It's not belittling; I was considering much the same. My conclusion is that I definitely had anxiety during all those episodes, and the anxiety made the symptoms worse to some extent. My first panic attacks I ever experienced were caused by the symptoms early on when I had no evidence this was going to become chronic and relatively benign. I would be relieved if I could explain away my symptoms as mere hypochondria or acid reflux.

But I persisted for a while in the face of that because I felt that my body was trying to tell me something. Pain is a mechanism we've evolved with to indicate various abnormalities. I was willing to bet there was a reason behind the pain, instead of it serving no purpose whatsoever, and especially because this concerned the region where my heart was located, I felt it was urgent, since my heart is one thing that has to function for me to stay alive.

My unresolved anxiety is that I still haven't found the reason, so there has never been any closure for me. Worse, I might not be getting the treatment I need to prolong my lifespan. It's terrifying when considering that possibility in full, so I've had no choice but to put it out of my mind.

I stopped taking a lot of things about how I'm still alive for granted, but I've actually had start taking many of them for granted again, because if I didn't I would become completely paralyzed by fear for entire days. I had to find the balance between worrying about every potential cause of death I could face within the next hour causing desperation and expending my time being unproductive.

I did at least have a few positive outcomes since then. If it weren't for the constant pain and fear I don't think I would have changed my diet and started exercising as much as I did. The exercise was reassuring in a sense because the pain wasn't correlated with how strenuous it was. But now I try to be more wary about what I put in my body. I just hope it ends up mattering in the end. I wish I didn't have to worry about dying suddenly so often.