 

Hello everyone,

I am a currently 31 years old and have been dealing with anxiety and heart arrhythmia for the last 15 years. I just wanted to share my journey with all this because maybe it might help someone along the way. Just a heads up that I will not be talking about a solution to this but rather my experience with it. This might be a long one but hope it helps someone out there. 

I was always an anxious child from a very young age but anxiety and arrhythmia came in to my life when I was around 16 years old when I lost my father to cancer. My first episode happened when I was on vacation because my mother had sent me away trying to keep me away from all the sadness during that time. I felt a weird feeling in my chest which was probably a PVC/PAC but because I didn't know what it was back then I had my first massive panic attack. Found my self in the ER getting all kinds of blood work and heart related examinations done on me. After 6 hours in the ER they called it anxiety and sent me off with a prescription for Xanax. Now from then on after returning home I went to a cardiologist and had all kinds of tests done on me. Everything came out great. No arrhythmia was detected on holter monitor and I had no idea what that feeling was back then anyway. I had a very mild case of mvp which doctors did not care about at all. Now at the time I did keep on having these feelings on and off but because I was told that it was not related to my heart and I always thought it was my stomach and brushed it off when ever they happened. After all this I was told to go to a therapist and was put on an antidepressant called Efexor. For four years until university I was on and off of antidepressants because my anxiety kept relapsing and during the times I was on drugs I never had any issues, all seemed to be fine but when I stopped taking them after a few months I would start having panic attacks/pvcs again. University might have been the best years of my life because my anxiety and heart arrhythmia seemed to have disappeared, I was not on any antidepressants and didn’t see the therapist regularly. For 5 long years I was very happy. Although the truth probably was that only my anxiety had disappeared because I think I did continue having arrhythmia but very little and I didn’t think it was my heart so how you perceive things changes everything doesn’t it. Fast forward a few years after finishing university and starting my career I thought I was done with all this drama in my life but I couldn't have been more wrong. At that time I was working out 6 times a week and felt really healthy and all that but after having an episode of pvcs which were constant and back to back this time and lasted around for 2 days suddenly out of nowhere I found my self back in the ER. This time I got it recorded which were around 700 over a 24h period and I think it was the worst bout I had until now and these dreaded things had a name now. I learned that these indeed were coming from my heart all along but because I now knew what they were I lost it. I quit exercising for good and visited several cardiologists and they all told me that these were benign and I should continue with my life like normal but how could I with thumps that made me jump out of my seat causing me to think that I would die at that very moment. It was easy for them to say. I was in a very bad place in 2018. I would stay in bed not going to work. Found my self in the ER maybe every 2-3 days for about a month I think. Back then I had started to work with a new therapist and was put on antidepressants again but this time I refused to take them because I thought they made my anxiety worse and just couldn't continue using them after a few days. It took a while for me(around a year or so) to somewhat function in a normal manner but I had stopped doing a lot of the things that I loved doing just because I was afraid they would bring back my pvcs or my anxiety. During this time I had a lot of time to think and also scrap threw my old medical files which my mom kept thankfully. Guess what I found. My MVP diagnosis and pvcs where recorded way back when I was maybe 6-7 years old. But I had never even felt one until I was 16 and even then I didn’t learn what they were until I was 27. So what this tells me is that how you perceive things has a lot to do with how you feel and how your body reacts. To this day I am still seeing my therapist and I still have good days/months and bad bouts of arrhythmia and anxiety. The reason I told all this backstory is because over the years I started seeing some patterns in all of this drama. Through therapy I really learned how to understand myself and how my body reacts to certain stressful situations. Even though at times I thought I was not stressed I would have many physical symptoms and start having pvcs again. These were the times that I thought ok this is not stress or anxiety there is definitely something wrong with my heart. But they would suddenly disappear after a good day at the therapist or the exact opposite like they would start like crazy after a stressful topic at the therapist. Now I do think that my body is prone to arrhythmia but having them start at stressful times out of no where and disappear just after a successful therapy session is no coincidence in my eyes. I have had on other occasions where my arrhythmia would start and I would start panicking and they would increase and then the moment I entered the ER they would stop just like that in an instant. Over the years I have been to many many cardiologists. Maybe 8-10 different doctors 2 of whom I still am seeing to this day every 6 months or so depending on how anxious I am or how bad my arrhythmia is. What they always say is that these are benign. If I am so unlucky that 8 different cardiologists misdiagnosed me after conducting all the same standard tests(echo, ecg, holter monitor) then I have nothing to say (For those who are curious in my country you do not have to get referred to a cardiologist by a gp so you can bypass it and go straight ahead). But I don’t think that is the case and it is just how my body reacts to my mental stress. The only problem is that my threshold has decreased so much that I am stressed all the time and my body reacts to the most simplest things like this. It is a very hard place to get out from and it is very easy to get to that point. Rather than trying to find a cure for my arrhythmia, which would be great honestly, I am trying to work out my mental health issues which directly affect everything I do. Mental health is that impactful on the body. Mind and body are much more connected than we realize. I also don’t like it when doctors brush it off as anxiety but sometimes it really might be. Your mind and body can be in a constant state of stress and you might have many different physical symptoms while you feel calm. Even though it is really hard to accept I hope it does stay like this rather than actually having a physical issue that causes all this.   
 

If you read that all through thanks for listening to my rant. I hope it helps some of you somehow. I wish you all the best and stay strong.