Do you ever feel
like you don't know how to breathe any more? I'm not talking about
an organic disorder, something like pneumonia or bronchitis or lung cancer.
Those are valid reasons for having difficulty breathing, but they're
not exactly what I mean when I talk about it here.
And I don't mean
precisely panic attacks, either. Sure, they qualify as a
psychological disorder that results in the feeling of the inability
to breathe, amongst other things. But there's a subtle difference
between that and the experience that I'm talking about. In a panic
attack, the panic – I believe – descends upon you, resulting in a
multitude of physical symptoms including the sensation of difficulty
breathing.
But with what I'm
talking about, the sequence of events is reversed, a vital difference
even if it might not seem significant, given that the plethora of
symptoms involved have vast similarities and might easily be
mistaken one for the other. No, what I'm talking about involves a
mental process before a physical one ever appears on the scene. That
is, when it happens to me – because it does happen to me, and a
damned nuisance it is, too – then the first sign of its appearance
is a thought.
Yes, just a stray
thought across the surface of the mind, because that's all it takes
as warning of an imminent attack. Even the thought that, 'Well, I
feel quite well, it's quite a long time now since I last had an
episode' is sufficient. Yes, ironically, the observation of feeling
well and not experiencing the weird 'breathing issue' is enough to
spark off an episode of that issue. Brains are funny, right?
Especially the neurotic and messed-up variety, I know.
I believe it's known
in some quarters as 'overbreathing syndrome'. And it can start off
just as simply as that.
Nothing here constitutes medical advice and is merely personal observation! obv.
Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/fauxpress/ under a Creative Commons licence - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode
