HEALTH | Mind over Matter

You must be wondering where exactly this is coming from. Personal story time. For the past few weeks I haven’t been feeling well. I’ve experienced weird pains in my chest area and around my ribs, I am constantly tired, I’ve had a consistent, dull headache which doesn’t seem to go away with painkillers, shortness of breath, my fingers and hands go numb and I get extremely dizzy if I stand up too quickly to the point that I actually can’t see. I’m generally a healthy girl but of late I’ve abandoned my healthy lifestyle for fast food, drinking and sporadic exercise. I’ve also been going through the most emotionally and mentally in terms of my career. Anyway, being the tech-savvy girl that I am, after an episode of throbbing chest pains in the middle of the night, I searched for my symptoms on WebMD which told me I possibly had 1 out of the 99 conditions listed. Not the best thing to do because by the time I visited my Dr a week later, I’d already convinced myself that I had some life-threatening disease. After going through all my symptoms and telling him my self-diagnosis he laughed at me and told me it’s virtually impossible to have a heart condition (which is what I thought made the most sense considering my symptoms) or any other life-threatening condition WebMD listed. I still insisted on getting a number of tests done, first an electrocardiogram which measures the electrical activity of your heart… It came back normal. I have a healthy heart yall! Then I also underwent a number of blood tests, and deep down I hoped one of them would raise a red flag and give me an indication as to why I was feeling this way. They all came back healthy. Apart from low blood pressure (which is supposedly what causes the chronic fatigue and dizzy spells) and a slightly higher than normal cholesterol level (I'm working on bringing that down), I am healthy. Physically. Then my Dr looked up from my results and asked me if I knew stress and anxiety could cause the symptoms I was experiencing and that maybe I needed to start taking care of mental wellbeing as well as I do my physical wellbeing.