Mens Health Blog. Medical Blog

Jan

The wedding of Jan’s daughter was six months away and the planning for it was gaining momentum. Instead of feeling excited, Jan was feeling desperate. What if she had a panic attack on the day of the wedding? What if she had to leave the church or the reception? What would everyone think? She didn’t want to make a fool of herself or disrupt the wedding in any way. What if she couldn’t even make it to the wedding at all? She was feeling anxious about it already, yet it was still six months away. Jan wanted to prevent her anxiety from increasing, but she didn’t know how.

Marilyn

Marilyn’s counsellor had told her that clinging to the memory of her first panic attack was not helping her as she worked on her recovery. Marilyn felt quite angry with the counsellor. What did the counsellor know anyway? That first panic attack was dreadful. Marilyn had been in the local shopping mall when it happened. She had no idea what it was and had thought she was dying. She had asked a few people to help her, but they didn’t respond. They must have thought she was either drunk or crazy. Marilyn had.to get back to her car and drive herself home, where she stayed for the next four years. Although she had made it home safely every time she tried to go out since then, Marilyn would think of her first attack and naturally she would become anxious. She didn’t want to go through that again. How could she not think about that attack? It was that attack which caused all the ongoing problems. Marilyn thought the counsellor, like all the rest she had seen, didn’t really understand and wouldn’t be able to help her.

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The bags under your eyes, the weight you have been losing or gaining, the grumpiness and sheer exhaustion—these are the obvious reasons to make some changes. Your child’s physical and emotional well-being are also reasons.

Dr. Burton White, author of The First Three Years of Life, feels that sleep problems understandably occur in families where children are loved and whose needs have been met. So, in some ways, the emergence of sleep problems is not necessarily a bad sign. He notes that it is the continuance of sleep disturbances that can cause deeper problems.

Dr. Marc Weissbluth, author of Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, states that the development of healthy sleep habits is not automatic. If your child has not learned them, then his functioning during wakefulness is not “optimal.”2 Put simply, a sleep-deprived child (waking several times a night or missing out on even an hour) is not at his best. His cognitive processes will be fuzzy and his social functioning will be marked by grumpy unpredictability.

A child can “adjust” to whatever sleep patterns he has fallen into. (Look at how you have “adjusted.” Do you say “I didn’t know it was possible to exist with so little sleep”?) However, there are signs—some subtle, some blatant—that he is not at his best.

It is the parents’ job to insist on healthy sleep, just as they insist on healthy nutrition, to give the child the strongest base from which to grow. Good sleep habits do not necessarily happen spontaneously. This is a skill that can be learned by children and facilitated by parents.

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One of the commonest symptoms of anxiety is the abnormal awareness of the action of our heart. Palpitation is a normal accompaniment of a response to danger. In this case the increased action of our heart serves to prepare us to meet the threat. However, as soon as the danger passes the action of our heart returns to normal and we cease to be aware of it. But when we suffer from anxiety, the unpleasant awareness of the action of our heart is often constantly with us.

Besides the persistence of the palpitation there is another factor. In our normal response to real danger our heart does in fact beat more strongly. But in the palpitation of anxiety there may be little actual overactivity of the heart, and the unpleasant awareness is due to our hypersensitivity to the normal beating of our heart rather than to overactivity of the organ.

The feeling of palpitation focuses our attention on our heart. We are all familiar with the dangers of heart attacks from coronary thrombosis. We soon come to feel that something is wrong with our heart. To reassure us our doctor takes an electrocardiogram and tells us that it shows our heart to be quite normal and that the palpitation is only due to our nervous condition. But we are not reassured. A lurking feeling remains that there is something wrong. In fact, it is hard to be reassured so long as our anxiety is still with. us.

A few years ago I saw an industrial tycoon, a man of strikingly pleasant personality and such exceptional ability that in a matter of a decade he had amassed a great fortune. But over the previous two and a half years he had suffered from pain over his heart and quite violent palpitation; and as a result was unable to enjoy the material success he had achieved.

In the manner of the real tycoon he was determined at all costs to get himself fixed up. He was not sure whether it was ten or twelve cardiologists that he had consulted in the various capital cities of Australia. He had gone to America to the most famous cardiological clinic in that country. He had been treated by a psychiatrist in America and by three psychiatrists in Australia.

“You can tell when there is something wrong with your heart, you can feel it,” he asserted.

There was obviously no point in having a head-on collision with such a man, so I merely said, “Anyway, you would be more comfortable if you were more relaxed.” And we went on from there.

One day about eighteenth months later I was driving home, when I caught sight of him in his car. In typical style he shouted, “Never better in my life.”

I must also tell you something of the other side. Last week I saw a healthy, athletic student who was becoming crippled by pain over his heart. Two leading cardiologists had assured him that his heart was perfectly normal. He was really brought to me against his wishes, by his father. He is convinced there is something wrong with his heart. He will not listen to me. He refuses to come back. Yet I am sure that if he would only do what I suggest he would soon be free of the pain.

Rejection by the patient like this does not happen often, but it is the most common cause of failure.

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