Learning to Relax for Long-Term Comfort
Feeding Your Senses
Switching your focus to different senses and sensations can be happily distracting and relaxing. If your racing heart, light-headedness, trembling, and other discomforts are too much to handle, perhaps a strong taste or smell can bring your mind to better places.
Lavender oil is a particularly relaxing aroma — it’s been used for centuries to relieve anxiety, insomnia, and stress. Bergamot and camomile are other notoriously calming herbs, and you can dissolve either essential oil in some water and breathe it in, or else brew the dried herb in a tea.
What you choose to eat and drink can have far-reaching effects on your body, too. Everyone has a unique set of triggers, but caffeine, alcohol, and spicy foods commonly aggravate AFib symptoms. Try to stay away from all your known triggers, and pay close attention to what you’ve eaten before an AFib attack to see if there’s a cause-and-effect relationship.
Calming an Anxiety Attack
Although a healthy daily routine will help keep AFib in check, it won’t come to your rescue when your adrenaline is rushing, your heart is fluttering, and those feelings of doom and gloom begin to grow. For those times, you’ll need some different physical and psychological maneuvers to get relief.
When anxiety symptoms hit hard and fast, they call for a quick response. You can reduce the severity of your AFib anxiety symptoms, and hopefully shorten or eliminate the attack altogether, with these simple techniques:
Gentle Exercise
Movement is one of the best ways to gently bring your racing heart back to a comfortable level. Strenuous exercise can make things worse for some people, but walking seems to relieve the discomfort and anxiety, perhaps because it stimulates blood flow and uses up some of the adrenaline that’s coursing through your body.
Happy Conversation
If you find it difficult to distract yourself, recruit a conversational companion. Talking on the phone to someone you care about will take your mind off some of your symptoms, and the comfort of connecting with someone may be enough to relieve the anxiety. Keep conversation light — positive thoughts and a happy tone will bring better results than a charged debate.
A Good Night’s Sleep
Sleep is one of the most important things you can do for stress and anxiety. In fact, there’s a strong connection between AFib and sleep disorders, which suggests that improving your sleep habits could improve your AFib symptoms. Laying down, closing your eyes and breathing evenly may even be enough to calm your AFib attack, and if you can fall asleep, a nap may restore and reset your body nicely.
Your AFib symptoms, anxiety triggers, and psychological reactions are very personal, but you don’t have to deal with them alone. Make the effort to find a support group for AFib sufferers, or reach out to your doctor regularly with your questions and concerns. Lean on the people around you to take off some of the pressure, and you will surely notice that your symptoms become easier to handle.
