Anxiety is in your body, not your mind • Hacker News Board

Re: Anxiety is in your body, not your mind

#241

Post by whalesalad » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

askonomm wrote: post #152

whalesalad wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buddhism. Psilocybin.

I really wouldn't blindly recommend Psilocybin to people. I got the idea of trying to fix my health anxiety with it from HN about a year ago. Took half a dose, had a pretty good time for around 2 hours and then the worst panic-attack meltdown of my entire life. I started sweating all over, dripping sweat from my head, being 100% sure that I'm going to die - in the end ambulance fixed me up with an IV. My anxiety diso…

The drug isn’t gonna fix you by itself. It facilitates a state where you can fix your brain. I’m sorry you had a bad experience. Perhaps it is worth trying again in the company of a guide or others. It’s also worth preparing for your trip by determining what kinds of things you want to try and accomplish while you’re on it.

Re: Anxiety is in your body, not your mind

#242

Post by sgtnoodle » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 12:26 AM UTC

XargonEnder wrote: post #232

sgtnoodle wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last year my heart's AV nerves progressively stopped working, causing my ventricles to slow and decouple from my sinus node. Before figuring that out, I was getting panic attacks from relatively benign technical disagreements with coworkers. It was very much a visceral fight-or-flight response. A few days before I ended up in the hospital, I tried playing a level of Tomb Raider and 5 minutes in I had a notable feelin…

Can you elaborate on your hearts AV nerves? I don't really get it, but I sometimes wonder if my vagus nerve is damaged and your situation has some familiarity to me.

Sure. There was inflammation on my heart around those nerves, causing them to cease working. There are three nerves there, that propagate the impulse from your atriums to your ventricles in a controlled manner. When those nerves don't work, some of the impulse still indirectly makes it to the ventricles through the muscle tissue, but it's significantly delayed. So the ventricles beat, but at a significantly slower rate. It seemed to go 2:1 then 3:1, and even 4:1 at times.

I had to get a pacemaker to solve the immediate issue of my heart not beating normally. With the inflammation taken care of a few months later, my nerves eventually started working again and my heart beats normally enough. They aren't 100%, but they're probably good enough that the pacemaker isn't necessary anymore.

Re: Anxiety is in your body, not your mind

#243

Post by peach » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 8:29 AM UTC

WWGaussDo wrote: post #49

So good to see a story about the physical aspects of anxiety at the top of hacker news! I’ve struggled with anxiety my whole software career. I finally identified the big triggers for me - morning standup when I was late on a ticket, when a test would inexplicably fail, when a coworker wound comment in a PR asking me to redo a chunk of work that I knew would take more time. And I identified them based on how my BODY…

Thanks for sharing. Interesting to hear someone is trying to take care of this aspect. Especially since it's very much underplayed in our industry.