Manual Breathing?

[dsdr]

I believed till an hour ago that I was crazy for feeling I had to manually breath till I read within this forum.  The feeling is that if I forget to breath my body will not do so.  Once my mind is distracted this is not an issue and may not return for weeks.  This has been occassional for the past few years and has not affected my life.  Recently, I had a "test" conducted which shows whether you are lying or not (polygraph).  What was interesting was that i was being accused of messing with my breathing.  Apparently I was holding my breath for up to 30 seconds at a time with extremely long draws of breath and exhales.  I used to do karate many years ago and used that breathing technique but apparently I falls back to it as I get stressed at least that is what I'm guessing (I was telling the truth if you were wondering).  Also, every so often I will take a long deep breath but don't know why which may be perfectly normal but my wife looks at me odd.  Not hyperventilating just an occassional big deep breath.  As sidenotes, I used to suffer from Atrial Fibrillation and every year or so will have an episode which seems to be gas related (pressure on the vagal (sp?) nerve possibly) in my opinion.

I am lucky that I'm functional and don't considered myself anxious though I've had minor anxiety attacks that I've had in the distant past that did not require any treatment that I learned to breath thru them and control them.

Is this worth seeing someone or should I just suck it up and deal with it?  Thanks.

[cj29]

I would never advise you to suck it up :)...heck I hate going to the doc's, but sometimes it is good just to get it checked out. Most of the time, there is a simple explanation with a simple answer, and if it is anxiety, then you can focus on confronting it...keep us posted!