A few days ago, I ended up in the ICU.
Not because I had a heart attack. Not because the doctors found something seriously wrong with my heart.
It started with my heart rate suddenly going up.
Then came the shaking. The heat. The constant awareness of my heartbeat.
And then the fear.
My heart rate stayed around 115–130 for hours and at one point went up to around 160. Every time I felt my heart beating faster, my brain had one question:
What if something is seriously wrong?
That question made everything worse.
The more I focused on my heart, the more I noticed it.
The more I noticed it, the more scared I became.
The more scared I became, the more adrenaline my body produced.
And the cycle continued.
The scary part was that the symptoms were real
This is something I understood only after going through it.
Anxiety is often described as something that happens in your head.
It isn't always like that.
The physical symptoms can be very real.
Your heart can race.
You can shake.
You can sweat.
You can feel heat through your body.
You can feel your heartbeat so strongly that it becomes impossible to think about anything else.
And when all of that is happening, telling yourself "it's probably anxiety" isn't particularly useful.
You want certainty.
So I went through the tests.
Multiple ECGs. Troponin tests. A 2D Echo. A treadmill test.
Everything was reassuring.
But strangely, even after getting reassuring results, my mind didn't immediately switch off.
That was another lesson in itself.
Knowing that you are safe and feeling that you are safe are two different things.
I learnt how powerful the adrenaline loop can be
I had heard about adrenaline rushes before.
I had never really understood what one could feel like.
Now I do.
The pattern became very clear:
Trigger → adrenaline → heart rate rises → I notice it → I get scared → more adrenaline → heart rate rises again.
The body was reacting to the fear.
And then the mind was using the body's reaction as proof that there was something to fear.
It is a surprisingly effective feedback loop.
And once you are inside it, logic doesn't always win immediately.
I also learnt that having more data isn't always better
This one hit close to home.
I like data.
I track things. I use gadgets. I look at numbers. I like knowing what is happening.
Normally, that is useful.
During this episode, constantly checking my heart rate became another source of anxiety.
120.
Then 125.
Then 118.
Then 130.
Every number became something to interpret.
Every small increase felt like a new problem.
It made me realise that there is a difference between monitoring your health and monitoring yourself because you are scared.
The device doesn't know the difference.
I have to.
A heart-rate number is information.
It isn't a diagnosis.
That distinction is something I want to remember.
I learnt that health anxiety can make you question everything
One strange thing about a health scare is how quickly your priorities change.
A few hours earlier, you can be thinking about work, money, gadgets, plans and everything else.
Then suddenly, all you care about is whether your heart is okay.
Nothing else matters.
It made me think about how casually we treat good health.
We usually notice it only when something goes wrong.
When everything is working normally, we don't think about breathing.
We don't think about our heartbeat.
We don't think about how much our nervous system is doing in the background.
We just get on with life.
I don't want to take that for granted.
I don't want to become afraid of my own body
This is probably the biggest thing I took away from the whole experience.
I don't want every increase in heart rate to scare me.
I don't want to keep checking my watch every few minutes.
I don't want to interpret every sensation as a warning.
And I also don't want to go to the other extreme and ignore symptoms.
There has to be a middle ground.
Take your body seriously.
Get checked when something feels wrong.
Listen to doctors.
But once serious problems have been evaluated, learn to trust your body again.
That last part may take some time.
I'm still working on it.
The biggest lesson
I went into the ICU thinking about my heart.
I came out thinking much more about my mind, my nervous system and how closely the two are connected.
I learnt that fear can create very real physical sensations.
I learnt that those sensations can create more fear.
I learnt that technology can help us understand our health, but it can also feed our anxiety if we aren't careful.
And I learnt that sometimes the hardest part isn't getting the medical tests done.
It is convincing your brain that the danger has passed.
I don't think this experience made me weaker.
If anything, it made me more aware of how my body works and how quickly my mind can turn uncertainty into fear.
I am still figuring out how to deal with that.
But one thing has changed.
I no longer see health as something that can be measured only through numbers.
Sometimes the most important thing you can learn is how to listen to your body without being afraid of every signal it sends.