Heart rate

[Blessed]

My heart rate is 140 for no reason And I feel real shaky and faint. I was doing good this morning it hit me out of no where. I just had half a bacon and cheese sandwich and tater tots And coke could that be the culprit, I just feel really weird

[Blessed]

Also can skipped beats or flutters cause a heart attack

[Blessed]

I'm really trying honest, I just don't see why it's not going down it's still up around 140, I've tried to distract myself but now I'm having chest pains, just wish I could wake up from this nightmare

[Ritch]

Blessed .

You're doing it again, you are feeding the monster . You must stop it .

Its not the heart that is the problem , it is the endless questioning that is causing the stress and the anxiety and is in turn feeding more .

Get one thing straight from the start , anxiety is NOT a mental illness in total . It is a physical reaction in the body which causes mental symptoms . You dont need to see a reason . Just like when you have the flu and all of a sudden you feel worst . It is your BODY reacting .

Even as you recover it will happen for 100s of reasons , any thing from feeling a little cold , eating something that revs your system up to feeling over emotional from something . All these things you will feel more . This is what a mental illness does .

What you need to do is learn to handle them and stop feeding them with the endless questioning on what if it is this or that . There is NO what if . You have been checked . It is ALL anxiety and the reaction your body is having to being stimulated . It is feeling it more simply because it is over stimulated and the endless questioning is feeding it even more .

You have not joined and read that site have you Blessed ??

Anxiety is not the problem that it is made out to be . In fact it is one of the simplest things to understand but the disorder itself is like trying to teach a six year old brain something and it needs to hear it again and again in order to see it . The problem is your not teaching it .

Again blessed the heart is NOT the problem . GO and join that site and read it again and again . And stop feeding your monster :)


I agree with a lot of that but it is not necessarily physical symptoms that cause mental symptoms it can be the other way round.

[Blessed]

Thanks for helping me, so do I just pretend like my heart rate isn't increased ? Or do I acknowledge it and face the fear? My only issue there is the more I fear and dwell on it the higher it gets and longer it stays ..,I do want to get better believe me I just am so convinced they missed something . I just had yet another nuclear and tread mill stress test and echocardiogram yesterday. I was fine then, today it just hit me out of no where

[Perses]

Hi Blessed,

just repeating this

I found this in NY Magazine: http://nymag.com/health/bestdoctors/2008/47567/



The hypochondriac is a virtuoso of interpretive flourishes, one whose impulse to assign dark meaning to the flotsam and jetsam of bodily sensation is unstoppable. No back pain, stomach discomfort, or patch of dry skin is beneath suspicion, which always inclines toward extravagant causes. Among the most characteristic, and noxious, features of hypochondriacal thinking is its catastrophism. “Hypochondriacs go for diseases that are most dramatic and acute,” notes Brian Fallon, associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center. “They’re drawn to insidious diseases—cancer, MS, heart disease, lupus—that can’t necessarily be identified with 100 percent accuracy by the medical profession, and that affect multiple systems, and have a large variety of symptoms that come and go. In that way, hypochondriacs can always find something to support their fears.” Theirs is a kind of perverse grandiosity, preying on the impossibility of proving a negative. Who can say for sure that one’s body is not being infiltrated by disease? The hypochondriac wades into a spiral of dread, as Barsky says, “because the headache that you think is due to a brain tumor feels a lot worse than the one you think is due to eye strain.” Hearing about a new threat—SARS, bird flu—can induce panic; glancing at a medical show on television can lead to disease fixation; learning of the illness of a friend or acquaintance can generate a debilitating empathy. (Hypochondriacs often practice elaborate rituals of avoidance—refusing, for instance, to visit sick family members—in an effort to control their fears.) Michael McKee, a Columbia University Medical Center psychologist who has specialized in the treatment of anxiety disorders, points out that there is no safe middle ground for hypochondriacs between perfect health and deadly disease. “The hypochondriac has a thought, and it bursts into flame,” he says.



Unwilling to surrender themselves to fate, unable to accept the imperfect authority of medicine, hypochondriacs, Fallon remarks, “suffer from the pathology of doubt and are plagued with uncertainty.” Most can bear their physical symptoms; what they find intolerable is being denied an explanation for what they are feeling. They latch onto a theory about what, for instance, is causing their chest pain—heart failure, anyone?—and then they scan themselves for further signs of the disease. “It’s a disorder of extreme internal vigilance,” says Fallon. “They think they’re facing something that will kill them.” When friends and physicians fail to support their fears, hypochondriacs turn away, feeling resentful and abandoned. They seek comfort, instead, in amateur medical sleuthing. Not long ago, they could be found primarily in the health sections of bookstores and public libraries, furtively poring through reference books. More recently they have taken to wandering the infinitudes of the Internet. “Going online can be a nightmare for the hypochondriac,” Fallon says. “They can spend hours and hours going from site to site. It doesn’t help them feel any better, it often makes them feel worse, and it can totally wreck their home and work life.”


Although its features had long been known, it wasn’t until 1980 that the American Psychiatric Association took the first steps to recognizing “hypochondriasis” as a distinct disorder, including it in that year’s edition of the canonical Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and being careful to distinguish the transient hypochondria that most people experience from time to time—at least 30 percent of patients’ visits to doctors are believed to have no identifiable medical cause—from the hard-core version of the malady. The threshold is high. Not only must the clinical hypochondriac be in the throes of life-altering distress and impairment as a result of an unsupported preoccupation with disease, but the preoccupation has to last at least six months. It takes a lot of stamina to sustain the lonely belief that one is dying for that long. According to Barsky, though, the crucial difference between a casual worrier and a hypochondriac is that the hypochondriac’s imagination of disaster is impervious to rebuttal. “These people are not reassurable,” Barsky says. “For instance: If you notice a mole on your hand, and it seems to have changed, maybe you’ll worry that you have a melanoma. That’s normal. But when you go to get it checked, and your physician tells you it’s not serious, you say, ‘Thank God, that’s what I wanted to hear.’ The hypochondriac responds in the opposite way. Their symptom gets worse.” Indeed, many of the most incorrigible hypochondriacs don’t bother visiting physicians at all. Inconsolable, they keep to themselves, paralyzed by fear that a doctor can do nothing for them but confirm their nightmare.


As the workings of hypochondriacal thought have begun, in recent years, to receive serious attention, much of the research that has emerged takes the form of intriguing hints—suggestions that the brain of the hypochondriac, like that of the person with obsessive-compulsive disorder, becomes an enemy of the restful mind. Barsky and colleagues found that hypochondriacs report higher than average sensitivity to bodily sensations—heat, cold, hunger, noise—and admit to finding minor irritants like insect bites and splinters unusually upsetting. Just as some people have sharper vision than others, Barsky proposes, hypochondriacs may be prodigiously attuned to their bodies. Their problem is that they don’t know how to tune out the bodily “background noise” of daily aches and pains that others barely notice. For the hypochondriac, according to Barsky, “the background static becomes intolerable.”

The standard psychoanalytic account of hypochondria maintains that the behavior is an expression of repressed conflicts—unexamined grief, yearning for parental love, distress over real or imagined transgressions. Fallon has seen some patients whose hypochondria can, he believes, be explained in this way. But he has also begun to provide a far more comprehensive account of a range of influences on the development of hypochondria. These include the habit, formed in childhood, of using medical complaints as an effective tool of gaining attention from parents. “These patients don’t even realize that it’s a habit,” Fallon says. “It’s just the way they deal with stress.” Another subgroup of hypochondriacs are strongly akin to obsessive-compulsives, though they limit their fixations to illness. (People with OCD tend to dwell on transmitting a disease, not dying from one.) Yet others have a deeper affinity with depressives.

Brain scans, he says, suggest that hypochondria involves a heightening of metabolic activity in the same areas of the brain that are affected in obsessive-compulsive disorder. In OCD patients, this hyperactivity depletes the brain of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which helps to account for the success in treating OCD with serotonin-reuptake inhibitors like Prozac. Fallon was the first scientist to study the effects of such medications on hypochondriacs and has convincingly challenged the traditional notion, supported by cultural and medical prejudice, that hypochondria is untreatable and that its hapless sufferers ought, above all, to buck up. In the late eighties, during his residency at Columbia, Fallon was introduced to a 50-year-old stockbroker with an unwavering belief that he had a brain tumor. The patient had had four brain scans, each of which proved negative, and none of which appeased his fears. He had already received a great deal of psychotherapy and had taken medication for anxiety. Nothing seemed to help. Indeed, given the literature on hypochondria, Fallon himself held out little hope for the man, who was also irritable and unpleasant. As a desperation measure, Fallon’s supervisor, an OCD researcher, suggested administering fluoxetine—Prozac—which was new to the market. In short order, the patient’s worries subsided and his personality was transformed. “Suddenly, he was this gracious, grateful person.”


In 1993, Fallon drew on this success and designed a large-scale study to treat hypochondriacs with Prozac. Within twelve weeks of taking the medication, 70 percent of Fallon’s subjects were substantially relieved of their health-related fears. Given the effectiveness of Prozac for a wide variety of depressive, obsessional, and anxiety disorders, the results were, perhaps, not surprising. Fallon was startled, though, by some of his peripheral findings, which demonstrated the dazzling, and disturbed, powers of the hypochondriacal mind. To begin with, a large number of subjects given a placebo improved just as substantially as those who had been given Prozac. More peculiarly, though, one patient taking the placebo developed an extraordinarily convincing array of the side effects associated with Prozac. Yet another patient, believing she had been switched, midway through the trial, from Prozac to the placebo, underwent a classic case of withdrawal from the drug and suffered a relapse of her hypochondria. It turned out, though, that she had remained on Prozac the whole time.

[Ritch]

Very little and when you recover you see this .

For example my thoughts of knifes caused massive increases in anxiety back in the day . But today with more settled system i can have the same thoughts and simply dismiss it for what it is a thought.

Thoughts are thoughts and nothing more , you have had them all your life and you will have them all your life . The difference with anxiety is the primal part of the brain fires too quick and your off with the anxiety monster before the logical part kicks in and tells you that its a load of rubbish .,

Its important to remember that the thought where always there . It only becomes a problem when the physical manifestations of anxiety kick in . Hence the reason you could take a benzo , have the same thought and have little if any reactions . Its because the physical reaction in the body stops.

Most of the mental symptoms are also a physical reaction in the body . Not all but most of them are just on a huge over reacted scale . For example it is alright to feel sad watching a sad movie , you might even cry a bit but to lose the plot about it means that your system is over reacting . This is the reason why you can ask anyone with anxiety whats happening and most will say at the time "I DONT KNOW"

There is no doubt that thoughts can and do get us in there but they are not the only thing that keep you there . You cant think your way out of anxiety and this is why just CBT talk wise will not work . It is not just the CBT but the actions, the behavioral changes that follow after the change in mind set . Sort of like ,deciding to lose weight is not going to make you thin , but the change in mindset and the change in habit will .

In order to recover you must see things as they are nothing more than a over reactive system and nothing more .

But you are correct in that mental thinking can causes changes but this is often because people cant see that there thinking is firing the anxiety . Not all the anxiety and often this thinking is solely related to what they are feeling about the symptoms, fear. By seeing the symptoms for what they are a over reactive system and dismissing them and learning to live with them while they settle is a dam side better than telling yourself you are mentally ill i believe.

Every thing in the body is chemical related in one way or another weather it is fear or love .

It is important to address the thinking but its also important to see that the thinking is different in every case of anxiety but the overstimulated system is the same with all .

"Its important to remember that the thought where always there . It only becomes a problem when the physical manifestations of anxiety kick in . Hence the reason you could take a benzo , have the same thought and have little if any reactions . Its because the physical reaction in the body stops"

But this explanation does not account for symptoms I experience such as racing thoughts, I can still experience racing thoughts/obsessive thoughts after taking a benzo. Anxiety does not always have to have a physical reaction. It seems like the above is an explanation of your experiences, but your experiences are subjective and strongly differ from mine.

[Blessed]

Some good info here . I remember as a child my parents would refer to this one or that one as a hypercondriac, because something was always wrong they were always at the doctor they never felt good. So I have turned into that??? I'm sure that's how my docs office feels about me. I really want up get better with this , just need to take the right steps, thanks for all your advice it helps so much

[Perses]

Hi Blessed,

I think you might be suffering from hypochondria, that is, it seems to me your form of anxiety. Yes, in the past people have said "Oh, she or he's a hypochondriac!" and meant it disparagingly. But all people who suffer from anxiety were looked down upon. Same with depression. I think hypochondriasis is just like any other disease worth investigating. You are working through your own problems. As several of us have already suggested, your high bp and chest tightness and palpitations, seem to be caused by anxiety, an anxiety brought on by the very real fear brought on by your mother's own passing. Your mother's heart attack has traumatized you. You are obsessed with being hyper-vigilant about your heart because you want to protect yourself. The good news, Blessed, is that you have had yourself checked out several times by your doctor who has run diagnostic tests on your heart to determine that there is nothing wrong with it. However, your own worry - your belief that something is wrong with your heart -- has become your own worst enemy because your anxiety seems to be triggering real symptoms. Real to you. So, it seems to me that finding a psychiatrist or clinic that works with hypochondriasis suffers could really do you some good. First, psychiatrists are MDs, so you'd still be in the hands of someone who went to medical school, and, second, they will take your symptoms seriously and figure out ways in which you can work to overcome this.

Honestly, Blessed, I think what everyone else has told you is really valuable. But, I also think there is nothing lost by seeing a psychiatrist and explaining your symptoms re: fixation with heart. If I knew where you lived, I'd look up the clinics for you.

Cheers, Perses.

[Blessed]

Thank you. It's real, the feelings the thoughts the fear the worry , it's so real it's scary. Everyone says they understand but unless they have been in it shoes they don't have a clue . They look at you like you have two heads and roll their eyes when you ask questions for reassurance. Like today, my heart rate has been between 120-140 , don't know why but something had it out of kilter . What do I do, ignore it, laugh at it , please I sm begging

[Perses]

Forwells, thank you for your comments. I hope Blessed doesn't think I'm dismissing her by suggesting that she is suffering from hypochondria. It was certainly not my intention, in fact, just the opposite. It is a label meant to clarify the kind of anxiety that she seems to exhibit - health anxiety -- and thus a suggestion that she go to a professional psychiatrist for further evaluation. I think your experience with mental health professionals has perhaps been less fruitful than my own, so perhaps we have a different perspective on what psychiatrists are trained to do.

Here's more information from the Mayo Clinic, America's premiere hospital:

http://my.clevelandclinic.org/disorders/hypochondriasis/hic_hypochondriasis.aspx

As I said, it is my opinion that Blessed could benefit from seeing a psychiatrist or psychologist who would take her symptoms seriously.

[Blessed]

So what steps do I need to take to stop worrying about my health and heart every waking moment. When symptoms are so very real how do I tell my self it's all in my head. The dizziness, high bp and heart rate . I know I have health anxiety issues that's a given, but what do I do from here, am I able to get over this and lead a productive life!?

[frankzito]

Good morning

[frankzito]

I've become limp from my anxiety

[gemma1788]

I have had the same thing, it totally sucks! Do you have a Benzo you could take? That helped me. Your heart can handle a lot more than you think!

[Blessed]

I take Ativan 0.5 mg. sometimes once a day sometimes. 3 times a day . How much is too much

[gemma1788]

Up to 8mg/day is standard in the psychiatric facility where I used to work (go figure). That was prescribed by psychiatrists and they didn't bat an eyelid if someone required the max daily dose. 1.5mg is nothing, don't stress :)

[Blessed]

I was in a car wreck last Monday and was prescribed lortab and muscle relaxer due to whiplash, but now im scared to take them because it seemed to be causing my heart rate to rise, does that sound possible? I haven't taken any in three days but my resting heart rate is still around 100. Sometimes goes up to 120. Any ideas?

[Blessed]

Also does being in the sun cause ur heart rate to stay over 100 while resting? It's like 70 degrees but the sum is out? Thanks

[Blessed]

Anyone ???