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Mysterious shortness of breath: What has helped you?
Lung Health | Last Active: 2 days ago | Replies (3467)Comment receiving replies
Thank you, yes my doctors seem to accept that pristiq was a sort of trigger for it to begin. The medication itself also came with "excessive yawning" listed as a side effect. My neurologist is ready to prescribe me a new serotonin drug to see if it affects the issue but I am not ready to try it right now, I think I need to exhaust other options first.
One personal theory is that yawning a lot formed some sort of dysfunctional neural circuit, where my body has decided that the releif from a yawn is necessary to deal with discomfort caused by other sources.
Vaping a menthol flavour seems like the best option for immediate releif with the least harmful results. Smoking fancy expensive weed from a dispensary has had the best lasting releif but still sometimes seems to hurt. Vaping weed at a low temperature feels like the safest option with a very thin vapor that provides some immediate releif. Dabbing extract has the most powerful effect with intense immediate releif but also I suspect has led to some pretty bad periods, depending on temperature, cleanliness, and the type of extract. Higher temperature mostly intensifies the effect. Having the nail not be completely clean seems to make things worse. And more full spectrum extracts like live resin seem to be more helpful than somethng like shatter or distillate. I haven't paid much attention to strain. My weed habits have been mostly just about getting high, as I don't really feel like I can justify it as a proper treatment for a breathing issue. I don't think edibles help at all, however I have an unusual high tolerance for edibles.
Taking time off work was a very mixed bag. It was very helpful in proving to myself that I still have some control of my life, and I don't have to make myself suffer extra when I am at my worst. But it was very much not a solution, and I am back at work now with flexible part time hours. Sleep was also a huge factor in this, as when I left this issue was affecting sleep the worst, while currently I have been able to get lots of full nights of effective sleep in a row.
Also, I owe it to claude.ai for learning about the connection/possible connection to GERD. When I get the chance I may feed some of the stories from this thread to it and see if there are any more insights.
I have more info posted here, as well as some simple tips/techniques that have helped me a ton.
Reddit user u/yawn_problem
Thank you and good luck to you too.
Replies to "Thank you, yes my doctors seem to accept that pristiq was a sort of trigger for..."
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Very interesting insights here, thank you for sharing. I'd not heard of claude.ai so I will definitely have to check it out. AI may turn out to be a powerful aid in our search for answers.
One other thing that seemed to help me in the beginning was taking iron and Vitamin B12 supplements. When I took those, the air hunger almost entirely went away. I don't know if that was just a coincidence or if there was anything there, but the fact that symptoms disappeared minutes after taking the supplements led me to believe that maybe I was deficient in those or other nutrients. So something to consider- maybe check if there are nutrient deficiencies.
Have you considered abstaining from the vaping or weed for a while? Sometimes abstaining from certain things for a while can also lead to various connections and insights about what sorts of things help or exacerbates symptoms.
That's interesting about the yawning theory. I too thought that maybe there was just something disconnected between how the brain and respiratory system communicate; perhaps there's some disconnect where the brain thinks your body needs more air, while your lungs and respiratory system are functioning just fine, but there could be a lack of "signal" there somehow. Anyway, just a theory.