Can anxiety cause missed heartbeats? It sure can! When it felt like my heart was missing a beat, I went and had a test done which revealed that my body was oversensitized, which made me feel like my heart missed a beat. This oversensitisation created other symptoms alongside it, including tingling in my face, and a feeling like I had an electric current running through my body.
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Related: Neurological symptoms of anxiety meditation
Missed heatbeats. I’ve experienced these myself. Last time would have been about eight years ago and I was fairly well-advanced on my anxiety recovery.
I hadn’t had any panic attacks or nocturnal attacks for a long time and I was feeling really good.
I was feeling really on top of things.
I would still get some stressy symptoms sometimes – like stress headaches or there’d be times that I’d feel a little bit overwhelmed – but this feeling that would come on every now and then.
The feeling of my heart missing a bit sort of came from nowhere and I wasn’t expecting it and I was feeling otherwise really good and healthy.
It got me thinking – Can anxiety cause missed heartbeats?
Well, to be honest my question was really – What is causing my missed heartbeats?
So I went to the doctor about it and they put a heart rate thing on me for 48 hours for me to wear and every time that I felt the sensation of my heart missing a beat, I had to press a button and that would log the time that I had felt the sensation.
So, I did that test and the test came back that there was no correlation between my heart actually missing a beat and me feeling like my heart had missed a beat.
So, the conclusion was that that was my old friend anxiety coming back into my life.
Ordinarily in the past, I would have been devastated and felt really like anxiety was getting the better of me.
I would have felt like it was bringing up all of these new symptoms but I think because I was so well advanced in my recovery journey, I kind of felt like:
“Oh, all of a sudden, like, here’s another anxiety symptom for me to test my method on just to see whether energy healing and my alternative methods and drug-free methods can really help.”
So, I did three things when I was trying to figure out when can anxiety cause missed heartbeats.
I wanted to help my feeling like I’d missed a heartbeat from my anxiety to help that settle down and I haven’t had that symptom again in years.
It’s like I fixed it once and I haven’t had to go back and look at it again, which is really good news.
Step 1: Can anxiety cause missed heartbeats? The answer is yes.
Accept that the feeling of a missed heartbeat is common in anxiety, and cannot actually hurt you
So, the first thing that I did when I got the results back, was to just accept.
I said “Okay, well, that’s the finding. I was wearing the monitor at the time, I wore it for a good 48 hours, it was very uncomfortable, I couldn’t shower during that time. It was well and truly stuck to me so I accept the test results. I accept that that this was the finding.”
I know a lot of people with anxiety like to second-guess things.
You always hear the nightmare story about misdiagnosis or something not being picked up through a test but I didn’t have room for this, I needed to move forward, I had to fix my problem and I had a good idea in my head as to what would fix it and I knew the first step was just to accept that feeling like I was missing a heartbeat was quite a common anxiety symptom and that it couldn’t actually hurt me at all.
So, coming into that acceptance was easy once I had that test result to say, “No, you’re not actually missing a heartbeat.”
Step 2: Instead of focusing on the question – Can anxiety cause missed heartbeats – focus instead on acceptance
Consciously relax the rest of your body – don’t try to manipulate your breathing or control your heartbeat, just let those things do what they are doing
Step two was to consciously relax my body and just sort of move into a feeling of pure surrender and acceptance, not trying to push any of the anxiety symptoms away.
So, not trying to push away or reject the sensation of a missed heartbeat if I felt it but just to accept whatever happens.
Whatever the sensation is, whatever the symptom is, I know better and I know that I’m not actually missing a heartbeat, it just feels like I’m skipping a heartbeat and not trying to be in control of my heart rate either.
When asking can anxiety cause missed heartbeats, I know a lot of people try to consciously slow their heart rate down or speed their heart rate up.
Sometimes people try to replicate the symptom, they try to make that happen and none of that is useful because what that actually does is engages with the anxiety, feeds the resistance and then doing that actually feeds the anxiety and makes it worse.
So, you just want to detach from the symptom, you just want to accept that it’s there and allow that symptom to be there.
There’s no need to push it away, there’s no need to manipulate, there’s no need to do any of that, just allow your body to do what it’s doing because your body knows what it’s doing.
Your body knows how to heal. It heals itself all the time without you even knowing, without you even trying.
You just have to accept and allow the body to do its thing.
Step 3: Let time pass
When you’re in such state of anxiety that you feel like you’ve missed a heartbeat, that’s a pretty high state of anxiety that you’re in.
The feeling that you’ve missed a heartbeat is really uncomfortable and it’s not going to do your anxiety any favors at all so you’ve got to accept that it’s going to take some time for this symptom to calm itself down.
Even if you have a couple of days where you don’t feel like you’ve had any missed heartbeats and then suddenly, it comes on again, don’t get discouraged, it’s just anxiety doing what it does.
It’s just your brain trying to protect you and bring your attention to a perceived symptom.
You know that it is anxiety, you know that it can’t hurt you.
The best you can do is just consciously accept and surrender to the symptom and allow time to pass because time is the great healer.
Time will do all of the healing for you if you do your part of it and let time do its part of it as well.
Next time you find yourself wondering can anxiety cause missed heartbeats, I’ve got a really good panic attack meditation that you can download for free. It’s great for you to listen to when you have a symptom such as feeling like you have a missed heartbeat and it sends you to a bit of a panic attack spiral.
It’s designed to be listened to during the panic attack and I count you down from 20 down to 1 and during that time, we actually bring you out of the panic.
It’s a great way to really get on top of the panic attack and feel like you’re in the driver’s seat again.
When you bring all of these things together, it makes the symptoms such as feeling like you missed a heartbeat really not feel as bad or as devastating as you think it is when it first happens to you.
If you calmly accept and lean into and let time pass with that symptom, like all the other anxiety symptoms out there, it will eventually recede and you can go about your life in a calm and peaceful and happy manner.
Love + light
Eva xo