Shortness of Breath and CFS Explained

One of the Scariest Symptoms I Dealt With

Shortness of breath sits right up there with heart palpitations and a racing heart as one of the scariest symptoms I went through. I know exactly what it feels like. It can feel like your lungs are shutting down. Like you're running out of oxygen. Like someone is pressing into your chest and you can't get a full breath in or out.

It rarely shows up alone, either. One tight breath can set off a whole chain: lightheadedness, a high heart rate, tingling in the hands and feet, pins and needles, vertigo. That's why it can tip into a panic attack so fast.

If you've been searching this at 2 a.m., you've probably already asked the question I asked: what is wrong with me? I'm going to walk you through what I learned about this symptom, including the hospital moment that changed how I saw it for good. One thing first. We're a coaching and education team, not doctors. If your breathing has changed, get it checked by a medical professional before anything else. What I share below is for people whose tests keep coming back clear.

How It Started for Me

In the beginning I didn't get much shortness of breath. It was mostly fatigue and anxiety. I didn't even know what anxiety was back then, but looking back, I was always worrying. Worrying about work. Overthinking everything. I couldn't shut my brain off.

Over time that fatigue and worry grew into more symptoms. Brain fog. Insomnia. And then the breathing.

I first noticed it going up a flight of stairs. I couldn't catch my breath. Then it was bringing groceries into the house. Then the stairs in my own home. Then a sidewalk with a slight incline. It made no sense. I was a personal trainer at the time. In high school I was captain of the wrestling team. I played football and rugby and ran track. Before all this I was working out five times a week, no problem. Now I was handing a client a pair of dumbbells and getting winded.

At first I brushed it off. I'm probably just tired. But it kept happening, and it started stacking on top of everything else. The palpitations and the high heart rate made me anxious, because I thought something serious was happening with my heart. The anxiety made my breathing speed up. Faster breathing turned into shortness of breath. And shortness of breath turned into panic attacks.

The Breath and Anxiety Loop

Once the loop got going, it could start anywhere. I remember driving through a tunnel at 100 kilometers an hour and feeling trapped, like there was nowhere to pull over and nowhere to run. My breathing got tight. The tight breathing turned into a full panic attack while I was behind the wheel.

Another time I was sitting in a mall food court. Out of nowhere a thought showed up: what if something happens and I need to get out? The door was maybe 75 meters away. My brain decided that wasn't close enough. My chest tightened, I started gasping, and I had a panic attack over a plate of food.

Both times it started with an anxious thought. Then came the shortness of breath. Then came the fear about the shortness of breath, which made the breathing worse, which made the fear worse. It's a catch-22. The more anxious you are, the harder it is to breathe. The harder it is to breathe, the more anxious you get about running out of air. Round and round, until it spirals into a panic attack. And after a panic attack there are usually leftover symptoms for a while, which keeps the fear simmering for the next round. If you want the bigger picture on how worry and exhaustion feed each other, our post on anxiety and chronic fatigue goes deeper.

The Hospital Moment That Changed Everything

I needed a doctor to help me believe my lungs were okay, and it took a few different moments for it to click. The biggest one happened at my absolute worst.

By then I'd been completely bedridden for about eight months. I was on a pile of supplements from a naturopath. My grandpa was the one taking care of me. He pushed me in a wheelchair to doctor's appointments, helped me up the stairs, took me to blood tests, and rubbed my shoulders at night when I was crying because I didn't understand what was happening to me. He and my grandma were my rock. Then our family went through a hard stretch of its own, and my anxiety climbed to a level I didn't know existed.

After that I didn't sleep for about two weeks. My body was wired, my emotions were a mess, and I couldn't eat. For three days my dad had to blend my food. I remember rice and tilapia blended in warm water. Disgusting, but I needed something. My digestion stopped working. We called an ambulance.

That first night in the hospital I got no sleep at all. Every time I was about to drift off, my whole body would jolt awake like someone had flipped a switch. By the next day I was so exhausted I was having trouble breathing. I was whispering to the staff, "I can't breathe. I need oxygen." A couple of hours later it got much worse. I couldn't get a breath in. They had me hooked up to oxygen. Nurses were running in and out, taking measurements, doing an emergency X-ray because I was sure something was badly wrong with my lungs. I couldn't even move in the bed, so they had to lift me with a hoist on the ceiling to get me to the scan.

My girlfriend at the time was holding my hand. I looked at her and couldn't get a word out. I was 22 years old.

Then the doctor walked in with the X-ray results. He said, "Miguel, guess what. You're going to be fine. Go ahead and take this." And he put a small pill in my hand.

The second the pill touched my palm, I took a gasp of air. My body loosened its grip on me. I could breathe normally. I could think clearly. The pain eased. And I hadn't even taken the pill yet.

That was the moment. In that second, the message my brain was sending my body changed, and my body followed. Looking back, I believe it was a panic attack on top of two weeks without sleep. That's my own read on it, and I'm not a doctor. The tests were clean. I was in the ICU for about a month and they ran everything. My body was okay. My brain was sending the wrong signals to it.

What My Doctor Taught Me About Limiters

About four weeks later I met the doctor who taught me the rest of it. He explained it to me this way: when your nervous system is hypersensitive, your brain can place limiters on your body in the form of symptoms. That was how it made sense to me. It felt like my brain was trying to slow me down.

For me, brain fog felt like a signal to stop thinking so hard, and pain felt like a signal to stop moving. Shortness of breath, aches and a dozen other strange things showed up when I kept pushing through.

It all clicked for me. I looked back at every stairway and every tunnel and saw the same thing: my brain pulling the brakes. He gave me a roadmap with diagrams. I'm a visual person, so that's what finally made it stick, and it's still the roadmap I use to explain this today. There's a whole list of these limiters. I call them primary and secondary symptoms. Usually it starts with a few primary ones, like fatigue and anxiety, then grows into secondary ones, like shortness of breath and palpitations. After a while they all play off each other and lead into one another.

The way I think about it now: my hardware was fine. My organs were working. The software, the way my brain was sending signals to my body, was stuck in high alert. Stuck is different from broken. And software can be retrained.

From the day he explained that, I stopped being afraid of shortness of breath. I trusted that my lungs were doing their job. For me, learning how to lower the stress on my brain and nervous system is what brought the symptoms down. The fear went, and for me the fear was the fuel.

How to Overcome It, Indirectly

This is the part I had backwards for a long time. For me, shortness of breath eased when I worked on the thing underneath it: the anxiety, the constant nervousness, the constant worry. Chasing the breath itself kept me stuck. Calming the system that was tightening it is what moved the needle.

For me the worry had a shape. Am I ever going to get better? Am I on the right track? Is it Lyme? Is it mold? Is it early Parkinson's? Is it some weird thing nobody has discovered yet? Those thoughts were driving the breathing. The more I could tone them down and focus on the one thing my doctor had explained, a nervous system stuck on high alert, the more the shortness of breath faded. Once it clicked, it was night and day. I stopped buying into the symptom as much, and it lost its grip.

Three things made the difference for me. First, knowing. Hearing from my doctor that my tests were clear and my lungs were doing their job, and letting that sink in, took the teeth out of the symptom. Second, catching the loop early. When the tightness showed up, I reminded myself it was a limiter, a signal from a brain on high alert. For me, that helped it pass. Third, treating each episode as practice. Every episode was a chance to show my brain I was safe. In my experience, I needed the symptoms to show up in order to retrain. They were the practice. A tight-chested day on the stairs, met with calm, taught my brain plenty. Our guide on brain retraining and symptoms explains how that works.

This is what worked for me, and it isn't advice. If your breathing changes or gets worse, get it checked.

Get Checked First, Then Retrain

All of this applies if you've had the tests. Chest X-rays, heart checks, bloodwork, whatever your doctor ordered, and they've come back normal. Plenty of people have been told, "You're completely fine, your tests are normal," and the doctor doesn't know what else to do. That was me too. Normal tests, no answers, and a nervous system that turned out to be stuck on high alert. We wrote about that exact spot in normal tests but you still feel sick.

If something does show up in your lungs, that's a medical issue to handle with your doctor. Our coaching is education for people whose tests are clear and whose symptoms remain. It does not replace medical care. We're a coaching and education team, not medical providers, and breathing symptoms always get checked first.

And if you've got normal tests and a body that still feels like it's running out of air, I've been exactly there. In my case, my lungs were fine and my brain had the brakes on. Calming the system that was pulling them is what worked for me. It took me a while, and it came with plenty of flare-ups along the way, but shortness of breath went from the thing I feared most to a signal I understood. If you're in that spot right now, I hope this helps you see it a little differently.