Living With POTS: How Psychotherapy Can Help You Understand Your Body, Advocate for Your Needs, and Cope With Symptoms.

Learning to notice what your body is telling you.

Interoception is our ability to notice internal physical sensations. This can look like recognizing when we’re hungry, thirsty, cold, in pain, etc. This can also look add to our understanding and experience of emotions, too. For example, a tight feeling in your chest might signal that you’re feeling stressed.

When it comes to POTS, our brains are being bombarded with interoceptive signals. Your heart might feel like it’s pounding or racing, you might be feeling sweaty, experience lightheadedness, or feel nausea. So, is it anxiety or is it POTS? Is it both? Psychotherapy can help people tease out where POTS symptoms begin and how they might mingle with anxiety symptoms. This is especially relevant for people diagnosed or suspecting hyperandrenergic POTS and hypovolemic POTS. Tracking symptoms can feel exhausting and overwhelming. With psychotherapy support, you don’t need to do it alone.

For people who have ADHD and/or autism, building interoceptions skills can be especially helpful as interoceptive abilities can often look different for neurodivergent folks. For example, some people might experience sensory input, such as sounds or light, intensely but might struggle to notice when they need to rest.

Above all, psychotherapy helps people recognize their limits to prevent burnout and symptom flares. If you can’t recognize your limits, how can you know when to rest? This also involves learning to trust and listen to your body, even when it feels hard to do so.

Advocating for your needs.

POTS can easily be misunderstood or invalidated as it’s considered an invisible disability, meaning that the condition can’t be identified just by looking at another person.

It’s already a feat to accept ourselves and meet our own needs, but what do we do when others don’t believe us? Many people with POTS run into challenging social, workplace, and medical situations as a result of misconceptions about POTS and the impact on those living with it.

Women with POTS often feel that they have to educate everyone in their life about their experience. Sounds exhausting, right? It definitely is. Psychotherapy can help people find ways to communicate their needs without feeling like they need to divulge every last symptom. It can also help people set realistic and achievable boundaries with the people they love. For example, this can look like setting limits on how long they can attend an event or having an exit plan if a flare comes up.

What about the doctor who’s never heard of POTS? Or the one that thinks POTS only looks like fainting episodes and doesn’t understand the myriad of other symptoms that can come with it? Once again, we’re stuck feeling like we’re having to educate, educate, educate in order to get the support we need. Psychotherapy can support by creating practical care guides outlining your specific symptoms to share with medical staff, building self-advocacy skills, and help with building direct communication skills to name a few.

Cope with symptoms.

Although POTS is considered a medical condition, there can be emotional impacts that come with living in a body that doesn’t always work as intended.

Psychotherapy offers the opportunity to explore and identify ways to manage symptoms in a safe and supportive environment. For example, this work might look like learning to manage environmental or emotional triggers for POTS symptom flares. Of course, this also often looks like identifying and processing emotions as well as building strategies that can be used when symptoms become overwhelming.

“What coping strategies can I use?” you might ask. Well, this is where things get exciting (in my opinion)! There is no one designated treatment or behavioural intervention designed specifically for POTS, however, there are many strategies out there that might be helpful for you and others that might not be. Part of working with a psychotherapist involves identifying what kinds of strategies might work for the way your brain processes things, your environment, and your preferences. For example, someone might really appreciate body-based (somatic) strategies to help cope whereas another person might find that challenging unhelpful thoughts is the most helpful thing.

To get a sense of what types of therapy is offered at SNO Psychotherapy, our list of treatment options is available here.