Anxiety and more anxiety

[MrsJ88]

I usually don't get anxiety THIS much but the last 2days ugh have been bad

[Rickk90]

I usually don't get anxiety THIS much but the last 2days ugh have been bad

Hang in there,
I was rushed to the ER this morning as my shortness of breath was pretty bad.

[MrsJ88]

Hang in there,
I was rushed to the ER this morning as my shortness of breath was pretty bad.

Oh no :( what did they say? I'm having the thing where I'm dozing off then jolt awake

[Rickk90]

Oh no :( what did they say? I'm having the thing where I'm dozing off then jolt awake
omg I hate that jolt feeling. Try to watch some tv till you eventually fall to sleep, works for me.
and I had all these tests done; Xray, Lots of blood work to see if I had any clots in my lungs or somewhere. To make the long story short i got sent home with the diagnosis of a panic attack.

[Peak]

Me too. The only advice I can give is something my counselor taught me when I was doing CBT which I found really helped. I don't know what your anxiety is about but mine was about my health but regardless of what yours is about you can apply this technique. You basically draw a probability pie chart where you draw a pie for each possible thing that could explain what you are worried about.

So for me if I got heart palpitations my immediate fear was that I had heart disease and was going to have a heart attack or stroke. What I had to then realise is that this was just one possibility. Now the thing with anxiety is that you quite naturally always fear the absolute worse and because this fear is so strong or the worse outcome is so bad, to you it becomes the only thing you fixate on. On this basis if I drew a probability pie chart I would completely fill it with Heart Disease. All this does is to confirm your fears thus increasing your anxiety. Instead start filling in the pie chart with all the other things, no matter how small they might be. So I could put:
Being Unfit = 30%
Just Had A Strong Coffee = 10%
Feeling tired = 20%
Everyone gets ectopic heart beats everyday and it's normal = 10%
Problems at work = 20%

So suddenly 90% of my pie chart is filled up with perfectly benign things that could well explain why I was getting the palpitations. The remainder 10% I would put down as Heart Disease and you can then see that in reality what you fear the most is also the most unlikely thing it will be.

I found applying this technique very useful and I'm sure did manage to prevent a couple of full on panic attacks. I too ended up in A&E/ER once whilst on a city break. I just felt so light headed, my heart was racing and was beating totally out of rhythm (loads and loads of ectopic heart beats). At the hospital they did loads of tests as they thought I could be about to have a heart attack but found nothing wrong. They could see that my BP had shot up, that my pulse was very fast and irregular but there was nothing wrong with my heart. They too just put it down to a panic attack and as soon as I was discharged and got back to our hotel I suddenly felt totally calm and everything went back to normal. Really, really scary when it happened but just goes to show what our brains can do to us physically without us knowing about it.

[bonehead]

my wife gets those jolts quite often.. unless she takes a magnesium pill that day.. I swear she has never once had the jolts if she took a pill that day. we use Slow-Mag (from Walgreens).. it's Mg Chloride plus Calcium