How long do you all recommend usually waiting between physical testings for TMS symptoms?
@Lauren, since we are not medical practitioners we have to be very careful about questions like this. With that caveat firmly in mind, I'm willing to tell you my story.
I'm 73, and I've had a lifetime of heart symptoms, mostly extra beats, which I've understood since my twenties to be stress-based. I was 60 when I finally discovered Dr Sarno. However, the only time that I had a full workup was in my early thirties, including the stress test and a Holter monitor, followed by an Rx for beta blockers which I only took for a short time. I was fifty-something when I had an episode of strong extra beats for almost two hours in the middle of the night. They freaked out my husband, who could feel them, but I had no other signs of actual heart failure. A phone call to the 24-hour urgent care hotline calmed me down a bit, and I promised to go in for an ECG the next day, but by then there were no signs of any issues. They said I should come right in the next time it happened so they could get it on record, but of course a lengthy episode like that never happened again! The only other time I ever had an ECG was in 2019 after a fainting episode. The ECG was fine (as was everything else except for marginally low potassium, the entire incident having been brought on by lack of sleep due to a bad cough and a heat wave. I eat more bananas and avocados now).
Over all these years I have had the experience of going a really long time without any heart symptoms, only to have extra beats show up out of the blue - which I can nonetheless always connect to elevated anxiety and slipping into mindlessness. Deep breathing is my go-to remedy, and expressive writing exercises if it continues.
Like many of us, I can see how my list of different TMS symptoms come and go, kind of in rotation, as if my TMs brain knows to give me a rest from one symptom so I'll forget about it and then be more worried the next time it shows up in the rota, LOL.
When to seek medical care is a very individual decision. We always say that new symptoms should be checked out - but even then, there are a lot of symptoms which by their nature can be given some time to see if a mindbody approach makes a difference. There are other symptoms which should never be treated this way, and while every adult should be aware of the difference, age and experience do make a difference. In any case, signs of heart attack, stroke, pulmonary embolism, or respiratory distress must always be treated as an emergency.
Back in 2010 and 2011, just before I discovered Dr Sarno and this forum, I was experiencing bad panic attacks with all of the associated tight breathing and tight chest - yet I never once called for emergency help, because I had enough life experience to recognize what they were, and I was willing to calm myself down and do some deep breathing and massage my inner wrists (good acupressure point to distract you from the panic sensations) - and to get out of it.
Have you ever heard of Claire Weekes? Her book,
Hope and Help for Your Nerves has saved thousands and thousands of people from anxiety and panic attacks for decades since it was first published in 1969. It's a wonderful little book, full of compassion and insight about how anxiety causes physical symptoms - and a simple technique to banish it. It was the second book that saved my life, after
The Divided Mind. 
