style="font-size:15px;"> Now look at your hands. They sweat? Maybe tremble? Maybe the skin is sore and tingles with ‘pins and needles’? But the hands of any tense, frightened person may feel like that, and you are certainly frightened, so how could your hands behave otherwise? The sweating, trembling, ‘pins and needles’ and soreness are no more than the physical expression of oversensitization of your adrenalin-releasing nerves through anxiety and fear. These sensations get no worse than this and could never prevent you using your hands. Maybe your hands do sweat and tremble, but they are still good hands to use.
Therefore, accept the sweating, trembling, soreness and tingling for the time being. These cannot be cured overnight. With acceptance, although your hands may still tremble and sweat for a while, you will find some peace, enough to begin to still the outflow of adrenalin, so that your sweat glands will gradually calm down. In place of fear-adrenalin-sweat, you put acceptance – less adrenalin – less sweat; and finally you have peace – no excess adrenalin – no excess sweat. It is as simple as that, although acceptance may not seem so simple at first.
Hyperthyroidism
Hot, trembling hands are also found in a sickness called hyperthyroidism, which is not ‘just nerves’, although it looks very much like it, and which must be treated specifically. Do not persevere with hot, trembling hands unless you have the assurance of your doctor that you have not hyperthyroidism. Once given such assurance, accept it and do not waste time and energy worrying for fear the doctor may have made a mistake. If you cannot accept his assurance, seek a second opinion but do not inquire beyond that. Hyperthyroidism is usually not difficult to diagnose.
RACING HEART OR HEART ‘SHAKES’
Now examine your racing heart. By ‘racing’ I do not mean the short attacks of palpitation you may have from time to time, but the constantly quickly beating, thumping, banging, ‘shaking’ heart that is your daily companion. You probably think it is racing, that is why I chose this expression, but if you find a watch with a second hand and take your pulse, I doubt if it will be beating at more than one hundred beats each minute. It may be beating at one hundred and twenty, but I doubt it. In fact, your heart is probably not working much harder than any other healthy heart. The difference is that you have become sensitized to its beating so that you feel each beat. And you will remain sensitized to its beating while you listen to and anxiously record each beat!
I want you to realize that it will not harm your heart in the least to beat this way. You could play tennis or baseball if you wished. In fact if you had the interest and energy to play such games, it is most likely that your heart would calm down and beat more slowly while you were playing than when you are sitting holding your pulse. I am assuming, of course, that you have had a medical examination and have been told that your trouble is ‘only nerves’.
These weeks of watching, waiting and holding your pulse have been a waste of time. You cannot harm your heart. You can do anything you wish, provided you are prepared ‘to put up temporarily with the strange feelings that come from the region of your heart. The soreness and pain are merely muscular chest-wall strain, brought on by tension. A diseased heart does not register pain where you feel it. Heart pain proper is not felt in the heart.
So, as far as your heart is concerned, it is a good heart, beating very much like any other. You are only aware of its beating and are making yourself more aware by worrying about it and paying it too much attention. Have the courage to relax and analyse this beating and understand that it, too, like the sweating hands and churning stomach, is once again the result of over-sensitization of adrenalin-releasing nerves. The nerves of your heart have become so sensitized by fear that they answer the slightest stimulus. A sudden noise may suffice to make your heart ‘rattle’; or, more puzzling still it may suddenly beat quickly for no apparent reason.
Be prepared to live with this erratic beating until your nerves become less sensitized. They will do this as you become more philosophical and accept the racing and thumping as part of your recovery programme. You have made the mistake of thinking that while your heart continued to beat quickly, you must still be ill. It may be some weeks before you cease to be conscious of the quick action, but once you accept it, you will be getting better all the time. There is no magic switch to immediately calm your heart, although sedatives can be a great help and you need not hesitate to let your doctor prescribe them.
SORE HEAD
The soreness around, or on top of, your head is caused by contraction of your scalp muscles as a result of continuous tension. You may notice how relief comes if you press your scalp or place a hot water-bag where it is most sore. This should prove to you that the cause is local, where you can reach it and is not deep-seated. These are not the symptoms of brain tumour.
Since contraction of tense muscle causes pain, it naturally becomes worse when you worry and improves as you relax and release tension. Pain-killing tablets help, but only a little. With the relaxation that follows acceptance, tension eases and the pain gradually lessens. However, this scalp pain, this ‘iron band’, is a most stubborn symptom to cure, so do not despair if it lingers a while. I assure you that it eventually goes. The hardest, tightest band will gradually lessen and disappear with acceptance.
Once More, True Acceptance
Make sure that you appreciate the difference between truly accepting and only thinking you are accepting. If you can let your stomach churn, your hands sweat, your heart thump quickly, and your head ache, without paying too much attention to them, then you are truly accepting. It does not matter so much if at first you cannot do this calmly. It may be impossible to be calm at this stage. All I ask for true acceptance is that you are prepared to live and work with your symptoms without paying them too much respect.
The Limited Power of Adrenalin-releasing Nerves
After examining these ‘terrible feelings’, I want you to remain seated and concentrate on each in turn and try to make it worse. You will find you cannot. Apparently the power of the adrenalin-releasing nerves is limited. You may succeed in slightly intensifying its effect with concentration, but only slightly. And yet, all this time, without realizing it, you have been shrinking from facing these symptoms squarely because you were afraid that by so doing you would somehow make them worse. It was as if you gave them a fearful, sideways glance.
Let me reassure you. You cannot increase your symptoms by facing them or even trying to intensify them. In fact, you may find that when you try consciously to make them worse, they improve. The very act of concentrating on them in this way means that, for the time being at least, you look at them with interest rather than fear, and even this brief respite from tension may have a calming effect. Symptoms can be intensified only by further fear and its resulting tension, never by relaxing, facing and accepting. Are you beginning to suspect that your symptoms may have had you bluffed? They most certainly have.
A student whose sensations were very much as I have described, could make little headway at his study because of banging heart, sweating hands and churning stomach. One day, when he thought he would go crazy unless he could get relief, a friend, an ex-soldier, came to see him. He told his friend about his suffering and said, ‘I can’t stand it much longer. I have done all I can to fight it and I dont know which way to turn next. Surely there is a way out of this hell?’
The friend explained that many soldiers at the ‘front’ had had nerves like this until they realized they were only being bluffed by them. He advised the youth to stop being bluffed by his nerves, to float past all suggestion of self-pity and fear and go on with his work. The
