Not a doctor, just a guy who has done a shitload of reading and gets that sometimes, so take this with a grain of salt. But there's a lot of shit going on behind the scenes of our minds that we're not privy to and they sometimes manifest in physiological reactions. Oftentimes, these physiological reactions happen in congruence with what your conscious mind is focused on, so instead of thinking, "Oh shit, my heart is beating fast." that heartrate increase never even registers with our conscious mind and we just behave excited. However, sometimes there's a dissonance between what we're consciously feeling and how our body is reacting to the world around us; Some subconscious aversion triggers a heart rate increase, and since the conscious mind isn't aware of why your heart is pounding it can lead to a feedback loop of freaking out, or iow a panic attack. Now I'm not saying your covid infection didn't cause this, just giving you a background, because the trigger can totally be something biological that we're not privy to as well. But, speaking from my own experience, if you know it's coming you can sometimes train yourself to bring it back down. I personally have one of those Xiaomi Mi Bands that I've got set to alert me if my heart rate pops over a hundred without detection of any strenuous activity. Sometimes it's just tech silliness where the sensor is detecting double my heart rate, but other times I can see it slowly climbing and then, before shit hits the fan, what I do is give myself a bit of a time out and ground myself. There's all sorts of techniques out there you can do (google grounding techniques), but mostly I just pause whatever I'm watching or excuse myself and then take a few minutes to focus on my breath. And here's the funny thing, sometimes once you've removed yourself from the distractions, you'll get a flash of what's causing it. I figured out that sometimes if I smoke weed in the evening of one of my days I run in the morning, my body will have flashbacks back to the run and if I close my eyes while I'm doing my breathing I can almost feel myself back in the run. On the other hand, I've also started to get a bit of a heart rate spike from certain scenes in Rick and Morty when I'm sober, so who fucking knows.🤷♂️😂
Not a doctor, just a guy who has done a shitload of reading and gets that sometimes, so take this with a grain of salt. But there's a lot of shit going on behind the scenes of our minds that we're not privy to and they sometimes manifest in physiological reactions. Oftentimes, these physiological reactions happen in congruence with what your conscious mind is focused on, so instead of thinking, "Oh shit, my heart is beating fast." that heartrate increase never even registers with our conscious mind and we just behave excited. However, sometimes there's a dissonance between what we're consciously feeling and how our body is reacting to the world around us; Some subconscious aversion triggers a heart rate increase, and since the conscious mind isn't aware of why your heart is pounding it can lead to a feedback loop of freaking out, or iow a panic attack. Now I'm not saying your covid infection didn't cause this, just giving you a background, because the trigger can totally be something biological that we're not privy to as well. But, speaking from my own experience, if you know it's coming you can sometimes train yourself to bring it back down. I personally have one of those Xiaomi Mi Bands that I've got set to alert me if my heart rate pops over a hundred without detection of any strenuous activity. Sometimes it's just tech silliness where the sensor is detecting double my heart rate, but other times I can see it slowly climbing and then, before shit hits the fan, what I do is give myself a bit of a time out and ground myself. There's all sorts of techniques out there you can do (google grounding techniques), but mostly I just pause whatever I'm watching or excuse myself and then take a few minutes to focus on my breath. And here's the funny thing, sometimes once you've removed yourself from the distractions, you'll get a flash of what's causing it. I figured out that sometimes if I smoke weed in the evening of one of my days I run in the morning, my body will have flashbacks back to the run and if I close my eyes while I'm doing my breathing I can almost feel myself back in the run. On the other hand, I've also started to get a bit of a heart rate spike from certain scenes in Rick and Morty when I'm sober, so who fucking knows.🤷♂️😂