Comment by tarsinge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tarsinge | Hacker News Reader

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Well I suffered from that for more than a decade but in the end in turned out in was indeed "anxiety". Your thoughts can make you sick. It took me a long time to realize that idea, to admit that psychosomatic effects are real and strong, that it's not craziness, and yes doctors are usually not very useful with that.

Simple test: what were your thoughts and emotions 5 minutes ago? 1 hour ago? since this morning? and how were you breathing (slowly with good posture or rapidly)? If your brain is constantly circling thoughts with no cool-down with bad posture it's guaranteed you will have physical problems.

For me the cure was a combination of:

- Slow breathing exercises

- Mindfulness (to learn to listen to the body and emotions, an to be aware and able to "control" thoughts). No mysticism bullshit, just having a brain and body at rest and present.

- Stoic philosophy : not worrying with things not in my control, not being affected by outcomes (e.g. objectively did my best and the boss/client is not happy? That's fine for me)

- Strength training

- Nutrition

- Financial security (I know I'm lucky but that doesn't change the point)

- Edit: "reconnecting with nature": again no mysticism, just outdoor walks, gardening, and taking the time to observe and appreciate while being fine doing nothing

The best I could describe my default state now is as being relatively at peace, with no negative thoughts circling, slowly breathing with good posture (that I can maintain while coding long hours for example). I'm still of anxious nature and still worry about the future, but only on the time period I will allow it (and not as a the permanent background noise). YMMV obviously.

Funny enough - I suffered for 6 years a pain condition. Luckily it was acute enough at times that it was hard for me to believe it was all mental. But that still didn’t stop the sheer force of multiple doctors claiming psychosomatic origins, even flipping my own parents partially in believing that. By the end of it all, I was just about convinced it was mental. I did have a ton of anxiety, it was impossible to figure out the causality.

Ultimately, a genetic test revealed it was a rare autoimmune disorder that causes a wide variety of hard to pin down inflammation-related pain.

I had already come up with a ton of coping mechanisms, and was halfway to accepting it was “just me” or “anxiety”. I’m so glad I finally found what it was, because it would have been devastating to have convinced myself all that was my fault without even any clear genesis.

Not to say yours isn’t. But it makes me wonder: we have no idea the complexity and incidence of smaller phenotypical irregularities that lead to any number of “minor pains” that get ultimately interpreted as “anxiety disorders”. You may even be anxious - who wouldn’t, with an unresolved medical issue spanning years - but you may also have some imbalances driving it that are hard to pin down.

Yes you are right to point that it can juste be coping mechanism and that there can still be an underlying unknown medical condition, responsible for parts or all the symptoms. In my case the stomach burns and acidic reflux part were not « stress » but a kind of food allergy (kind of like ulcers were « stress » until it was discovered it was a bacteria).

Your last paragraph sums it up perfectly.

Do you know the name of it and the affected genes? My wife has had autoimmune symptoms for years and the doctors keep saying it's anxiety as well. We've had a genetic test done for the common disorders but didn't find anything

Dont have the genes on hand but it’s Familial Mediterranean Fever, more commonly shows when youngish. Idk if there’s anything that’s come to replace it but if you’re ok with putting data in hands of big med, promethease is what helped me find it (was before they sold out), likely still worth trying.

Don’t be afraid to push deeper into testing for various autoimmune.

Lot of doctors run out of date tests. False negatives are also a big issue.

Sjogrens is really bad for that, 30% show negative on the standard test.

there is an “Early Sjo” that catches what other tests miss.

You developed what I like to call my toolkit for fixing the variety of things doctors have no solutions for.

Crazy facebook/twitter people love to talk about their cure-all (why is always essential oils??). But the reality is there is never a simple solution to solve the issues.

Think of it as a holistic solution. Things to examine:

- Nutrition | Are you eating regularly or too much?

- Sleep | Is your sleeping regular

- Movement | I hate the word exercise! Just walking, stretching, or being outside is helpful

- Meditation | Learning how to use this to reduce anxiety and activates your parasympathetic nervous system

All of these can be very low/no cost

As for things that cost some money

- Therapy | Learning to understand yourself!

- Acupuncture | This varies for each person, but has helped my anxiety

Something I’ve leaned is a lot of things are nonsense, but they may work anyway.

Nutrition is the biggest. I’ve read so many people that come up with some crazy diet. Usually eliminating toxins nonsense.

But then you realize they are circling around an autoimmune protocol diet.

The person has inflammation problems, but doesn’t know it. They are slowly finding what really works.

Supplements is another one. People go crazy about them.

Turns out most people have a magnesium deficiency. Number one supplement that helped me out.

I was shocked at how scientific some of the Facebook groups are. Every question get 30-70 responses. A good portion have great advice.

That's great for you and all, but this reads like you are dismissing other people's very real and debilitating experiences of chronic illness.

Sorry if that’s what you got, my intention was only to bring my experience that these symptoms can indeed come from « anxiety », not that it’s the exclusive cause.

I identify a lot with parent comment. Had a lot of chronic pain resulting in very intense and sharp pain near the nose, I really thought it was linked to sinus cavities being inflamed.

At the end it was very linked to my mental state, it took me half a decade to figure it. As parent comment is suggesting, slow breathing to remove tensions near your rib cage can help.

The most useful tool for me is to smoke cannabis, I then identify pain points in my body and massaging them with my hand vigorously is effective. Hope it can help people having « the same kind » of chronic pain.

Your almost describing TMJ. There is a spot between nose and ear that gets crazy tight for me. First time I Painfully massaged it out I had a 75% decrease in migraines.

The type that comes from anxiety is real and debilitating too, and I wouldn't dismiss that either. I lived with that for years before it became clear I had symptoms that boiled down to me stressing myself out enough that they occurred (tremors, pain, IBD, sleep disturbances, cardiac, etc). Psychosomatic doesn't mean "imaginary"--rather, it means being a disorder of both psychological and somatic (physical) nature. That's one of the very first humps I had to get over to accept it was happening to me: the symptoms are every bit as real as in a fully somatic condition.

So I took the comment's point as that there are multiple potential causes for a given manifestation, and chronic conditions in particular are confusing because they invariably end up with physical -and- mental symptoms. There's something to be said for exploring easing the one you can do by yourself, at least to some extent. Mindfulness, slow breathing, and some of those other techniques helped me too. No matter which aspect is primary and which aspect is secondary, easing the mental stress some can still help.

> Mindfulness, slow breathing, and some of those other techniques helped me too.

Any other advice for what helped you?

Not specifically. Everyone's different, but for me self-awareness was the key. Mindfulness and breathing exercises (very close to the same thing unless you get deep into MM) are both about processing your various physical and mental reactions. That makes them especially applicable towards breaking vicious cycles like the one I'd gotten in, where I was freaked out in part because of the symptoms so it became self-perpetuating.

I don't want to paint these as silver bullets. I still deal with my anxiety disorder on a regular basis. I just feel more able to look at it in third person a little to defuse some of the worst bits.

Edit: I'm always hesitant when someone uses the word advice, so I gave a vaguer reply than I needed to. I won't give advice but will give a little more detail.

Looking at the original list, the specific ones there I also have tried to improve with varying success are stoic philosophy, nutrition and fitness. But I'll also add sleep, since of them, sleep has had the most immediate effect that I've noticed. However, there's a chicken/egg thing there if you're too uncomfortable to sleep. I used a short course of sleep meds, but those have their own risks so YMMV.

Stoic philosophy is good to aspire to, but it's more end goal than technique IMO. It's a good thought yardstick, though, for what you "should" be feeling if you can step outside yourself a little.

At the risk of being flippant, saying that all illness is chronic illness is dismissing other people's very real and debilitating experiences of continual anxiety.

There's a balance. The two sides of anxiety and chronic illness aren't at war. You can say it could be one thing without dismissing the other.

Audiobooks are great for calming down racing thoughts

I find this too. I have several series of books I’ve gone through enough times to not need to be fully engaged or worry if I miss bits. I always have one playing when I go to sleep and it gives me something to hold just enough focus to not get lost in my thoughts.

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