GERD?

My latest new symptom is a combination of throat mucus and acid in the throat/regurgitation. I’ve been going through some anxiety at work (boss who seems annoyed by me all the time) and now I’m dealing with these symptoms.
It’s a feeling of constantly needing to swallow mucus and/or food slightly coming up into my throat. Being a TMS person since 2005 I can say I’ve had a lot of symptoms and I know how TMS works. Can anybody offer any support or suggestions, since swallowing and eating food are very important!
Thanks!

 

Hi marytabby -

My suggestion: become mindful of where you are holding tension. If you're like me, you hold a LOT in your torso. Abdomen and diaphragm.

See it, acknowledge it, and then RELAX!

I practice deep breathing, relaxing all those muscles, and telling my brain and my gut together "This is not necessary!"

If it continues, I know it's time (usually overdue) to pick up pen and paper, and start free-writing all of my thoughts. ALL of them. Conscious and unconscious; acknowledged and repressed; big and little. No exceptions!

 

Thank you!

 

I had GERD in my late 20s and into my 30's. I was constantly throat clearing and having stomach acid backup into my mouth at night while sleeping. Only recently I've come to realize I am TMS susceptible. I had 4 different Doctors look at me back then and they never really found any reason for the GERD. I had a deviated septum surgery that didn't do anything and took a proton pump inhibitor for 10 years daily, but I don't think it really helped. Eventually I just got sick of taking the meds. and had matured enough to change my diet and was no longer bothered by the GERD and still am not to this day. I now wonder whether my GERD was TMS related?

 

yes, jan....absolutely tension in torso! i have also written about this in other posts. realizing this is THE thing that relieved a lot of the ibs type symptoms for me. i was walking around feeling like i was carrying a bowling ball in my abdomen. it was awful! soon as i realized it was TENSION, i could intentionally relax. now to handle the post nasal drip issue. it somehow seems connected to the digestive issues since the constant throat clearing puts pressure on all the torso and diaphragm muscles every single time i cough. hard to get a break. aargh!

 

Weirdly I've been going through something similar recently, not sure if its GERD or something else,

I've been getting the feeling of pressure in my upper torso, mid chest, upper abdomen. Because of timing, myself and my GP put it down to mild COVID-19 symptoms, although no fever, cough or transmission to others in the house. Eventually it went away so that was that. But in the last few days I've got the same thing again.

From reading this, it definitely feels like I'm holding onto tension in my chest, and I seem to notice it more when I feel stressed etc. I've arranged a call back with the doctor tomorrow to discuss it. But I imagine its another one of my TMS related symptoms.

I have also been exercising everyday, focusing mainly on upper body, a mixture of abdominal workouts, pressups etc so it could be that I've caused an issue with that?

Does anyone have any good breathing exercises they could recommend that help release tension?

 

IMHO, it's 100% TMS, hugely exacerbated by pandemic stress.

You can't subject the entire human population to a disaster of this scope, with all its attendant uncertainty and grief, without a huge psychological impact, followed by a physiological impact.

Of course, the medical community is not ready to accept this. But look at how inflammation has become the big issue in COVID - but not in the beginning. Then google "stress and inflammation". And try to tell me there isn't a connection. Just try to convince me that this inflammation has nothing do with the unrelenting stress that every person has been under for three full months, with no end in sight.

The virus itself has not changed. But our stress levels have. I think that this dangerous inflammatory response has EVERYTHING to do with stress because that's the difference between now and February.

If all you've got is some mid/upper abdominal tension (I've got exactly that too, by the way) you're doing well. In my case, it's not nearly all I've got, but that's another story - and I'm 100% blaming COVID stress.

 

Hi Jan. I hope you are doing well with the recent medical appointment(s) you have mentioned on TMS Wiki. As you know, Dr. Hanscom's posts in his Back In Control blog also appear in the subform here titled "Mindbody Blogs (was Practitioner's Corner)." In case you missed it, I recommend to you his June 7, 2020, post titled "Thrive and Survive--The Movement" and a hyperlink therein to his longer monograph titled"Plan A--Thrive and Survive COVID-19." The movement of which Hanscom speaks is one that links too much inflammation to both what Sarno called TMS and death from COVID-19, though Hanscom's post and monograph do not mention Sarno. The good news is that the same steps one takes to overcome TMS might also improve one's odds of surviving a COVID-19 infection. Why? It has to to with pro-inflammatory proteins (called cytokines) produced by central nervous system immune cells (called astrocytes and microglia). Sarno did not know about this because neuroscientists not did discover the critical role of overproduction of pro-inflammatory cytokines in chronic pain until after Sarno concluded his work. That presumably accounts for Sarno's reliance on Freudian theory rather than neuroimmunology to explain TMS. As you know, Schubiner and Gordon talk about neural pathways as the cause of chronic pain. Although neither of them mentions it (so far as I am aware), there is now incontrovertible research showing that these neural pathways are modulated by astrocytes and microglia through their production of pro-inflammatory cytokines.