As far back as 2022, I would get tingling and numbness in my arms. After eating I would get so tired that I couldn’t think or do anything. I would just stay in my seat like a zombie until it was time to go home. When I got home, I would sleep for an hour or two and then recover. This was in addition to the more than 8 hours of sleep a night. Even with all of that sleep, I could barely crawl out of my bed to get to work. I was always so tired.
In 2023, when I worked out, I had to take 10 minutes pauses between sets. I was completely drained. Eventually, it got so bad that I could no longer workout. After about 6 months, my body decided enough was enough and I was hit with 3 days where I couldn’t get up from my bed. My muscles ached painfully and I felt incredibly sick. Eventually, I recovered though.
Fast forward to 2024 and everything took a turn for the worse. After a stomach bug, I developed IBS and SIBO. Out of nowhere, I started waking up in the middle of the night with insane panic attacks. My heart would pound all the time and my nervous system was stuck in fight or flight 24/7. I could only sleep 3-4 hours a night for many months. I had a lot of blood tests done, including all the vitamins, but they were serum, and I know now they were worthless. Everything came back normal except vitamin D which was low, so I started supplementing and staying in the sun. After a couple of months, somehow I recovered again and I thought that was it, the vitamin D was the culprit and I had solved it.
Surprisingly, for most of 2025 I was fine, in the sense that I didn’t have critical symptoms like before, except, there were times I would get so tired that I couldn’t think or do anything but sleep and my body felt incredibly heavy. Since I would recover quickly, I thought nothing of it. Also, during this time, I would wake up in the middle of the night, feeling extremely hot, and being irritable in a way that it not like myself. After about 20-30 minutes I would get really cold and instantly fall asleep again. This happened every night for many months. I would also be either extremely anxious or extremely tired during the day, alternating.
Persistent Tachycardia Considered Panic Attack
In 2026, I decided to start working out again. I managed to do so for 3 months before an array of symptoms, the likes that I never thought I could experience, began. They began with me being so tired that I almost fell asleep at the wheel. Then I would get home and instantly fall asleep from early in the day, until the next day. This lasted for about two weeks. After this, the panic attacks started. One night I woke up around 1 am in a full blown panic attack thinking I was going to die. I knew how to deal even with the worst panic attacks previous experience. I would just go out for a walk, and so I did that this time too. I walked for two hours but this panic attack was like nothing I experienced before. It didn’t stop. Eventually I ended up in the ER. I stayed there for 9h, during which time my resting heart rate did not come under 100bpm, and with the slightest movement it would jump to 140-150, even while laying down.
By morning this worried the ER doctor but the cardiologist that checked on me, and couldn’t find anything wrong after a whole bunch of tests. Even so, they kept me in the hospital for a few days for monitoring. Having similar experiences in 2024, where I was told by everyone that it was just anxiety and all in my head, I accepted it.
They gave me some pills to slow my heart rate down and I was discharged. That day, after more than 14 hours of non-stop tachycardia, my heart eventually slowed down. This was just the beginning of my declining health though. My sleep became restless and my heart felt like it was beating out of my chest for hours on end, again.
Since I went through something like this in 2024, I brushed it off to anxiety. I just tried to live my life and not think about it too much, but the symptoms persisted and diversified. I experienced frequent panic attacks that would wake me up from sleep. Sometimes, I would lay there in bed feeling a huge weight on my chest, unable to breathe properly. Other times, I would wake up and feel my muscles aching, heart pounding, and be so utterly tired that I just couldn’t move, no matter how much I wanted to. During that period, even minimal exertion would tire me very quickly.
Relentless Heart Palpitations, Insomnia, and Breathing Difficulties
On top of that, the insomnia and the feeling that my heart was pounding out of my chest was relentless, every night and day just non-stop. At one point, I was hit with a wave of tiredness like I had never felt before. I just couldn’t move. I couldn’t think and my heart was beating out of my chest and extremely fast. I was taking shallow and slow breaths and it felt like I was running out of oxygen. I thought I was dying and yet I was so tired that I couldn’t even call the ambulance. I couldn’t move at all. After about an hour, the episode resolved by itself, with me being completely normal.
In the same time period, I had two weeks in which my heart rate wouldn’t come down from 100, along with hours and hours of adrenaline surges, heat flashes, arrhythmias, and one episode in which my heart beat so fast that I was sure it was a medical emergency. My parents convinced me it was all in my head and so I just waited it out. Eventually it stopped, and I was so utterly tired that I simply passed out. I couldn’t stay awake anymore. This happened more times than I can remember: the utter tiredness, where I couldn’t think, move or do anything, but just lay there and watch it. It happened around friends, family, by myself, at random times.
Another time when I ended up in the ER because I felt my heart beating out of my chest, and my BP reader kept throwing errors when I tried to take my blood pressure, the doctor that listened to my heart was visibly worried, gave me a beta blocker which didn’t do much, and moved me from minor emergencies to major ones. Unfortunately, the doctor in charge of the major emergencies wasn’t so caring. He asked what I was doing there and said that I was wasting his time and released me. I went home with my heart beating out of my chest constantly, even while trying to sleep. I had many such episodes when I would wake up from dead sleep with my heart beating out of my chest, sometimes in a panic attack, sometimes not. Honestly, these episodes made me want to go to the ER each time, but I just tried to tell myself it was anxiety, because everyone was telling me that.
Of course all these symptoms made me seek many doctors and do a bunch of tests. As of now, I have been checked by four cardiologists, all of whom cleared me. I have had two thyroid panels, with autoimmunity and everything else, and they came back normal. I had a pheochromocytoma metanephrines test, all normal. During these episodes, my hands would tingle and so I checked Hb1ac. It was normal too. I only have slight insulin resistance because my glucose came at 99 fasting one time and 84 another. My insulin was 15 I think. Considering that I have been in a constant state of fight or fight for more than 3 months now, I think those results are pretty good. Really, the only thing besides the insulin resistance that came slightly elevated was my RBC which was 17.3.
All the doctors tell me that my symptoms are ‘all in my head’ and send me to psychiatry. I’m now tapering off the paroxetine that was prescribed, since it’s not helping at all. I never liked psychiatric medication. I only accepted to take it now because I was desperate.
A Horrible Diet
As a kid I used to eat a lot of candy and pizza. I lived off of breakfast cereals, pizza, and bread with ketchup; anything except natural foods. Honestly, I’m surprised I did not have health issues sooner. I am 29 years old now, and although I cleaned up my diet a bit over the years, maturing over the years, I still ate a lot of fast food.
What really tipped the scales was the SIBO. In the last 6 months leading up to all this, I craved carbs, and I ate a lot of them. Even if I wasn’t eating fast food all the time, white rice and potatoes were staples. I ate very little protein because it didn’t appeal to me anymore. With working out, I thought it was even more important to eat more carbs for energy. I did not understand why I would get so tired, to the point of not being able to continue, after 20-30 minutes, while my friends could do hours-long workouts. I couldn’t understand how they could have that much energy. I figured that was just the way I was built. I never considered diet.
Discovering Thiamine and Other Nutrients
More recently, I have learned about vitamin deficiencies, especially vitamins B1 and B12. Given my diet, I think these may be at the root of all of my symptoms. There may be additional deficiencies, but these two seem to fit. A few weeks ago, I began supplementing with vitamins B12 and B1 (100 mg thiamine HCL), a multivitamin, and 200mg magnesium daily.
Surprisingly, ever since starting the thiamine, I have noticed that my heart recovers much faster. Where I used to wake up before with it pounding for hours on end, now it only pounds a few seconds then stops. I am still in an almost constant fight or flight state but it doesn’t go crazy like before. My heart used to fluctuate wildly. It could 80 one moment, 97 the next and so on. This could go on for hours. Now, even if I have the surges, they are somewhat milder and don’t last as long.
Also, over these past two weeks, I have had days where I slowly recovered to feeling almost normal, in the sense that I wasn’t in constant fight or flight anymore, but then I would crash back to being exactly like before. It gives me hope that I might be on the right track, but the crashes are discouraging. Also, supplementing B1 seems to have fixed my IBS and SIBO. This is something I have been suffering with for more than two years and had tried everything to heal.
I have only been taking the thiamine for few weeks and I know that it is very little in the grand scheme of things but things seem to be improving slowly. I haven’t seen this pattern of recovery in the cases I have read. A lot of people seem to get a paradox reaction initially. I did not have that experience. I seem to get better and then backtrack again. Has anyone else experienced this pattern?
Also, I haven’t read any case stories where the person experienced adrenaline attacks that lasted hours and hours on end like I have. This is what made me think of pheochromocytoma initially. Maybe it was thiamine though. Does anyone have any insight on this?
We Need Your Help
More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.
Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter.
Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels
