisite occured and most people were either struck with panic or extremely frightened as to what was happening. I would think it likely that if one of us had a car crash or car accident, we'd also develop anxiety over getting in cars too.

We went over the issue of control in the early postings of the thread, have you read those?

Your experience with cars is interesting. Since you race in cars mabye you have desensitised yourself to the fear of crashing and dying? We're all different, but it's the same fear that stops people from getting on a plane or boat: you can't control the situation if it goes bad. I have started to get anxious as a passenger in the car with my mum. She drives unreasonably fast on the motorway, gets close to cars in front and seems to have poor control over the brakes (she slows down gradually then slams them on for a second at the end).

I was offered a holiday at the end of this year but have declined because I don't want to get on a plane. That's not the only reason, I would get on one if it was somewhere I really wanted to see, but the plane is a conveniant excuse for me to not go. I didn't let that reason be known, and I know statistically it's much less likely to crash than a car, but that doesn't seem to help. A crash in a plane during flight is pretty much guaranteed to be fatal, whereas a car is not. You can't really have a "mild" plane crash, unless it's before take-off or after landing, but in a car you might only crash going 20 mp/h.

I have always thought to myself that I would carry a parachute on a plane if I had to get on one, but that wouldn't help much if it was over the ocean. I would also require a boat, food and water. I wonder if you can get packs which include a self inflating boat and parachute attached? Regardless, food and water would still be required.

Well anyway, yes control is a big factor and something which we must learn to overcome. We can only control a small fraction of our body's functions such as movement, speech, etc. and we don't become paranoid about the other body functions over which we have no control. I don't see anyone having panic attacks about not being able to regulate their own body temperature at will. The heart though, is obviously perceived as a much more dangerous and urgent organ to malfunction, but there are many functions which we can't control that would kill is just as quickly if they were to malfunction. Digestion, for example; if we were to stop digesting food we would die an even worse, much slower death than our hearts stopping suddenly.

Dodger wrote on Jun 29^th, 2011, 4:25pm:

All these points are well taken, and I certainly get it. I suppose the anxiety I get these with these things are a matter of "not being in control". When driving a vehicle you feel (even though its a bit of an illusion), you have "control", to a certain degree. You satisfy yourself that  if you stay vigilant and obey the traffic laws etc, the odds are in your favor. With these things it seems to be a crap shoot. Even though the tests come back OK etc...they're  still unsettling and worrisome. Logic tells you "something" is amiss. In my case there "was" a reason for these things happening. Turns out to be a "thyroid" issue. Oddly enough, it was something that had been overlooked by 2 ER's and at least 4 or 5 Doctors.  So, I suppose from my perspective its was a "control" issue, However, had I  not insisted that my present physician look for other reasons the problem I had, it may have been overlooked for years, leaving me too suffer through it longer. I certainly know that we're all different and I took comfort from yourself and others here when I was having a "bad" patch. I don't blame modern medicine, and I still have faith. After all, we're all only human...

Okay, just a comment to help further your exploration. It's important to take into account instinctual drives and archaic response sets which are common in all humans. This will help you to understand how and why the brain responds to fear stimulus.

When you experience an event that invokes fear and danger, the brain records every possible nuance associated with the event in order to establish and maintain what could be referred to as an advance warning system of sorts. For instance, if you are walking down your neighborhood street and at a precise point a bad dog emerges from a hole in your neighbor's fence and threatens or frightens you, all of your sensations whether visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory and even gustatory if involved will be established as a pattern along with physical sequelae that accompanies the event, such as rapid pulse and respiration or other changes due to sympathetic nervous response.

On any subsequent occasion that you walk down that same street, it will seem as though your defense system suddenly snaps on and just your increasing proximity to the hole in the fence will re-create the response set from the original event, causing you to prematurely avoid further approach or alternatively take a stand and confront the dog.

Once you've experienced benign palpitations and they are unwittingly perceived to be a threat, any subsequent incidence will continue to produce similar reaction until such time that you transform your perception from irrational to logical. That is in part, the goal of this forum, to provide you with facts that can gradually restore the proper perspective and logical resolution to the circumstances. You are repeatedly frightened and your confidence challenged because of what you believe benign palpitations to represent.

This pattern, however, is cause for you to explore the matter far more in depth because it most often exists in a similar form with respect to historical patterns and not merely the onset of benign palpitation events.

In sum, take the content being developed on this thread and apply it to yourself from the standpoint of looking more in depth at the rationales being explored. How we communicate these perspectives outwardly is not how they are dealt with internally.

The car accident example is merely to portray the relative risk that we rationalize on a daily basis, moreover our perceptions versus the actual potential at any given interval.

Best regards and Good Health

That is indeed correct, Martin. Transformation is the act of training in many instances and if you look at the circumstances for many of you involved in a similar pattern set, it is a sense of training through repetition that results in the inability to alter perceptions as rapidly as accepting the actual premise of benign palpitations on a purely intellectual plane.

In other words, understanding the actual physiological event from a logistical standpoint does not always translate to the commensurate absence of emotional discomfort that the events produce. This disparity is produced by the lack of certainty with which many people judge life events. In other words, let's use our bad dog example to illustrate my point. If each time you approach the hole in the fence, the dog appears and takes on an aggressive posture but does not attack, you may intellectually deduce that the dog's disposition is merely one of posturing. This is certainly plausible since many animals limit their response based upon territorial boundary, with advancement elevating the animal's aggression and retreat defusing it.

But in some instances, animals pose aggression for other reasons and it is this unknown that limits the ability for you to be entirely unafraid when proceeding in the direction of the hole in the fence. The line separating the response set in humans is naturally variable, with some demonstrating the perception that the animal is merely acting territorial and despite encroachment to the point of walking near the territorial boundary, the animal will not actually attack. Still others take the course of least risk by establishing the rationale that it's better to be safe than sorry, ultimately choosing an alternate future route and yielding to the dog's perceived domain.

Benign palpitations are extra-cardiac in nature. They are universally perceived to constitute interference with the normal rhythm of the heart, which is technically incorrect. The only knowledge set that people have to draw upon in order to make sense of the events is based upon general knowledge relative to cardiac arrhythmias and their association to the characteristics of heart disease or cardiac event.

If we extrapolate this example to a point within relevance on a clinical plane, benign palpitations are the physiological equivalent of a muscle twitch of the eyelid, known as myokymia, and yet when someone experiences a muscle twitch of the eyelid, there is no association with such an event to the potential risk of damaging or loss of eye-sight. It does not bear the same mark of apprehension as benign palpitations and yet the two events are physiologically equal in terms of their origin and outcome. It is the misperception and personal codification that benign palpitations are more than what they seem, that they possess the capacity to do harm based upon how they've been defined in the mind of the sufferer.

The brain is merely responding in an instinctual context because it's being told that the events are a potential risk by virtue of the response set being demonstrated. Thus, the advanced warning system mentioned previously simply remains on a variable state of alert because the events are unpredictable in nature. People with benign palpitations feel no less at risk than the individual with a true cardiac risk.  This perception is so real that I've been told by countless patients that I don't understand the nature of the problem and that something has to be wrong, that I'm just not proficient enough to locate the source of the trouble. This is a clear example of how intuition manifested from a state of fear becomes far more convincing than known fact. It is a compelling need to remain vigilant because the brain is seeking survival to whatever extent felt required to overcome a threat which in reality, does not exist in any form.

Best regards and Good Health

And: It doesn't help you much thinking about killing the dog! (Though you might be able to pass the fence without provoking it too much)