i wake up with bad anxiety and my chest pounds.all day. last night i didn' sleep at all. The anxiety is so bad that.i don't even feel tired. i have this anxiet all day every day. if i go to the hospital they don' do anything but put me in the psyche ward. haven't found a med that works for me im really discouraged. I've been on every anxiety med and haven't found anything yet that is working to help me.i don't know what to do with the pounding that is going on in my chest.
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I’m sorry. I have bad anxiety. I have been hospitalized several times for ptsd depression and anxiety. I had ECT. Tried every med. Many therapist and talk therapy and alternative and medical treatments. After my last treatment I feel better like I have some control or hold on it, but it’s not gone. I take clonipin. I used to take so much. So I am down to 1 or, 2 on a bad day. I also would go days without sleep and not be tired. It’s awful. I feel for you. Just posting that and sharing is a good start. Try to distract yourself as hard as that sounds. People would tell me that and I would want to punch them. Or sometimes I would find something distracting. Anxiety is awful. Reach out to physical people around you that you can trust. Or your doctor. If you feel your doctor is not helping try your GP or ask people you trust if they have had a good experience with their doctor. Even if they suffer from something else. A good doctor listens to you and doesn’t let your care just happen to you, they allow you to be part of the process of coming up with a strategy. I am so sorry. And I know I keep saying that, I just really am. I have been right in your very shoes. I probably will, or maybe not again in my life. Feel free to PM me if you want to chat. Hang in there and keep sharing and trying. There is hope. There is hope right here.
Diane
Taurine is an amino acid that may help also GABA I hope you feel better deep breathing is good maybe even going for a walk
While we are talking supplements .. don't forget l-theanine. It is a mild one though.
Have you tried Reishi ? It is a mushroom supplement.. I was taking Four Sigmatic's Reishi Elixir at night.. but it is a bit of a diuretic . .so It was too many nightly bathroom trips for me. It would probably be ok during the afternoon or early evening. I read somewhere that a lot of the Reishi supplements are fake.(at least in the US market) The only two reputable sources that I know are Four Sigmatic and Orivida .. there are probably more but those are the ones that I know about. I also do a mindfulness meditation. I have this weird device challed a chi machine.. It jiggles your body.. weird but very relaxing.. on tough nights I will use my chi machine and do a meditation at the same time. It definitely helps me to relax. Have you tried cardio ? It seems counter-intuitive to exercise when your heart is racing.. but I find a good run can really help.(Gets harder when you get older and your knees get old.. hopefully that has not happened to you yet)
There are a lot of guided mindfulness meditations available online. Try a short one.. I recommend starting with 5 minutes. If this is too much try to do a 5 breath meditation. See if it makes any difference.
Another suggestion is doing something repetitive like knitting or crochet. Knitting can be very calming.. not sure why.. I discovered this when I learned to knit to teach my kids. It really relaxed me and it is kind of fun.
Hope these suggestions help!
Sending relaxing thoughts!
Softwaremom
efishman, You've tried everything you can think of. So have your doctors. Yet still your chest pounds. Maybe it's time to try a different approach. Something that runs counter to your very instincts, or anybody else's. The very opposite of that which you have been doing so far.
Do nothing.
Disengage from from the gladiatorial contest with anxiety. Cease to contest your pounding chest. Pound to your heart's content. Why not try it?
If your pounding chest was going to do you major harm it would have happened by now. So nothing to lose.
Agree to let your heart pound away. Let the bad feelings come. Don't flinch or hide from them. But don't try to ignore them either. Acknowledge they are there but you are going to pay them less attention. They are of less importance now.
Begin to imagine that maybe the very act of willing them to stop gives them life and energy. How so? Because each time you lose that fight you release hormones of fear and stress that revitalise your anxiety.
Stop hoping the pounding will stop, instead agree to coexist with it for the time being. Only for the time being, you understand, not for ever, there would be no point in that.
Get on with your life despite this thing: business and pleasure. Every time you accept the pounding you deny it power.
It's an inconvenience, yes, but you've nothing to fear, no permanent damage, we've agreed that. Even anxiety has its limitations.
No testing to see if you can be free of it today. You need the pounding in order to practice that 'I couldn't really care less' attitude that will bring you victory over your anxiety and allow you to reclaim your quiet mind and your still heart.
That's the objective, efishman, to wake up one morning and to be able to honestly say 'I don't care if my heart pounds or not today, I've got better things to do, other things to think about.'
If you can cultivate that frame of mind I think you're getting close, very close, to victory. It will take longer than a day, longer than a week, possibly more than a month even.
You will not feel like this for ever. I sincerely believe you will find an answer to your troubles and wish you all speed towards your recovery.
gteat advice
my chest pounds and i hyperventilate
benzos are the only meds that work to calm down the anxiety, but they are addicting. the last 2 nights i didnt get any sleep.
efishman, you have to be on benzos for a long time at a high dosage before any question of addiction arises. And if you do become addicted it's easy enough to taper them off gradually over a couple of months.
I took them every day for over a year back in the 1970s and they never lost their effect but I did have to come off them slowly when the time came.
I think benzos have been unfairly demonised: there's no problem if they're taken on an 'only when needed' basis as you do rather than taken regularly every day. For fast relief of high anxiety nothing beats a benzo.
efishman, do not worry if your chest pounds, it is a normal reaction to stress and worry. The heart is the largest muscle in your body, it is fully capable of coping. Just accept the pounding for the time being, agree to coexist with it for the moment, you have nothing to fear and if you accept it long enough and do not obsess and stress about it then the pounding will pass.
There is a breathing exercise that releases natural tranquillising hormones: breathe in slowly, hold it for 5 seconds, breathe out very slowly through pursed lips. Maybe you knew that anyway, but it should bring you relief without hyperventilating!
I would like to encourage you and let you know there are many other methods for treating your anxiety than just medication. Often times, the medication itself has adverse side effects and can cause a brand new set of symptoms. That's because certain medications are not designed so "one-size-fits-all", and also because not everyone's biochemistry is the same. If a doctor doesn't draw blood or do a saliva test, they have zero idea of what is going on inside your body. Unless you are 100% sure of what your cells, tissues, glands, organs, and systems are doing, you can't pinpoint what to address first or why.
There are reasons why you feel the way you do. You have to look at all the systems to see what has broken down because maybe at one time you were not depressed and didn't have anxiety, and if that's the case, something had to change on a biochemical level or physiological standpoint to make your body not be able to make enough dopamine, serotonin, and GABA.
What a functional doctor will do in place of meds, (meds just block these neurotransmitters to keep more in your body) is to look at why your body isn't producing more. There is a process involved that causes your body to produce hormones such as dopamine that need to reach the blood brain barrier and cross over into your brain. If one of those steps get prevented, like not getting enough oxygen into the brain, the process cannot be completed.
The first location where this process of manufacturing the hormones needed to make you feel good is the liver, so it's paramount a person eats the right foods, like fresh foods, and eliminates all sugar, alcohol, caffeine, processed foods, junk foods, fast foods, and other chemical laden foods. Garbage foods are loaded with hormone disruptors, so that helps explains why a person feels so off.
Make sure you eat foods rich in iron, vitamin D3, niacin, magnesium, and tryptophan, all of which impact the production of the hormones you need.
It is imperative you find the underlying cause of why your body does not produce enough hormones. Once your body is back in balance, you will begin to feel better. I hope some of this helps.
Just to reiterate what Jeff1943 said in his post. Doing nothing about those anxious thoughts and physical sensations work. The more you try to stop yourself from thinking and feeling the symptoms of anxiety, the more they persist.
Any one can recover from anxiety when they understand that fighting or putting up with anxiety is not the way to recover. To recover, you have to literally make friends with the symptoms by letting them be there and doing nothing to change things. Developing an attitude of Acceptance is key to recovery because it means you no longer fear the symptoms. It is the fear or fearing the feelings of fear which keeps the anxiety going. Lose your fear and the anxiety will quietly slip away.
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