Richie,  I am having a reduction in symptoms just in the 3 days since I have changed my attitude. Are they still there, yes, do they still affect me, of course, I would be lying if I said no, but whats different is I TRULY believe in what RLR has taught me.  And with that belief I am trying to change a very nasty habit of fear!  

This is the hardest part for all of us in that just because for 5 seconds you change your attitude does not mean your nerves will calm immediately.  First your mind and thought patterns need time to change and Habits are very hard to break.  Just cause you start exercising today, does that mean you are at your goal weight tomorrow.

I have altered my fight or flight to strike with intensity at every little feeling because I have been telling myself I MIGHT DIE every second of every day for 7 years!!!  Think of your nerves as a tuning fork, every time you are afraid you hit the tuning fork and it vibrates, be afraid again and it vibrates again and this continues.....just because I stop hitting the fork for a second doesnt mean it stops vibrating.

Another example....you break your leg and you want it to heal....you dont sit around all day and hit it with a hammer.  Well if I want my nerves to heal I need to let them heal....the only way I can do this is to take every symptom I have and truly believe it is anxiety caused.  How can I do this without question, its not easy, but I am trusting that all the doctors I have seen are right and I do!

So this is, I believe, the hardest part for all of us....and that is we try and step over that line of trust and when the symptoms dont disappear wight away we go back to being afraid and back to hitting the tuning fork.

I am now trying to step past that place that I have created in an effort to make myself feel safe, which in actuality is causing my symptoms, and I need to go where I am very uncomfortable and experience life again without fear and with the realization that I am creating my own hell!

Its not going to happen right away!

That is my plan and I cant turn back because I dont want to live like this anymore.  So I am willing to jump over my safety wall, even though I am scared to death, and see what is on the other side.

I hope this helps  : )

Big COuntry,

Great post. I feel your pain. I think for me I just reached a point where I was just tired of living in fear. I have had multiple versions  of all sorts of tests run and every Doctor has said I am fine. So the all of these symptoms and pains and fluttering and skipped beats were still there. I lived in constant fear that I was about to drop dead at any moment.

I just could not live lie that any more. I just got re married a month ago and I want to live, not hide in fear that everything is me about to have a heart attack and drop dead. Some how we call all find peace from this and move on with our lives. I hope the best for you and will be here if you need to talk.

Best wishes

I think for me the worry about my heart stemmed from deeper issues previously. I've always felt really uncomfortable about things I don't understand or can't comprehend or imagine.

As I grew up through my teenage years, I became more and more aware of my own mortality. I moved away from my home town, plunged myself into a full time job. Within the space of six months I'd gone from having the freedom to do what I want, when I want, to being an adult, with adult responsibilities, money concerns, paying my way, having to go in to work every day.

I suppose this may not sound like much, but to me it was a shock to the system because I'd never experienced it before. It's that realisation that my life would never be the same again which I believe to be the root cause of my palpitations.

For me these days, my palps have reduced a huge amount. However, my general anxiety/health anxiety has shot up. I've had the palps for about four years now, so I kinda feel that if they were going to take me, they'd have done it by now.

However, when I was in the midst of my panic disorder about these things, I began to worry about other things too.

I hear of people around my age getting terrible illnesses and disease. And my mind says "yeah I think I'm healthy, but that could have been me, or could be me tomorrow"... I'm sure many of you can relate to that kind of thinking.

It's exactly the same when I go on a plane. I know for a fact planes are the safest form of transport but I hate it, because a) I can't control it and b) I always think "what if" it's me who's in that one fatal accident.

It could just as easily be me than anyone else after all.

I've heard RLR talk about this before - unfortunately we live in a world where virtually anything is possible. The trouble is that it's true really, but until I figure out a way to deal with risk, I will always struggle.

Risk is the key here for me. I can't handle the risks of life at the moment. It's a risk that any of us could go at any time and that's just the reality of life. I need to come to terms with that and then I'll be able to move on.

I believe personally it is also a fear of death - again, the unknown and the uncontrollable. The one thing in life that is guaranteed for all of us.

I'll end it with two quotes from Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning:

"Even more people today have the means to live but no meaning to live for."

"Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

Okay, there is a very powerful message being flirted with here and it's headed in the right direction.

It's the one place, however, that I can't take you. You must do it for yourselves. You must work at this until it yields the necessary insight.  


Best regards,

Rutheford Rane, MD (ret.)

its great that you feel up for this challenge to re program yourself !

I hope it'll work for you in the end!!

What I do notice myself is the moment I try to relax and let go my anxiety then something else physically comes up or my symptoms seem to get worse and worse . Finally there is a level that I will respond to it.

So I know how hard it is.
Furthermore (i also wrote this elsewhere on this forum) there keep poping up new problems or possibilities for my symptoms. My Thyroid seems suspicious in my opinion ( serum levels) so, I keep occupied with my body, cause I still feel something else is causing this. I know anxiety and arousal is an issue for me. But just when I start to get convinced of that some new things pop up and could well be what causing my symptoms.

Did you know that many many people with anxiety and depression in the end turn out to be thyroid problems?
Now that my levels are questionable I start to wonder and i'm back at the beginning.

i absolutely believe that arousal and anxiety can cause symptoms and sustain these symptoms. But where did it start?  What if there is a problem inside my body what causes the anxiety?

Only when everything else is ruled out you can work mentally imo
The problem I face is that when you get the stigma of hypocondriac or anxiety then suddenly all facts found in your serum which seems suspiscious are still put aside . I really like to know if a TSH of 4.0 ( in the normal range 0.4 - 4.0/4.3) is not too high and t4 of 14.2 (11-25) do give a case of a slow thyroid (or illness).

my doc says ..I worry too much, but thyroid problems are often underestimated. the internet is full of specialists who agree with this. So its not easy for us people who indeed tend to worry too much but have sometimes normal reasons to question things.

What I want to say is..
keep up your good work..I know I want to be in your slipstream, but i'm not convinced that I can beat this only mentally not when there are too many fingers pointing to other directions.

I really could use the expertise of people about my thyroid levels.

symptoms:

Painful chest
skipped heart beats spasms
twitching muscles
Painful muscles
tired
shortness of breath
inability to sport due to feeling of heart troubles
feeling of tingling and tickling arms hands legs feet
splinterhemorraghes nails and some whitening on my nails which i never saw on other healthy friends and family

I do have bloodgas values in the past that matches chronic hyperventilation. But now I start to think its my thyroid or something influencing my thyroid

I'm currently in training for a new job. Just for a little bit of context, I'm a social worker. Anyway, today we discussed at length the idea of safety and risk. The main point of the discussion being that safety is a subset of risk and that you can have risk without safety issues but no safety issues without risk.

It seemed confusing to me at first but I thought about driving a car. There is risk in driving a car but we all put safety measures in place before we drive. We buckle our seatbelts, we drive cars with airbags, (some of us) drive carefully. These things reassure us and reduce risk and increase safety.

It's kind of the same with the anxiety we experience. We feel that we are at risk for something, but we lack the protective factors to tell us that we are in fact completely safe.

I feel like working on the protective factors - in this case, education regarding the harmless nature of our palpitations, methods on how to reduce stress, anxiety, triggers etc. - are the keys to the kingdom.

Life is full of risks and our reaction to those risks is what guides us. I think it's all about knowing how to appropriately respond to what our body perceives as a threat. Heart palpitations are certainly jarring and upsetting at times, but my reaction to them lessens that fight-or-flight feeling I get. It took a very long time for me to reach this point, though.

I don't know. It makes sense to me.

I really want to stay involved here but I'm not sure what to say.

From my point of view I sometimes have a decent day with low anxiety, and then something will trigger and I'll have an awful day and it'll remain like that for a number of days before slowly improving again.

I want to be able to harness that good feeling and try to keep it in place. i don't know how to do that.

I've had this anxiety for so long now that I feel kinda lost. I don't remember how I used to feel, I just know it was better than I feel now.

I want to be able to go out without feeling uncomfortable, or sick, or having palpitations, or headaches, or feeling achy or worried. I'm tired of wasting my life.

For me as I mentioned before it's all a question of risk. I don't feel suitably prepared for the risks in life. I used to be absolutely fine, I never thought about it.

Now, that's all I can think of. Palpitations started it off. Now it's palpitations, cancer, other dreadfull illnesses.

The what if's start. And then they get out of control and I dig myself a big hole and jump straight in.

I like to use the analogy of a slippery slope. I struggle up it, feeling better, then something will trigger it. I'll slip, and fall back down to the start.

Recently, I have been managing to get higher up the slope. I was feeling good. And then an issue which came up on Monday plunged me about as low as I've ever been and I feel I have to start it all again.

One minute you feel great. That evening you can practically feel yourself slipping down to the bottom again.

I know what I need to do. I need to think logically. As RLR says so often, I need to use logic to break the cycle of fear. I need to use facts and figures to understand the risk and put it into sensible context. I need to learn that nothing in life is guaranteed.

But more than anything, that is what I'm struggling with. There can be no absolute guarantees. I always say what if... what if I'm next... what if I'm the unlucky one. I guess it's possible. That's what I can't bring myself round to facing.

I don't think this post has been particularly helpful so my apologies. I just wanted to get involved a bit.