I suffer from Health Anxiety and also have GAD which I've had for about 20 years. Most of the time I have it under control but last week I had quite a big 'blip' and got very freaked out.
I had gone to the GP about heart palpitations I've been getting which I know are harmless ectopic heartbeats that I've had on and off for 20+ years but they had become more frequent and I wanted some medication to control them that I've had before. During this appointment my GP checked by Blood Pressure. I do have elevated BP but I monitor it at home and with medication it's always normal. This time it was through the roof. This was because I had misunderstood what they GP had previously told me about the medication I'm on and had incorrectly stopped taking it. My mistake.
However seeing my BP so high really shook me up and over the next 72hrs I then developed:
Shortness of breath
Dizziness
Numbness in left arm
Headache with visual auras and blind spots
These symptoms only made my anxiety worse and I feared it was all heart related.
So on Thursday I went back to the GP who listened to my heart and lungs, took my BP, measured my oxygen saturation levels etc etc and very reassuringly told me that this was all down to anxiety. Immediately I felt a sense of relief and the symptoms started to ease.
3 days later I'm only left with 2 symptoms:
An intermittent headache - easily controlled with paracetomol
Shortness of breath.
The shortness of breath isn't that I'm actually short of breath just that I have an almost constant feeling of needing to take another breath, like the last one wasn't satisfying enough. I know and believe that this is entirely anxiety because I know my saturation levels are spot on and my GP assures me there is nothing wrong with my heart and lungs and I finally believe him. Also if I deliberately slow my breathing, the feeling goes away and if I focus my attention on something else, the feeling goes away again.
The problem I have is that I'm hyper aware of my breathing. This means that if I'm doing something and it takes my mind of my breathing, the feeling goes away but then at some point I suddenly realise that I'm breathing normally and not feeling breathless and at that very nano second, it will start up again. Equally if I do something that would naturally make me breath more heavily like climbing a flight of stairs, carrying something heavy etc, I'm then instantly aware of my increased breathing, try and control it but the extra effort required more rapid breathing and so I just make matters worse.
I know all of this is in my head, I know I'm the one making it worse, I know if I could stop thinking about my breathing it would sort itself out but for the life of my I can't do it. The millisecond I wake up in the morning, it starts and continues until the second I fall asleep (with various periods in between when it is normal).
For me I know mostly it's not that I'm breathing too quickly but that I'm just aware of my breathing and trying to control it.
Other times I think I'm just tensing the muscles that control breathing that then make it harder to breathe.
There are also a small number of times when I probably am breathing too quickly, but this is the exception rather than the norm I think.
Does anyone have any experience of this and how to beat this cycle, how to get control back of your breathing by forgetting to control your breathing?
