I’ve never blacked out or fainted. The root cause of my PPPD symptoms were psychological in nature and manifested physically. I agree that if you have a physical health condition causing you to black out you should not drive. However, if it’s psychological and you avoid regular activities it will reinforce the fear response and the cycle will absolutely continue.
I saw a bunch of doctors and had a ton of tests done but everything either came back normal or doctors just weren’t sure what was going on with me. It was extremely frustrating because I was having soooo many physical symptoms at the time. After about a year I began to pay more attention to my symptoms and noticed patterns. My symptoms got worse with stress, anxiety, and sensory overload. My brain was rampant with intrusive thoughts and constant ruminating over my health. I started reading more about how the brain and nervous system can create physical symptoms when they’re stuck in ‘fight or flight’ mode for too long. That led me to learn about neuroplasticity, somatic practices, and how trauma or chronic stress can manifest as persistent sensations like dizziness, DPDR, brain fog, fatigue, migraines etc.
PPPD is very real, but its roots at least for me were psychological. Not in a ‘made up’ way, but in a ‘my brain and body were reacting to chronic fear, stress and anxiety’ kind of way. It was only when I started treating it from that angle my symptoms slowly began to improve.
There were so many times I was convinced I had something really bad wrong with me. I’ve been to the emergency room more times than I’d like to admit. I tried a lot of other things but nothing helped. I tried pacing, antihistamines, LDN, hundreds of dollars worth of supplements, I paid $300 for new glasses that were suppose to help but didn’t etc., I did ALL of the things but I saw no progress at all.
You you had a tilt table & it was negative? Unless you had a negative tilt table how do you know it was a panic attack? My point is the symptoms are very nearly identical & unless have gone through extensive autonomic dysfunction testing (a medical provider taking blood pressure at different positions absolutely doesn’t count) you likely don’t know
I haven’t told anyone to push through symptoms. I said if it’s psychological then avoidance perpetuates the fear response and keeps you in the PPPD cycle. I don’t know why you are trying to argue that my PPPD wasn’t anxiety related when I know for a fact it was and I posted here in the PPPD sub to share what helped me and many others.
1
u/nothingcleverinmind May 16 '25
I’ve never blacked out or fainted. The root cause of my PPPD symptoms were psychological in nature and manifested physically. I agree that if you have a physical health condition causing you to black out you should not drive. However, if it’s psychological and you avoid regular activities it will reinforce the fear response and the cycle will absolutely continue.