RLR, how much do breathing patterns have to do with Palpitations and anxiety?  Since I have started reading this thread I have been trying to analyze my thoughs and what I feel in life in general trying to see what I am like on a moment by moment basis to see if I can identify certain behaviors that lead to these Palpitations.  One thing I notice is that my breathing is very erratic most of the time.  I also feel dizzy a lot through the day as well.  I have a very stressful job and I am on the phone a lot and I definitely dont breathe properly. I am an upper chest breather big time and I find myself not breathing a lot through out the day.  Did I develop this erratic behavior because of anxiety.  Is it reversible? Thanks for your input.  Also I have reduced my fear level by half over these skips.

RLR...I just wanted to let you know that for the first time in 5 years I have had a reduction in anxiety and in heart skips!!!!  I can only believe that it was a result of my time spent in this specific thread and reading over your post in general.  Before I came here I truly believed that I had a heart problem and was going to die.  With that belief I continued to fuel the anxiety that lead to these skips.  After reading, rereading and rereading this post and many others I was able to start changing the way I thought specifically about these skips every moment of the day.  I worked hard and long to get my mind right with these.  I have experienced every flop, skip and run that has been mentioned on here.  I was agoraphobic for about 2 years and I had horrible panic attacks as well.  But since I found this site and REALLY studied and believed what was said I started changing my though patterns, actions, changed my behavioral patterns etc and I finally have a true and significant reduction!!!  What a feeling.  This work was not easy at all but now that I am seeing a reduction it has been truly worth it.  It has been absolutely the hardest thing I have ever done in my whole life.  I still have daily skips....but they do not bother me and they are far less now.  

I would just like to truly thank you for showing me the way to getting my life back.  You have no idea how much this site has helped me and I truly thought that I would live the rest of my life in horrible fear and depression.  A life lived in fear is no life at all and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your sympathy, understanding and knowledge.

If I have any words of advice for the rest of you on here...it would be to read as many RLR post as you can and use what you learn from his post to constantly change your scary thought patterns.  It is an exhausting job and takes a tremendous amount of effort and time but it is well worth it.  Also I would recommend picking up a book from Claire Weekes called Hope and Help for your nerves.  I have read and reread this book many times and she parallels exactly what RLR states...just not as medically specific.

Thanks RLR, you are an incredible man!!!!

Hi RLR, Hi all,

From a personal point of view, I’ve found this thread a huge help. I do still get the odd dodgy beat every now and then, but they’re becoming fewer and fewer as time goes by.

My health anxiety remains, and I’m currently fixated on stomach issues which scare me just as much due to the catastrophic nature of my thinking.

Maybe it’s foolish, but I think I traced my anxiety back to a really horrible flight I had back from Italy to the UK in 2008. I’d had a long and good (but very tiring) holiday, and was eager to get home. It was an early flight and I was run down.

The flight was horrible, turbulence all the way home. For the first time in my life I had a huge fear of impending doom. The plane was going to crash and I was going to die young, without fulfilling my ambitions or achieving anything in my life. I was incredibly scared. I guess it was a panic attack.

After that, I started getting regular palpitations and general health anxiety. A headache was a tumour, stomach pain is cancer, palpitations is an impending heart attack. It was horrible and I was a complete mess for a few months afterwards.

Fast forward a few years and I’m still here. I still have health anxiety because I’ve just been unable to shake the thought that I’m going to die young and I think this is where my fear lies. I’m not afraid of dying per se, I’m afraid of dying without achieving my life’s goals and ambitions – I want to travel, I want to enjoy my time here, and I want to have a happy and successful family, I want to get a degree and complete the education I was doing previously (I am currently in the process of doing this).

For example this stomach pain at the moment – my Dr suggested it could be H Pylori bacteria and had given me a week’s course of Omeprazole, Metronidazole and Amoxycilin. I’ve finished the course of antibiotics, which gave me a few stomach issues, and because my stomach now has these antibiotic related symptoms, I fear that it’s more serious than first thought. That’s the way my mind works due to my anxiety disorder.

In terms of getting over the palpitations, the first thing I did was to recognise that the odds of me, a 24 year old, having heart problems was incredibly slim at the outset. Further to that, I was very active and ate fairly well for my age. Further to that, I’d had the holter test and numerous check ups from the doctors which all said the same thing – benign ectopic beats. Further to that, RLR’s brilliant assurance on this website continued to reinforce the belief that maybe it was ME that was wrong, not the numerous qualified doctors and tried and tested methods of detection which had  not turned anything sinister up!

Every time I had a palpitation, I’d remember RLR’s words and just worry less about them than I had previously. This in turn led to a reduction in these events.

Unfortunately because I have not yet tackled the underlying anxiety, something else in the form of these stomach issues simply replaced it, so it is important to tackle whatever it is which is causing these issues in your life. This is my aim now.

I hope this is not too off topic - I'm just trying to relate to others my journey - which started in the discovery of this thread - and has led me to a major achievement on the way to beating this anxiety disorder once and for all.

Wow this thread got deep in the lists. I have not posted on this forum for awhile but I am having a rough night so I thought I would check in with everybody.

I have really been working on the whole anxiety thing and it has been dong wonders. I have had a few small episodes of palps and chest pain. It is curently 4am and after having a horrible dream of being in the hospital, having a heart replaced of all things, I am actually doing well. I t is amazing what a thought process can do. Instead of freaking I chose to look at like "wow I survived a heart transplant and was dong great" instead of the other way around.

I have been to the ER once with chest pain that would not go away and it turned out to be nothing, all tests came back good. I did have a palpitation event while there, which is the first time that anybody had been able to catch one on tape. So that was kind of like redemption for me that I was not going crazy. Doctors said everything looked good and let me go a couple of hours later. So firmly believing that if anything at all had looked off they would not let me go , I have been dong well.

I know that I have never been in any danger now and things are going so much better. I am engaged and looking for a new career. My fiancee has been wonderfully supportive of my anxiety issues and I know she has been a big help in "calming my world down". I hope all of you are finding peace as well. Take care and I hope this will help somebody to.

Hello everybody, hello RLR,

I've not posted on these boards for a good time and I thought I'd drop by and see if I could give some reassurance and maybe some hope to the others within this thread and the forums. I'm sad to see this thread not being active, but I'm also part of the reason for that.

So, I've not had any sustained anxiety or panic attacks for a long time now. I think I've come to a realisation regarding what has happened to me in life and I hope I can continue making progress with all things.

Anyway, before April 1^st 2011 I had a very angry, hateful, bitter and highly stressful family member to live with (evil brother). Since moving house on April 1^st 2011, and moving away from that person, I gradually began to get better and better and now on May 15^th 2012 I can confidently say that my panic/anxiety has subsided to near non-existence. I still get a bit worrisome at times and only occasionally have brief moments of doubt where my heart rate starts to raise, but never have sustained "attacks" like I used to.

So anyway, the cause I believe was a combination of factors that all played a part in increasing the liklihood of anxiety and panic.

• Health - Crohn's disease - DX 2007 (approx. 5 years)
• Highly stressful family member - 23 years worth
• Stagnating life at the time

There was also I believe a compound effect taking place to worsen my circumstances further. My Crohn's disease seems to respond negatively to stress, which I was laden with at the time. This had the effect of stressing me out further and pushing me over the proverbial edge.

Since moving away from my evil brother, I went from 130 lbs (early 2011 - at 5'11"), to 187 lbs at Christmas 2011, and I'm not even sure what my weight is at the current time because I'm no longer concerned with it, but I suspect I'm technically overweight now and wouldn't be surprised if I was still around the 180 - 190 mark. I'm fitter, stronger and healthier and I have lots of energy that I didn't have prior. I sleep well, I worry less and I generally feel a thousand times greater than I did. I don't fret over my resting heart rate anymore and sometimes notice it beating away nice and slow (I don't even count the rate) when I'm in bed at night. Contrast this to before when I would incessantly keep my fingers pressed to the palm of my hand to feel my pulse and would always count it at around 90-110.

I also believe a big factor in my disorder was that I slept very poorly. I slept poorly because I would go to bed and leave music playing, leave Internet videos on, leave my computer screen on and make sure there was noise so I couldn't focus on my pounding heart rate. This in turn kept me fatigued all the time. I didn't even consider this to be the cause of my fatigue, but once I moved house and had a couple of nights without my computer, and consequently no distraction, I realised that sleeping in the dark with no noise or distraction is the only way to sleep. Sometimes I fall asleep with my computer left on and I always notice the next day that I'm more tired than I should be. I'm positive that having noise or lights on while you sleep ruins your bodys rhythm and leaves your nervous system fatigued, perhaps paving the way for the symptoms such as anxiety and panic.

I remember that Dr. Rane always said that anxiety is a symptom and now I see why. Yes, it is a symptom, and one of a cause probably unknown to most people who suffer with it. I always hoped that if I overcame my problem I'd be able to give advice to others on the forum but I don't believe I can. I am now under the impression that anxiety, though common among us all, doesn't share a common cause. That is something which you must find yourself and must find a way of dealing with it once you discover what it is. Examine your life before and during anxiety; figure out what's changed from the time long before you had anxiety/panic to the time when you did.

Hope this thread comes back to life, I may post more frequently now that I'm not dependant on these forums for help.

Dr. Rane, I would also like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for being here and staying so dedicated to the forums and helping others with advice and kind words. I've no doubt I would have gotten a lot worse had I not found this forum, but I still hope that I would have found the end eventually. I don't think I will ever fully be free of the panic and anxiety that I suffered from; I believe there will always be times when insignificant matters cause me to panic, but now I'm at the stage where it just doesn't matter; unsustained worries will not affect my life any further.

Thank you.

This is a great post and I am not sure why it falls so far back in the forum either.  I think the reason is that so many of us are past the panic tipping point to see and think clearly.  What I mean is panic is a natural defense that the body has built in to protect itself.  So the fear of these skipped beats has been identified by us and then labeled as a scary thing.  Once that label gets placed it is extremely difficult for the brain to take that label off.  I will give you a good example...I walk home from work often for lunch.  One day a couple of weeks ago I walked by a bush and there was a snake there and it slithered in front of me and really startled me.  I havent thought much about it and havent walked home since then but today I did.  As I past this bush today there was some concern that was building inside me....I almost had to laugh because if this event happened once and my mind has logged this place as something to pay attention too..........well how many times have I told my mind to be afraid of the skipped heartbeats????  So working backwards from this is extremely difficult.  Just my 2 cents...

Since I posted my last post there has been over 50 views of this post...RLR is right.  There is something holding people back from getting involved here and I am not quite sure what it is?  If you are like me I go through big ups and downs with my life and these skipped beats.  There are times where they dont bother me and other times where I wish they would just take me.  Out of all the sites I have ever been on this is by far the most helpful.  I am hoping we can get this thread rolling again because I would definitely like to live the rest of my life to the fullest.  The last 6 years have been wasted on fear and anxiety and I want my life back!

I have read a lot of information from Claire Weekes and between her and RLR I have found that I am able to hold down the fort so to speak on this tremendous fear I have self created.  However just holding down the fort is not good enough for me.  I want to "lose the fear".  RLR talks about finding a root cause for the fear and Claire Weekes talks about Facing, Accepting, Floating and Letting time pass and says its not necessary to find a root cause to recovery from anxiety.   So I am a little confused on how to proceed going forward!  The days I use Claire Weekes methods without question are my better days until I have a bad skipped beat day and then for 24-48 hours it seems like all hope is lost, and that I fear that I dont just have benign palpitations and I am going to die and leave my 2 kids and pregnant wife behind......or my other fear is what if my anxiety gets so bad that I lose my job and am unable to work and make a living for my family.  The cycle is endless and exhausting.  Thats why I am going to use this forum as much as possible because this is not a life I want to live.  I know I can do it with the input of others and RLR.  I dont speak much to ANYONE about my heart or anxiety so having this outlet is my only true voice outside of my head.