@SlowlyLosing defining anxiety is really hard isn’t it? My general ‘day to day’ anxiety seems to be that my brain is ‘ramped up’- everytime I’m quiet or by myself, my thoughts kick in. I seem to think darker things (eg worries about my children, or the general ‘future’, or I’ll think about how I’d cope if my dh left me or died, and then I feel really really guilty about even thinking those things as if somehow thinking it would make it happen). I suffer with palpitations and these ramp up, but they don’t seem to actually raise my heart rate. I get a weird tight feeling in my lungs like when you have a chest infection and your lungs burn. When it’s really bad I just feel like there is a dark dark cloud over me, just a sense of absolute impending doom. My blood runs cold. It’s all what if, what if, what if. It’s absolutely exhausting and at its worst I would be like that all day with no respite.
I also suffer with driving anxiety and that is more like claustrophobia, I feel trapped in the car on the road and just have this overwhelming urge to stop and open the doors. When I see roads up ahead of me I feel trapped and it’s not like I’m scared as such, it’s like I must escape. It’s like a complete sensory overload being bombarded and again it is completely exhausting. I can only manage short journeys because I’m literally exhausted by the experience.
I also have health anxiety- characterised by a lot of symptom spotting/checking, Dr Google, and again, an overwhelming feeling of doom. It’s not been helped by the palpitations and fluttering feeling because I have been very worried that my heart was just going to stop. The only ‘respite’ I get from this is that when I workout I don’t get excessively breathless so I am reassured because I wouldn’t be able to run 5 miles if I had heart disease, and also that if I did have eg. Leukaemia or some other hidden cancer, I’d probably be dead by now (which I know is a terrible thought but after 2 years of symptoms it’s probably true)
the skin crawling and adrenaline feeling is also something I suffer with, there is actually quite a lot online about this internal fluttering feeling that’s associated with peri. I’ve had that for years, in fact I’d say it’s one of my first symptoms and I always associated it with insomnia because I will lie in bed and feel like my whole body is vibrating, it’s as if the bed is trembling. Such a weird feeling. I’ve started having that in the day more now, like a light fluttering feeling in my chest and abdomen, it makes me feel sick and quite weak. Again, it is a peri symptom.
I suppose the decision as to whether to try HRT or not, or whether to treat the individual symptoms (eg with anxiety/antidepressants?) or whether to carry on and maybe make lifestyle changes to help you lies with you. I personally started by writing it all down, looking at the whole package of symptoms and the impact it was having in my life. The main one for me is the anxiety. Nice guidelines are that they should treat on symptoms alone if you are suffering.