@jc76 I can only answer for myself. My nature has always been one of inquisitiveness, or curiosity. We had an older gentleman friend of my parents back in the early 60's who, when he would see my parents out 'n about, would ask, 'Where's How Come?' It was my calling card. I would pepper all grownups with, 'How come?' I read. All day long. Research, cross-referencing, looking for contradictions, looking for shared information that seems legit, and then formulate a file of knowledge. Fortunately, at 73, I'm not so rigid that I can't be made to either shut up or to change my mind. 😀

I have to know all I can to make decisions that don't complicate my life..............or ruin it. When I developed AF eight years ago, I began to read. I still read. I strive for consistent, reliable, and veridical information. I can't just read one NIH or JAMA article and be satisfied that this is the Great Truth. God knows that the medical community has all kinds in it, and they don't all agree on everything. So you hafta pay attention to changes in the winds....by reading multiple sources.

So, you ask what others do? I pace. I read. I talk it out. And once I understood the AF science, its mechanisms, and what ablation can possibly do if done well, it became my one solid hope, and I began to push for it. It took two ablations, same gentleman surgeon, before he nipped the AF, and I am happily about to go into my 38th month in blissful and consistent NSR (normal sinus rhythm). As a patient who was horribly symptomatic, I got little relief from cardioversions and never was prescribed AADs (anti-arrhythmic drugs), and living while in AF, which was coming on more and more frequently, lasting many hours, was horrible.

You can also experiment. With diet, with forms of exercise, with Vagal tone modification, improved sleep, ruling out obstructive OR central sleep apnea (and for God's sake get on that right away if it's a problem...it just increases your slide toward dementia and further heart deterioration!), etc. IOW, put your mind to work at finding relief for yourself. Knowledge is power, and you'll be able to relax more knowing................stuff. Especially when what you learn matches what your cardiologist and EP propose for you.

@jc76 Fortunately most of my A-fib episodes don't last very long these days ( many are less than 1 minute) so I just wait them out, keep on keeping on with what I am doing, and ignore them otherwise. But I can entirely sympathize with your feeling like a mess psychologically and physically too, when you're in A-fib and wondering how long this will go on. I've had a few longer ones and felt that way too. Admittedly the few hours-long A-fibs or Flutter I've had have driven me bonkers, others I didn't even feel but were reported by my pacemaker monitor.

Hopefully your docs will agree to an ablation for you, but in the meantime, it may be that medication will help to keep those A-fibs at bay? I take a heart rate control drug- metoprolol which does a decent job at keeping the heart rate down, diltiazem is also used for this purpose. There are also antiarrhythmic drugs which are intended to keep the heart in normal sinus rhythm, you can discuss that with your doctors to see what your options are and what's best for you.
Well, as for those arrhythmias not showing up on your Holter monitor report- those are notoriously intermittent and according to a corollary of Murphy's Law they won't show up when you're looking to document them- either in an office EKG or an extended monitor! Doesn't mean you don't have them or they won't come back at the most inconvenient time, and the doctors know this.

But if you have an ICD/pacemaker device and have at home monitoring capability ( either automated remote or manual where you send a report via phone or internet) your A-fib episodes may have, or can be sent to your doctors and documented in your records. I think they call these intracardiac readings from your pacemaker EGMs, but they can also be graphed and will show the type of rhythm that's occuring- or so I am told.