Have you ever found yourself worrying something is wrong with your heart? Have you ever had such powerful palpitations in your chest that you could swear your heart was going to burst? If so, maybe something is wrong with your heart… or maybe something is wrong with your nervous system. There are many occasions in which anxiety is the source of tachycardia, rather than heart problems.
Needless to say, the first precaution you should take if you are worried you might suffer from tachycardia or a serious heart condition is consulting with your medical doctor. First and foremost, you want to get all the appropriate tests and make sure your problem isn’t physical in nature. Once probable physical causes of tachycardia have been ruled out, then it will follow naturally that your problem can be psychological in nature.
If that’s the case, treating your anxiety disorder will indeed help alleviate your tachycardia, as well as other anxious symptoms you might have. You should know it’s actually very common for people suffering from anxiety disorders to fear they’ll have a heart attack. It’s even more common for people who really believe in such a thing to trigger sensations that may make them reinforce such fear, which in turn will actually reinforce their symptoms.
Patients suffering from heart conditions may experience actual tachycardia, in which their heart may beat as fast as 200 beats per minute for no apparent reason. In patients suffering from anxious disorders, the same symptom may arise; the main difference being that with anxiety, the patient may actually have a healthy heart, and their tachycardia can be fully caused by their anxious mental states.
There’s a simple way to tell if your anxiety is at the source of your tachycardia, and that’s precisely by observing with your mental states. In people with heart problems, tachycardia can occur in a situation of rest without any apparent triggers; in anxious people, tachycardia is essentially triggered by worrying, so you’ll find a connection between your thinking and your racing heart if you watch closely.
If you’ve already talked with your doctor about your tachycardia, and he found no problems with your heart, but you still experience tachycardia and it tends to get worse the more you worry about it… then you may be dealing with an anxiety disorder, of which tachycardia is just a symptom.
