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Dissociation, Mindfulness Exercises, and Breathing Crises

I've not posted here before, because I haven't felt right about it. Right now I'm far from having a PD diagnosis but I have a lot of the commonalities. Problem is, we're working through a lot of compound health conditions and ruling in PD is about as likely as ruling out PD.

What I do have is routine problems breathing. Thinking too hard is pretty much the most reliable way to make myself stop breathing, and sometimes I have awful days where I can go an hour or more where I have to consciously focus on breathing. These usually come with complicates from Cataplexy, so it sounds on first blush as just some Panic Disorder. Trouble is this also happens without Cataplexy symptoms, and I'm getting a touch bit tired of having to be vigilant on a pretty routine basis about if or if not I have taken a breath recently.

The catch 22 I'm in right now is that for unrelated reasons, I've tried to do a breathing exercise for mindfulness related therapy stuff. I know I dissociate pretty hard but I didn't realize just how intensely concentrated my focus is on breathing. Once I ended the short, minute long breathing exercise (called the 'box' exercise I think), I've spent maybe the last 20 or 30 minutes in the same kind of breathless state that I've gotten used to having come and go.

A good portion of this is me trying to figure out where symptom and syndrome are intersecting. I'm 33, and depending on what's going on with my body that week, I might need to walk with a cane. I have collapsing episodes, I get really rigid, I have very freaky essential tremor in my right hand that comes in almost instantly if I get a little tired or suddenly disappointed. That all sounds, on paper, like normal Cataplexy. But then there's these breathing paralysis episodes where genuinely, it feels like I'm fighting for my life. Sometimes my body gets so heavy that slump over and I can't even change my position nor open my mouth to ask for help, that kind of stuff.

My question, with that all above: Has anyone else had a breathing exercise cause you to briefly lose your ability to breathe easily? Real 'surprise: you are manually breathing for the next hour' kind of stuff.

Mind you it's not like, an asthma or COPD kind of issue; we're talking it takes serious mental concentration to force yourself to breathe in and out, enough that it becomes the only thing you can do. I'm naturally pretty anxious about the potential for PD or a related, serious nervous system disorder that I keep fluttering on the outer edge of. It's going to take a serious emergency for anyone to be willing or able to do anything about it at the moment.

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