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Comment by brainfish | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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