What To Do If You Struggle with Panic Attacks and Heart Palpitations with Will Humprhreys

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Okay, rockstars, let's get this right out in the open, right out of the gate. I am not a cardiologist. I am a healthcare professional. I'm a physical therapist. But what I'm going to talk about today would make you think that I'm a, you know, cardiac specialist. And I'm not. I'm a guy who had lots of heart palpitations and was told he needed a pacemaker. So this is a special episode of people who are so stressed that they start having heart palpitations or panic attacks. It's either one of those. So if you don't have either one of those, you can skip today's episode, go back and have fun, listen to something else. Because I want to talk to my people who are hypersensitive like me. I am so sensitive as a kid. I remember that my brother, older brother, would be like, man, Will, you're so sensitive. And I would scream and close the door and go, no, I'm not. Which, you know, was probably proof in the pudding. But, hey, guys, rockstars, thank you for listening. Let's get right into it. Let me tell you the true story of my heart palpitations. About 20 years ago, I started noticing this, like, skipping sensation in my chest. And it was so scary to me because some of the skips were so prolonged that I would start to get lightheaded. And I didn't think of the correlation of the fact that I was opening a fourth location and that I was. I had a bunch of C players on my team and that I was working 70 hours a week and that, like, I was treating, you know, 80 patients a week. Like, that never occurred to me that that's why I was having heart palpitations. I was also having panic attacks. And if you've never had a panic attack, the way I describe it to people is that you feel like you're actively dying when you're having a panic attack, but you don't think it's a panic attack. You just think you're dying. It's what your body feels. It's. In my case, the heart was skipping. And what would happen is your heart. When you're having a pvc. I can't remember what it stands for. Periventricular contraction. See, I'm not a cardiologist. Like, when you're having those heart skips and then you start having a panic attack, the adrenaline gets so intense that it's almost like a tickle, like a twitch in your muscle where your heart will start skipping repeatedly. So I would skip, skip, and then beat, beat, normal, normal, beat, skip, skip, skip. And it would go like that for hours. And it was the single most terrifying thing I've ever had. And so it got progressively worse. And what's even worse, guys, is I've had a handful of my entrepreneur friends, leadership friends, who have actually had pacemakers. One guy went into VTech, literally just passed out, was dying. And he passed out in a clinic that was next door to a firehouse, where they came and charged his, like, clear, charged his chest. The guy woke up and went to the hospital and got a pacemaker put in. I was having so many. I was seeing an electrocardiologist, and the guy was amazing. I'm here in Arizona if you guys ever need a good recommendation or if you want to fly to Arizona. He was. Is phenomenal. And he just worked with me. He had, like, the most soothing, calming demeanor. He kind of knew that most people were high strung, like me. And so he just came in and would be like, it's okay. Here, take some flaconide. And it just like, nothing seemed to work. And so I got to this point where it was starting to rule my life. I literally would have to leave the clinic and go home and lay down because I thought I was dying. And I'd gone to the emergency room before because I thought I was having a heart attack. It was just a nightmare. I mean, I'm laughing a lot, but, like, you can either laugh or cry. And to be honest, this was one of the darkest times in my professional career. I couldn't even go into, like, the details of how horrible things were at my practice at the time. And I was so busy, like, I was the only one that was seeing a double load and all these things, right? And all the victims, things that were happening to me. But at the end of the day, what ended up helping me was I started researching, you know, two main things, the physiology of the heart and stress management. So I'm gonna talk really briefly about both of those. It's gonna be a short episode. But for anyone out there who's on propanol, like a beta blocker or who's on flaconite, or anyone who's, like, worried about their cardiac health because they're stressed out and they're having all these palpitations, or you're having just frequent panic attacks, Remember, I am not a cardiologist. I'm definitely not an expert in mental health. I'm just an expert of being mentally ill in my own way. I've experienced it so intensely that my body legitimately was manifesting these intense physical symptoms. Hey there, rock stars. 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To learn more, email info virtual rockstar.com Again, that's info virtual rockstar.com and so this is what I did. I started researching those two items. Let's talk about the way that we can look at the physiology of the heart and help reduce the amount of palpitations that we had. So this is in no way a recommendation for you to do this. This is just me telling you my story of what I did. I found that, that most of the time people were significantly deficient when they were having palpitations. And this was all through research and talking to my electrocardiologist, that they were having electrolyte imbalances of large proportions, namely potassium and magnesium. And so what I did is I started using two products. I'll put, I'll put them in the show notes and if you don't see them there, let me know and I'll send you a link without any, like, money to me. But I started supplementing magnesium and potassium. This magnesium is something I use called calm. And it's really easy to use. And then this powder is called Dr. Berg's electrolyte powder. And it was, it's all about potassium. And so I would do a single scoop of that, which is a thousand milligrams of potassium. And then I would do two teaspoons of the calm. I still do that to this day because I haven't had palpitations in years, years and years. And so, you know, when you think about your, your heart and stress, let's just talk about stress and how this like carries over into palpitations. I want you to think of a table, an analogy of a table. I didn't create this, by the way. I was told this by one of my doctors. There's different legs on that table. One of them is the electrolytes. One of them is sleep. Right. How much sleep are we doing? One of them is exercise and diet, if we're getting exercise and dieting. And then the last one is stress management. And so that fourth leg is something we could spend a lot of time on. But when it came to the electrolytes, the supplements were easy. When it came to sleep, it was me just kind of realizing I have to have at least seven and a half hours. There's superhumans out there who do less than five. Not me. I significantly reduce my likelihood of palpitations and stress, which goes to stress management when I get seven and a half hours of sleep. So I bought something called the sleep eight. Again, I'll put it in the show notes without any benefit financially. It's a cover for your mattress that regulates your temperature and keeps your your temperature within your sheets around 65 degrees. And it monitors your heart rate while you're sleeping. It will actually fluctuate the temperature based on your heart rate to keep you in a deep, restful sleep. It changed the game for me in terms of sleep quality, how quickly I fell asleep. Highly recommend it. Super expensive. I think it's like two or three grand. But guys like we spend a third of our life sleeping and this dramatically stopped heart palpitations. I forgot to mention, by the way, at one point they told me I had over. They put a monitor on me. I was having over 2000 a day palpitations. My heart would skip and I would feel it and have to catch my breath. It was miserable. And so for me to go from needing a pacemaker, which I didn't do, to not ever having palpitations, I just really want to emphasize that these are potential options to talk to your doctor about. So got better sleep. What was that third one? Exercise. So exercise and diet. I learned that really fatty foods like pizza would, would kick it off. I have since realized I have a dairy sensitivity, that if I have lots of dairy, it's gonna make it make me more prone for heart palpitations and exercise. If I could do 30 minutes of zone two cardio, which for me is like 125 beats per minute, I get on a Stairmaster and I check my emails. If I get on that StairMaster. And I do that 30 minutes a day. It releases enough. Enough of the positive chemicals in my body. I forgot which research article I read, but it indicated that there was enough positive response from organic chemicals that would be the equivalent of, like, a full dose of Prozac. And it was so massive to me just to get on that StairMaster every day. And then that last table of stress management. Obviously, exercise, diet, electrolytes, and sleep are going to help you already, but the main thing I learned it was meditation. You probably have heard a ton about meditation. We'll do a different podcast if you want, but I am heavy into it, and it took me a long time to get into it because it always felt really weird to me. I'm a Western medicine kind of guy, giving my pills. Get out of my way. I want to get back to work. But there was something about taking time just to learn how to breathe, just to learn how to let my mind go where it needed to go and let it do what it needed to do. That dramatically helped. Now, listen, I don't want to negate all the work I did to help improve my work environment around learning how to recruit better, how to get rid of people that weren't good fits for the team, how to be a better leader. Like, all those things were huge. But in the short term, in the very near. And now, learning to handle those four legs of a table completely stopped my palpitations. I will tell you this. At first, finally, the flaconite helped and stopped my. My heart palpitations. And then I started weaning off of that over time. And now I'm at a point where I get this question all the time as I coach different medical leaders. It never comes up as like, hey, Will, can you help me with this? It just kind of like embarrassingly pops up like they're having panic attacks or they're having heart palpitations. So just remember there is so much you can do about those things. And that in the. In retrospect, I don't think of those panic attacks or the heart palpitations as these, like, negative things. I mean, they were very negative to experience them, but that was my body and my mind telling me something, guys, what is. If you're experiencing that, what is it that your body's trying to tell you?

What is it? Like, like, if you could list three things that you think it might be, what are those things?

So, yeah, like, go talk to your doctor about the things that I did. I'm sure they'll help. But what are Those things that are in your life that are causing you so much pain that you're repressing it and it's manifesting physically.

Please listen to that. Not because you're going to die if you don't. Like, like, I was worried about. I was so worried I was going to die or pass out, and I don't know, who knows what have happened if I let it go. But most importantly, like, what is it that I was tolerating? What was the thing, what was it that I was not willing to do for myself to get me free of those horrible feelings?

I really care about you. I don't know you, but as you're listening to this, I just need you to know the time that you're spending with me, whether it's with somebody else or it's just you and me like this, I honor it. It is a gift. So I'm only going to share the deepest stuff with you guys. I wish someone had done that with me. So, for whatever it's worth, take this information, go handle that stress. And what I think you'll find is that when you can feel like you're in charge of your physical and mental health to a degree to where you're not being controlled, that way you'll start making bigger moves. In your professional world. We can't make those moves happen until we've got control here within us first. But once you have that, all that power that you have, you'll be able to exercise it externally to control your environment. And, I mean, you're powerful. How do I know? Because if you've listened to this far of the podcast today, that means you've experienced some of these symptoms, right? That means you have so much in your world and somehow you're just holding it all together mentally to the point where your body is telling you, stop. That's how strong you are. So take it as a compliment and recognize it's also an indication that you are capable of taking that same power to control these things internally. What's weird, as you'll find, is that controlling it often looks like not controlling it, and that's a different episode. But either way, you get to a point where you feel empowered to where you can then go outside of yourself and handle those horrible things. Pay attention to your body. It's trying to tell you something. Thank you for listening, guys. Never give up. Until next time. Thank you for listening, rockstars. And if you're one of the many medical professionals and leaders who have had it, dealing with the drama of hiring and training people that you think are overpriced. Then let's think about how virtual assistants can offload you to do what you love, which is changing people's lives. In the show notes, there's a link to jump on our calendar so that we can show you why LinkedIn shows that virtual assistants is the second fastest growing trend in healthcare next to artificial intelligence at no obligation. We'll see if this is a fit for you. I hope to talk to you soon.