Episode 53 Managing Health Anxiety: I thought I was having another stroke!

Navigating Anxiety Management: a personal story and useful tip

It is one thing to have fear around something happening that is very unlikely, it is a whole other thing to have fear around something happening again. You can't console yourself with "that can't happen" when you have already experienced that it can, and does happen! I live with the results of brain damage, I don't want more!

In this episode, I share a personal story related to health anxiety along with the powerful strategies I use to overcome it.

From consistently stepping outside my comfort zone, re-framing those familiar feelings we associate with anxiety and much more.

I have also learned some powerful lessons from the book Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth (by Chris Hadfield) and share how I put them into practice to manage anxiety here. If you suffer from anxiety and/or health anxiety, you may pick up some valuable tips in this episode.

Learn more about Fiona's speaking, radio and consultation services at Informed Health: https://informedhealth.com.au/

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Credit for the music used in this podcast:

The Beat of Nature

Music by Olexy from Pixabay

Transcript

Fiona Kane: 0:31

Hello and welcome to the Wellness Connection Podcast with Fiona Kane. I'm your host, Fiona Kane. We've just had Easter here in Australia, so I hope you had a lovely long weekend and whatever you did or didn't do over that weekend in regards to food, just move on. Forgive yourself and move on.

Fiona Kane: 0:53

So much of what I see with my clients and um and just in general, is that people they hold on to things for way too long, they shame themselves for way too long over perceived failures or falling off the wagon or all of those things. The quicker that you just get on with it and move on, the better it will be. So, just, whatever you did or didn't do, it's fine. Move on, the better it will be. So, just, whatever you did or didn't do, it's fine, move on. Because if we don't move on, then we can't get anywhere. And I've talked about it in other episodes. But when we look at things like emotional eating and when we look at shame around eating and eating patterns and things like that, what we see is that when you get caught in that cycle of feeling shame that you did the thing, and then you feel shame, so you want to have more of the chocolate or whatever it is, and then you feel shame and it goes around and around a spiral. So, essentially, the quicker that I'm getting my notes, the quicker that you just let go of that and move on, the better off it is, because that causes a lot of stress in the body when you are holding on to stuff you shouldn't or shouldn't have done. So let it go. I won't sing that like the. Was she a princess in one of those? What's her name? I can't even think who she is. Now. You'll all be screaming at me because everyone with children will know who she is. Anyway, the princess that sings Let it Go. I can't remember her name. Elsa, elsa, maybe. Anyway, I don't have children, I'm not around it as much, but yes, millions of you will know If millions of you were listening. I wish millions were listening. But on that note, please like, subscribe and share so that more people do hear this podcast.

Fiona Kane: 2:34

So today, what I wanted to do is I just wanted to share a little bit of a personal story and just a little bit about something that I found useful. So throughout my life I have certainly had a certain level of anxiety. I wouldn't describe it as being maybe severe anxiety, because I've seen that in my family and what that looks like, and mine, okay, I was going to say it's never been crippling. When I was learning how to drive it was actually crippling. I found that very stressful and I was quite crippling then around that. It's never been crippling for me around my general life. Driving was the only thing that really really I had a lot of anxiety around when I was younger and I'm still not the most confident driver in the world, but I've been doing it for a long time now and I'm used to it. But yeah, that is something where I did have a lot of anxiety, but it's never really affected me in my jobs or studying or going and enjoying time with my friends or anything like that, and I've never been one of those people that's had really full on panic attacks and that kind of thing.

Fiona Kane: 3:43

And it's probably because I've been around a lot of people with severe anxiety in my life. I didn't really recognize it in myself for a long time because, you know, we only kind of notice. It's how we compare ourselves to other people, right, and so if if other people have a perceived worse version of something you have, you don't see it as being as bad anyway. So it's something I have lived with to a certain extent throughout my life, but luckily not severely. But I've just had my moments in there, and one of the things that I learned is I learned a lot about how to manage anxiety when you do have anxiety around things.

Fiona Kane: 4:23

And so you know, for starters, a lot of anxiety for me if I do have anxiety, and for many people, is actually just around new things or trying something new or pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. And my experience is the more that you do that, the more you push yourself out of your comfort zone, the more comfortable you get with it, and essentially it's getting comfortable in the discomfort. That's what we do. We get comfortable within that discomfort. So the more you do it, the more practiced you are, and the more regularly you do it, the better you are. And that's what I would also say too. Don't build yourself up to once a year doing something that is out of your comfort zone. Try and do something fairly regularly out of your comfort zone, whether it's weekly or monthly, but make it fairly regular, because it's one of those things that it's like the comfort muscle grows when you use it regularly. But then, if you don't go to the gym for 12 months, the muscle retracts and you kind of start to lose your comfort again. So you've really got to keep using that muscle. It is like using a muscle over and over again, that muscle of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone.

Fiona Kane: 5:33

But a lot of my anxiety when I do have anxiety just comes from you know. It could be fear of failure, it could be fear of success, it could be fear of the unknown or making a fool of myself or just trying something new. Whatever it is, and what I've tried to do is what I do a lot of the time is just reframe that with excitement, because anxiety and excitement feel quite similar and but we interpret it in different ways, right? So when you think of those people who are really speed freaks and they're really into jumping off bridges and doing all those sorts of things, I think they have a very similar feeling. I was, from what I know. I don't know, I'm not one of those people, but I think that the only difference is they interpret it as excitement. They kind of go yes, I'm excited, this is fun. So it's not that they don't get feelings of any kind of fear or any kind of feeling. It's just that the feeling that they get, they relate it to something exciting they're doing and it's exciting and it's pushing the boundaries and they're enjoying the feeling of all of the different hormones and things rushing through their body, whereas someone else who's got a history of anxiety will read that for those feelings as being an anxiety attack or as being bad.

Fiona Kane: 6:50

So a lot of it is how we perceive the event and we do know that there's been studies on this where they have people doing exams. I think they did this study at Harvard University and they had people doing exams and they reframed it for them and told them that all of those feelings that they were getting were actually feelings of their body preparing to help them get through it, actually feelings of their body preparing to help them get through it, and that those feelings of essentially of your body going into gear, getting into gear to help you manage the stressful event. And when they were able to reframe it that way, they were able to kind of go oh, this is my body actually helping me do it Fabulous, right? As opposed to oh, my God, I'm starting to have an anxiety attack, right. So the way that we a lot of it is the way we perceive the feelings, and people with history of anxiety obviously have a lot of negative association with certain feelings in their body, so they have negative association with feeling that excitement, feeling that can feel like anxiety. They have negative associations with things like a warm room If it's getting hot. That often is associated with things like a warm room. If it's getting hot, that often is associated with an anxiety attack, or it could be associations with other things as well, whatever it is that has been your triggers for anxiety, so a big part of it is reframing.

Fiona Kane: 8:07

The other thing that I've learned, though, is I've learned that I have to be aware of my breathing, and I have to be aware that I'm not hyperventilating. I don't go into the full hyperventilate mode, but I do tend to and I'm actually just aware of it now while I'm talking to you. I do tend to talk really fast, as I was just doing then, and I tend to do a lot of that upper breathing where you're not really using your whole diaphragm to breathe which is what I've just started doing now that I've brought my attention to it but where you're sort of doing that shallow breathing. That's all from the upper chest right. A lot of us do this. It's very automatic, and I'm one of those people. I automatically go into that mode and I don't have an awareness until I stop and think about it of my breathing and slowing down my breathing and making sure. Hold my hand on my tummy at the moment, making sure when I breathe that actually I'm pushing my tummy out, I'm using my whole diaphragm.

Fiona Kane: 9:10

Now, I'm not an expert on breathing. Go and talk to someone who is. So I don't pretend to be an expert on any of this, but I do know bits and pieces about this. And what I do know is when we hyperventilate or just sort of shallow breathe, we can get a lot of symptoms associated with that. And a lot of those symptoms are what will bring us into that panic attack, that anxiety attack attack, that anxiety attack. And if you recognize some of those symptoms starting to happen and you can say to yourself, oh, I know what this is, you can start to slow your breathing down. So it's kind of getting in ahead of the anxiety attack sort of thing. So the symptoms, I'm just going to have a look. I mean, obviously, guys, you can Google this.

Fiona Kane: 9:55

I've just at the moment I'm on healthlinecom and just looking at what they talk about for hyperventilation and essentially what they say is and it can be a really serious issue. And if it feels very serious for you, if you're unsure, please seek medical attention. I'm not encouraging anyone to not seek medical attention. I'm just talking about a situation where in the past I've sought medical attention. Now I know how to manage it and then if it got past a certain point, then I would seek medical attention. But it's just getting to know your body and getting to learn. But yeah, if you're unsure, get medical attention, of course, but I'm just talking about an experience that I've had and something that I've learned. And you can learn that within your own body and make those decisions. But if you're ever really unsure, just get medical attention, because it can be serious and the symptoms can last up to 20 or 30 minutes.

Fiona Kane: 10:52

But essentially, when we hyperventilate, what happens and one of the most common causes is anxiety, stress, nervousness, and I would say that's because we're doing this breathing and we could be doing this kind of breathing because we're nervous, or we could be doing this kind of breathing because maybe it's just a habit for so many of us. It's just a habit that we do that. So anyway, uh, it talks about I'm just going through here. It's basically it's rapid breathing or over breathing, fast breathing, um, and for me it can be. I do a lot of shallow breathing, but essentially what happens is when you do this quick breathing, you get an imbalance between the oxygen and the carbon dioxide and it reduces the amount of carbon dioxide in your body. When you have low carbon dioxide levels, what happens is you narrow the blood vessels that supply the blood to the brain and see, this isn't a good idea for a whole bunch of reasons. So we really want to make sure we are breathing well and slowing down our breathing, because when you think of all of the implications of not getting enough blood flow to your brain, it's a good idea to learn how to just calm the breathing. Calm the farm is a way of me reminding myself to calm it all down.

Fiona Kane: 12:12

So what happens is you can get lightheaded, so you start to feel kind of feinty and you can get tingling in the fingers and tingling and people can eventually loss of consciousness, things like that Obviously seek medical attention for those things. Or if you see someone in that situation, do all of the usual first aid stuff and call an ambulance if that's what you need to do. So what they're saying is and there's lots of different causes and so obviously, if there's other things associated with fevers or bleeding or things like that, obviously that's a medical thing. Deal with it in a medical way and get support. But what I'm talking about is that kind of thing where you just start to get all those symptoms and you realize you've just been breathing a bit fast and there's no obvious reason that just that you're feeling a bit anxious or whatever it is feeling a bit anxious or whatever it is. So what happened to me quite a few years ago is I just have some tea, actually as well, just because my voice is getting a bit dry. Hang on, voice dry, throat dry, whatever.

Fiona Kane: 13:26

So what happened to me and I've talked about this before is in my 20s I had a couple of small strokes and they were associated with migraines and they were relatively small compared to what happens for some people, but they were really big for me. They had a really big effect on my life and I've got some visual field loss and and some a bunch of other issues and essentially I've got permanent brain damage and I've had to learn to live with some deficits in relation to having those strokes. And what happened for me and I think I have talked about this before as well is for a long time after that happened to me because I was only 23, 25 when all this was happening for a long time I felt very anxious about it happening again, and my grandmother died at the age of around 30 from a brain I think it was aneurysm, so a brain bleed, and so it felt very real to me that that could happen to me and you know these things, stuff does happen, right and it did happen to my grandmother and so I felt very stressed and very anxious and thought that there was a really big chance I was going to have another stroke and this time I was going to die. And I used to like I'd lay in bed at night and hear the blood rushing in my ears and go, oh my God, oh my God and of course, you can hear that anyway, we've all heard that. But now it suddenly sounded sinister to me and I felt like, oh, you know, I'm going to die, I'm going to die, and I had a lot of this on and off for years, because anyone will tell you this when I speak to anyone who's had any type of event, whether it's been a stroke or a heart attack or some other event, when people have events, especially at a young age but I would say really any age, really when you start having events like that, you do lose your confidence.

Fiona Kane: 15:34

You lose your confidence physically and mentally. And you start to when we're young and we're healthy, if we're lucky enough to be young and healthy you feel like you're what is it? 10 foot, 12 foot tall, bulletproof, whatever it is but you just really do feel nothing can happen to you. And when suddenly something does happen to you and you realize that you are, you're living a human life and a human body and it's fragile, and suddenly just everything can change, just like that, when you realize that it takes it, it takes a lot like it takes, it really takes a lot of your confidence. It sort of that takes the wind out from under yourselves, might be a way of saying it.

Fiona Kane: 16:23

And so this is what happened to me and I see it happen for a lot of people now. Some people deal with it a whole lot better and just get back on and move on, and well done to them. And some people struggle with it for many, many years and everything in between I had, you know, I did go back to work within six weeks and things like that, but I just on and off I struggled with this over the years and I think it would be about four years after those initial strokes. I even admitted myself to hospital once because I was starting to have these symptoms and what was happening is I was getting, my face was starting to go numb, my lips were going numb and I think my hands, my arms and I did admit myself to hospital and the good thing and the bad thing about having had a history of having a stroke is you do get admitted straight out pretty much straight away, which is very lucky. The bad thing is, because of my history of stroke, that they were very extra cautious, which is good. But it's also bad because what it meant is I got sort of over treatment, because essentially I believe what happened is I was actually just having anxiety and but they weren't sure if there was something going on in my brain and I got sort of I ended up in hospital for a week and I ended up on various medications and one of the medications I went on, I had a severe allergic reaction to, which caused me to be in severe pain with arthritis for about three months, so severe that I couldn't even hold a glass of water to drink the glass of water.

Fiona Kane: 17:59

And I was downing painkillers like nobody's business and I had always been the person that didn't take them at all, and even though I suffered from migraines. So going from someone who didn't take painkillers at all to throwing them down yeah, so that was the allergic reaction affected my like I came out in a rash but also it affected my liver quite severely at the time and and yeah, like I said, arthritis was really crippling. So the results of me showing up to the emergency probably took me at least a year, if not years, to recover from that, with the medications and all the rest of it, not having a go at any of the doctors involved. It's tricky when people front up with those things and the hard thing is actually that with people with anxiety, people don't take them seriously when something really is happening. On the other side of it, people who've really had something happen when they have anxiety. Sometimes it's hard to tell when it's anxiety, so it's tricky, right. So I'm not having a go at anyone. I'm just sharing my experience. So what I've learned is how to manage those feelings when they come up and how to manage the difference between do I go to the hospital or do I not.

Fiona Kane: 19:15

And one of the books I read that I found really interesting, for this is a book called the Astronaut's Guide to Life on on earth, and it's by someone called chris hadfield my friend, linda campbell, who's been on the podcast before. She's the one that told me about this book. Now there's a lot of stuff in there about being pilot and flying and kind of technical stuff that I didn't find so interesting. But if you are into that stuff you'd find it really interesting. But the part of it that I found really interesting is what he talks about in that book is he talks about preparing for the worst and then just getting on with it, and essentially that's what they have to do as astronauts. So they will spend years learning it might be at least months, but if not years just practicing for one mission mission, let alone all of the years they've spent learning to be a pilot, learning to be an astronaut and learning all of the different skills that you need to have to be on an aircraft like a shuttle type aircraft, because they don't just have to know their job.

Fiona Kane: 20:23

I think they have to know a lot of the other things that other people are doing, because everyone needs to know how to fix stuff if it goes wrong, right? So anyway, with astronauts, what they do, like I said, they can spend months and months, months, probably years I think he said planning for a mission and they plan everything. They plan what is going to be done to their bodies if they die, what to do with the body. Who's going to tell their kids? Who's going to tell the kid that's at university here? Who's going to tell their kids? Who's going to tell the kid that's at university here? Who's going to tell their kid that's at university there? Who's going to tell, uh, who's going to tell the wife? Who's, whatever it is, but they or husband or whoever but this is just a man who wrote this book. But essentially, uh, they plan every last minute of what, all the things that could go wrong, of course, all the things that can go wrong on the shuttle, all those experiences, everything that can go, and they practice it so many times and they plan it and they've got the whole plan of action this person's going to do this, this person's going to do that, this person's going to tell my wife, blah, blah, blah, it's all planned.

Fiona Kane: 21:18

And so he said, by the time you get on the what's it? I was going to start up the launch pad. By the time you get started on that launch pad, you're taking off. By the time you're doing that, you don't care about any of that, you've sorted it right. So you've thought about it, you've made plans for it, you've sorted it. And then he said you don't feel anxious at all because you're just getting on with it and they've got such strict protocols the same as what sort of pilots do if something goes wrong that they've got the protocol that you go through. So this alarm bell goes off, you do this. So they've got really definite protocols that just go straight into the protocol.

Fiona Kane: 21:52

And I found that sort of really interesting, that whole idea of sort of planning, and I actually it really helped me with a client of mine who, not long after I read this book, I had a client who had a break in her home and she had a lot of anxiety about it happening again had a break in her home and she had a lot of anxiety about it happening again. And so we used a strategy with her where we sort of said, well, what are our plans? What do we do if it happens again? Because I couldn't say to her, oh, it won't happen again, it can't happen because it can happen. The truth is in life a lot of things can happen. So while it's good to largely put out of your mind that things can happen because you know so much can happen and is it likely to Probably not with a lot of things At the same time if you've already had an experience like I had with the stroke or she had with the break-in when you've already had the experience, it's very definitely front of mind and you cannot convince that person it can't happen because they've just experienced it right and you know, and it can happen.

Fiona Kane: 22:49

So with her we just planned all of the bits and pieces that might be like where's the list of people to ring? Who do you ring? Who do you ring first? Who do you ring second? Do we need to put extra locks in alarm systems, cameras? I can't remember what it was, but all the practical things right, and essentially that really helped her with her anxiety, because it wasn't me saying oh, oh, poo-poo, don't think about that, don't be silly, you're overreacting. That can't happen because that doesn't help, don't? Yes, it can happen. So let's actually just plan it and then move on, right? So you just do it, plan, plan the life out of it and then you move on. And so this is exactly what I did.

Fiona Kane: 23:23

So a few years ago, um, when I had a clinic in um in in Penrith in Sydney, and at the time I think I had a few maybe about four staff that were working for me and I was really really busy in clinic one client after another but I started having this thing where my tongue would go numb and I've talked to, by the way, I have talked to my doctor about this and I've been to a neurologist recently and had tests and things. So don't think I'm completely ignoring this stuff. But, yeah, I just have these times where my tongue goes numb for a while and sometimes when that happens, I start feeling a bit stressed and I do this shallow breathing that I do, and then I start having some of those other symptoms, like the face, the jingle and that kind of thing, and I have an awareness around it. Now I start having those symptoms like, oh okay, that's interesting. All right, what do I need to do? So I think about what do I need to do and what do I think is going on and what I did at that time, because it lasted for, I think, several months actually, that I had the tongue thing going on. The tongue numbness comes back every so often now as well.

Fiona Kane: 24:28

So what I did is I spoke to my husband and I spoke to my staff and I went through with them. I explained to them the FACE, not face, the FACE acronym for strokes. So the FACE acronym stands for Face, arms, speech and Time. So FACE is the face drooping. So if you ask someone to smile, can they smile, or part of their mouth is drooping. Right Arms can they lift their arms? Can someone lift their arms? So the A stands for arms and speech speech stands for slurred speech. If you've heard my previous episode where I've talked about my stroke, I was actually slurring but I didn't know I was. You can't hear it when it's you. I thought that I was speaking very slowly, but the person on the other side thought I was on drugs, so slowed speech and then obviously, triple O, if there's any of these signs, right.

Fiona Kane: 25:29

So essentially what I did is I told the people around me what to look for and I taught them that I said look for these things and in between consultations, when you come in to talk to me, if you ask me to smile, whatever just look at what's going on and if you're unsure, call an ambulance, right? So I just said that to the people around me and then I just got on with my life and you know what it worked. It really worked, because I can't sit here 24-7 stressing that I'm about to have a stroke. Either I'm not, I am or I'm not and it felt like okay. Well, it doesn't really feel like I am. I generally feel okay, everything's going okay.

Fiona Kane: 26:06

So what I did is I just made the plan. I made the plan of the people around me who were close to me, who were in contact with me, what they needed to do if it happened or if I, obviously, if I felt like my symptoms were getting worse. I have, like I said, since spoken to my doctor and neurologist and things like that. However, I just made the plan. So I just wanted to share that with you because I thought that you know that might inspire you into maybe something in your life where you could do a similar thing, where you could make a plan. So I'm obviously not saying ignore symptoms and ignore medical emergencies, and we've always got to try and balance that out and figure that out and, if you're not sure, just err on the side of caution. It's better to look like an idiot than it is to end up in a bad way and not get the help you need.

Fiona Kane: 26:56

However, if you do recognize this in yourself, that this can be something that happens for you in your version of this we've all got a different version of this then putting a plan into place is really, really useful. So a plan of how to manage that or what to do around that. It could be someone checking in with you. It could be someone who regularly, you know if you live alone or something it might be. You have someone check in with SMS every half an hour, every 10 minutes, every hour, whatever it is, every day, depending on where you're at with symptoms and things, and you know that that person's going to ring an ambulance if they can't get hold of you, whatever it is. But make plans, and when we make plans for the worst because sometimes we do have to just be aware the worst can happen, make plans for it, then just get on with life and get on with living, because living is the most important thing Live while you're here, not spend all your time worrying about what might happen. And so, anyway, that's a strategy that worked really well for me and I hope that you might be able to some of you might be able to bring that in for yourselves.

Fiona Kane: 27:57

I hope that you have a great week and please, again, I would ask you to like, share, subscribe, comment if you're on Rumble or YouTube. I really appreciate that. I appreciate feedback, I appreciate anyone asking for any topics to be discussed and just please share this. The more people that find out about it, the more I'll be able to do this, because I can only do so much because I've got to work for a living. So if I can make more of an income from this speaking, then I can do more of it. So, anyway, please like, subscribe, share and have a wonderful week and I will see you all again next week. Thanks, bye.