Welcome to the forum and I've read your posting and concerns.

I'm as much taken aback that the psychiatric ward would place you in a bed there for any period of time as I am that your family felt it was necessary. Your difficulty in no way constitutes the need for psychiatric treatment.

Your problem is central to believing and trusting in your instincts to a greater extent than the actual facts which exist. This is quite normal because when your perceptions demonstrate that your life may be in peril, the brain actually takes such a notion no less seriously than if it were actually the case. This is know generally as a fight or flight response and such patterns are instinctual for humans and lower animal forms alike.

It is quite easy to see this response in its elemental form by observing lower animal species, which operate in the environment using basic behavioral characteristics that are frequently imposed upon by fight or flight circumstances within the environment. In other words, actual risk is more frequent in the lower animal kingdom because it is more explicitly dependent upon survival as part of the evolutionary patterns in life. Mankind is a departure from this obvious characteristic because of higher-ordered brain function. As humans, we have the capacity to analyze the relative nature of risk and impose judgments about the proximity of either harm or safety. Sometimes we choose wisely, other times not so well.

The important factor here is that biological forces are at work with respect to the nature of panic threshold events and fear of the type which plays a role. Understand that the brain is hardwired to respond to the vast sensory network within the body and with particular attention to the environment, provides constant feedback which aside from anything more cerebral determines one's relevant status regarding safety or danger. Again, this dichotomy is a meter of survival capacity of sorts and regardless of the fact that humans are not necessarily imposed upon by predation as lower animals might be, the perception of danger and safety causes the brain to act equally in response. In other words, whether real or imagined, the brain responds identically.

If you believe that something is wrong with you of a nature that can cause your death, it is a threat to your survival and the brain acts instinctively to produce changes necessary to best identify and overcome the threat by confrontation or escape. Again, this characteristic response is well-demonstrated in lower mammals and to understand it is to understand yourself in a certain manner.

Panic threshold events arise basically because of sensory overload and the locus coeruleus region of the brain is stimulated, producing a sort of flash-flood of emotions, panic and anxiety among them. Physiological changes are induced that are most often mistaken for symptoms that something is going seriously wrong, when in fact it is an entirely normal response parameter for the circumstances which exist.

The cyclic effect of panic is evident in health anxiety because despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the patient continues to believe that something serious is wrong because the brain is instinctively inducing vigilance to define the cause. Patients feel compelled to keep searching and the deep-rooted instincts that something is wrong feel entirely normal and accurate. They are, however, purely contrived by misperceptions that danger to survival exists. So it is that the healthcare system courts the patient's need to continually search for a cause that in reality does not exist and any reassurance is short-lived by the subsequent compelling need to search further and with greater intensity. Negative test results are discounted as inaccurate or not sensitive enough and only reinforces the driven need to remain vigilant. Patients often need the physician to "capture" palpitation events with the notion that seeing them will constitute the long sought after definition of the problem. This is a clear departure from the actual fact that we do not need to see such events to know their nature because we are looking for the absence of certain criterion on the test strip to determine the nature of the events.

The core of your difficulty rests upon the fact that you are unable to trust in the actual facts which exist because you believe that your life is in peril and the brain continues to respond to best protect you from demise, which in all reality is nothing more than misperception.

You must come to realize that you are in no danger whatsoever and that you are basing your fears upon circumstances which you attempting to interpret in the absence of the requisite skills and training to do so accurately. By simple example, if I feel that the brakes on my car are malfunctioning based upon my interpretation of how they should function, I am going to bring my car to the mechanic and desperately work to make him see my difficulty because otherwise I am having to constantly check the brake pedal while driving to make certain that the brakes have not failed. I assure the mechanic that I know my vehicle best and something doesn't feel right, but despite my efforts the mechanic can find no problem. I am left with the anxiety that my brakes could fail at any moment, so I start changing my route to one with less traffic and start braking far in advance of the time necessary because the uncertainty must be mitigated in order to avoid catastrophe. In doing so, I have opted to mistrust my professional mechanic and instead rely upon my instincts because it feels more accurate to do so. Since the mechanic can't actually prove to me that the brakes won't fail, I must continue to believe that they will. In fact, it has worried and distracted me to the extent that I've decided to stop driving at all except in the case of emergency.

This example should help induce the insight necessary to see how a departure from reality can be established due to misperception which induces fear of peril. It is the purposeful vigilance to find the cause for fear and in the absence of doing so, retreat to safety instead. Either way, it satisfies the fight or flight instinctual drive.  

You are in no actual danger whatsoever. I was a physician and specialist for more than 40 years and I created this forum to help folks better understand themselves and how it relates to health matters.

Spend some time speaking with the other members here and we'll talk more once my comments have generated some questions or comments. You're going to be just fine.

Best regards,

Rutheford Rane, MD (ret.)

RLR,

Thank you for your reply and for this forum. I have truly seen an improvement in my attitude and reaction to my palps since spending time in this forum.

I know it is a slow process to re-train my brain, but all my small steps are welcome.

Sincerely,
Greg

I have only recently found this forum and I too get a lot of peace of mind reading other people's experiences and RLR's very down-to earth-advice. I started experiencing heart palpitations last year although my anxiety started about 11 years ago. I had my anxiety pretty much under control until 2 years ago when it started to impact again on my life again. At least I thought it started around 2 years ago until I read one of RLR's posts to someone else about how a major life event can be the beginning point. It made me think back and I realised that my anxiety actually started to return 4 years ago when my mother died. She died of an enlarged heart and somewhere inside my mind I must have been worrying that the same things would happen to me. One week after she died I started experiencing vision problems. 11 years ago my first symptoms of HA were vision problems. It took a lot for my doctor, optometrist and an eye specialist to convince me that there was nothing wrong with my vision. Following that I had numerous imaginary illnesses which resulted in endless visits to my doctor and sometimes even specialists. Eventually my doctor sent me to a psychiatrist and from that point on my anxiety began to improve to the point where I could manage it myself. I find that relaxation techniques help me enormously if I am experiencing heart palpitations. I seem to be able to manage these well but I am still manifesting a new imagined illness every now and then. I also regret the amount of time that I have wasted giving into these negative thoughts.