How to Cope With Excruciating Anxiety Chest Pains
Dizziness, excessive sweating, dry mouth, and shaking are among the physical symptoms of anxiety. While these symptoms pose a real danger, they’re probably not as threatening, painful, or fear-inducing as excruciating anxiety and chest pain. The reason is that the chest houses the heart and lungs – two delicate organs the body needs for survival.
If you frequently experience anxiety or panic attacks, anxiety chest pains may be one of the noticeable physical symptoms. By learning some coping techniques, you can find relief and prevent the situation from degenerating into a heart attack or other heart conditions.
You may feel like you have shortness of breath but you can still breathe if you take deep breaths and know that you can breathe it just may not feel like it. If you have pain in the chest, make sure you get testing done if it exceeds symptoms of anxiety and make sure you do not have heart disease.
Continue reading for a detailed guide on coping with anxiety chest pains.
Table of Contents
How to Cope With Anxiety Chest Pains
Whether you’re feeling a sharp pain, a burning sensation, dull aching, or spasms, these techniques will help you feel better.
Practice Meditation
Anxiety results from an unsettled or troubled mind; you need some calmness and inner peace to combat anxiety, which will take care of the chest pain. Meditation is super helpful for relaxing the mind and freeing you from harmful, anxious thoughts. The good part about it is that you can practice meditation anywhere, and you don’t need any equipment.
Meditation is merely an umbrella term for different ways to achieve inner peace and stress reduction. Some meditation activities you can use to stop anxiety chest pain are:
Mindfulness Meditation: Be mindful of the present moment (thoughts, emotions, flow of air) and accept them without judgment.
Mantra Meditation: Repeat a calming word or phrase to distract you from the stressor or thoughts behind your anxiety chest pain.
Guided Meditation/Imagery: Create mental pictures of places or events you find soothing.
Another form of meditation you can use is deep breathing.
Start Exercising
In addition to many other benefits, exercise has a therapeutic effect on people who have anxiety pangs. Get up and work out if you want to reduce your anxiety and keep that chest pain away.
Once you start, your mind will leave those annoying thoughts and focus on the reps and impact of the exercise. And your body will feel less muscle tension, effectively dissociating itself from any anxious feelings. Also, anti-anxiety neuro-chemicals like serotonin come into play and limit your anxiety.
With all of these happening, that excruciating chest pain will excuse itself. If you want a more permanent solution, exercising regularly will boost your resistance to stressors and negative thoughts that may lead to anxiety.
Exercise improves blood flow, and memory and increases cognitive skills making it easier to fight mental illnesses.
Reassure Yourself
If there’s anything we know about anxiety and its symptoms, it is that they are temporary. The pain you’re experiencing will last no more than a few minutes; remember this and reassure yourself that you’ll be fine.
Focus on feeling better, not on the pain you’re feeling. We know that sounds like a weird thing to do in the heat of the moment, but it works. The idea is to divert your mind from the problem and focus on the solution. Do these three things to reassure yourself that everything is fine:
- Try to stay calm
- Tell yourself it is just a phase that will pass
- Embrace cheerful thoughts
Grounding Techniques
Grounding techniques are VERY helpful when you feel anxiety chest pains by helping you regain control of your thoughts. A popular grounding technique is the 5-4-3-2-1 where you use your senses and focus on everything around you and try to enjoy these site, smells, tastes, etc.
This is a way of being mindful and helping your body relax when it is in a state of fight-or-flight and it is trying to protect you. Take some deep breaths and fill your stomach and chest up with as much air, feel a nice stretch in your chest. Do this until the pain subsides and use this guide to cope with your anxiety naturally.
In Summary
There are many natural ways to cope with anxiety and improve your body’s overall response to stressful situations. If you have chest discomfort for an extended period of time, speak to your doctor about it.
If you feel like you have frequent anxiety chest pains, check out some more of my articles on how to cope with your anxiety without side effects.
Originally posted 2022-06-01 02:23:02.
Megan Santiago
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