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Mysterious shortness of breath: What has helped you?
Lung Health | Last Active: Oct 23 10:20am | Replies (3405)Comment receiving replies
Direct cause for me was anxiety. I had periods where it was like you say some days nothing some days it’s terrible. This kept me from living my life fully and eventually caused the symptoms to come back as strong as ever 24/7 every day- which caused me to practically never leave my house for 6 months until I “fixed it”.
Solution is to be completely indifferent to it. That your days or weeks of symptoms vs no symptoms should be remembered the same. That at the end of the day when asked did you have symptoms if so what time, that you genuinely can’t remember. This happens when you don’t give it any value. When your brain stops seeing this as a threat or anything important, your anxiety(survival alarm) will stop producing it. It’s a paradox. The more you try to get better the worse it’ll get. Stop trying to fix. Let it be. Bring it with you. Focus only on life.
People do this subconsciously and then give credit for the symptom going away to buteyko or to food or to exercise or whatever. No it is truly when you stop caring and forget all about it being an issue.
To those with very strong symptoms atm, my advice would be to just wake up every day with a can do attitude, bring the symptom with you no matter how strong, get out of the house and be as active in your life. Soon after you’ll have periods where you won’t feel it because by living NORMALLY with this you show your body “this is no threat. Once you have these periods don’t start trying to make the symptom better again, this is what’s tricky the symptom going came from you forgetting about it, how do you forget? You don’t, the more you try to forget the harder you’ll remember. Forgetting and not focusing comes passively. When you actively do something-life, you passively stop trying to fix your anxiety. But just one thing it’s not trying to distract from symptom, focusing on life won’t mean symptom won’t be felt just as strong it’ll mean though you can start living fully again. And when you have stopped caring one shred of effort on whether or not the symptom is there or not then it won’t be.
I’m not a doctor or therapist. You and your doctor are in charge of your mental or physical health.
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@yassir, it's certainly worth a try. While it may or may not be the smoking gun for some people, doing what you can to ignore the symptoms (so long as they're not serious or there's not some sort of other real, underlying cause) can provide relief. I know many here say that they don't notice it much when they're distracted, including myself. Typical of low discomfort and low pain incidences, distractions and focusing the mind on other things can be a powerful tool. Engaging the mind with positive thinking, positive thoughts, and being hopeful go a long way with reducing these symptoms and other symptoms, even if just perception. The mind and body are connected more powerfully than we understand as demonstrated by the placebo effect, hypochondriacs, and some mental conditions. It's still always good to get routine tests done to rule out anything more serious as shortness of breath and air hunger can be indications of something more serious. But yes, those who have ruled most things out and are on a longer term journey to figure it out, dealing with anxiety and using the mind to reduce symptoms would go a long way.