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Fun fact: standard dental anesthetic contains epinephrine. So if your heart starts to pound when you get numbed up for a filling, it’s just because you’ve been literally shot full of stress hormones. This is a great example of how emotional reactions (feeling like you’re panicking) can come after a physical/hormonal change. This happened to me today when I got numbed up for a filling.

Here’s a bizarre follow-up. I’ve been having heart palpitations since January (just a flare-up of my periodic rumbles, already cleared as “no big deal, just annoying” by a cardiologist). Now that the drug-induced tachycardia has cleared up, my heart feels the most steady, and my resting heart rate is the slowest it’s been, in months. 

I’ve long noticed that my body often doesn’t down-regulate after a stimulus (e.g., have trouble relaxing muscles after working out). In this case, the injection delivered a discrete amount of hormones, and my body responded with a strong relaxation response proportional to the amount of adrenaline in my body. But since my body wasn’t making new adrenaline, the relaxation response was able to overcome the epinephrine AND any background stress hormones that might’ve been making my heart do the wacky the last couple months.

What this is suggesting to me is that my body IS “able to create a relaxation response” BUT it is “unable to stop creating the stress response.” Like, I know how to put the brakes on, but I don’t know how to take my foot off the gas. So what happens is I hit the gas, then stomp on the brake without letting off the gas. It slows me down some, but the brake can’t overcome the gas, so I never fully get into the “off” position. I’ve always assumed that my foot came off the gas, but I didn’t know how to use the brakes, so I could only kinda-sorta coast to a stop. Maybe that’s not at all how my body’s been working.

It also stands to reason that this is incredibly draining – gas pedal is always on, AND I’m “braking” twice as hard…but not really resting. And it gives me some different ways to think of treating all this. The first things that come to mind are small doses of Sudafed or caffeine. I’ll let you know if anything works…

Dang. This is one of the most educational healthcare visits I’ve ever had.

p.s. You can totally ask your dentist for “cardiac-friendly” anesthetic that doesn’t have epinephrine. So, if you feel anxious at the dentist, go ahead and ask them to please not shoot you full of stress hormones.

UPDATE: I was back to feeling the same – or even a little worse – the next day. Which is not surprising; going through the adrenaline spike and recovery is hard on a body. So, there might not be any therapeutic breakthroughs with this info, but at least I understand why my heart rate spiked!