Anxiety, Stress & Panic Attacks
Hyperventilation Syndrome
Hyperventilation means breathing more air than your body needs at that time. There are two types: acute and chronic. Most people are familiar with the acute kind that is the normal response to stress. It:
- Floods the body with adrenaline
- Increases the heart and breathing rates
- Puts the nervous system on red alert
- Tenses muscles and increases sweating
All of which are useful to escape from danger. This is also known as "fight-or-flight". However, acute hyperventilation also sometimes happens when you are worried about making a presentation, and instead of being useful it can cause a panic or hyperventilation attack. Long-term stress can also lead to the over breathing becoming permanent, i.e. chronic hyperventilation, and the list of symptoms may continue to grow. Anything can cause stress, be it physical (injury and illness) or emotional (bereavement, bullying, financial worries), and sometimes even when the source of stress is removed, or the person has recovered, it seems their symptoms persist. They don't associate the wide range of symptoms with abnormal breathing, indeed the breathing pattern may not be obviously abnormal, so they don't know how to get rid of the symptoms.
Does this sound familiar?
You feel anxious over nothing. You know you shouldn't get so wound up, you never used to. You often have a sense of "impendingness" you can't relax, your shoulders are tense. It is getting really hard to concentrate, you feel "not with it" perhaps a bit light-headed or "whoozy". You start to feel a bit panicky in new situations, it stops you doing things you used to enjoy. You need to go to the toilet frequently, get worried if you know there isn't one nearby. Your heart seems to be pounding for no reason. Your world starts to contract. You have the opposite of a feeling of well-being. Maybe you start having headaches or even migraines. Perhaps you find it hard to get a satisfying breath, you feel tension round the throat, breathing is a bit of a struggle.
You feel very unwell, you see the doctor. If you are very lucky, the doctor recognises chronic or hidden hyperventilation and suggests you need to control your breathing. If not you may become a "fat-folder" or "fat-file" patient, in and out of the doctor's surgery, or even accident and emergency as you feel you must have something seriously wrong with you. Are you losing your mind? Perhaps the doctor will try you on anti-depressants. Perhaps they will tell you you have chronic fatigue syndrome/ myalgic encephalitis (CFS/ME), the diagnosis left over when they can't find anything wrong in the standard tests and examinations.
So now perhaps you start with the alternative therapies. In the meantime you symptoms may still be increasing in severity and perhaps some new ones creep in. Perhaps you feel you can't get enough air, feel anxious and remember the instructuction "take a deep breath"! Now you are really heading in the wrong direction. Perhaps you start dosing on vitamins. You are getting more desperate, perhaps you try some of the more outlandish therapies. And so it goes on.....