I just signed up and I hope you don't mind me opening a topic right in here.

For me one of the major problems right now is that I can not differentiate which symptoms are part of panic and which are part of illness. On top of that, any illness symptoms make me panic even more, so it would be useful when I know what is panic and what isn't.

Of course I understand this is not easy but I maybe someone has gone trough this and can share some tips.

I'll give you a few examples of things that happened recently in which I didn't know what was anxiety and what was health related:

I have had an stomach ulcer. During this I also had chest pains. It is not a problem if the chest pains are caused by the ulcer or by the panic attacks, the only thing is that if it is caused by panic attacks then I should try to prevent it so that I feel less pain. If it is caused by the ulcer then maybe I should go to the doctor and get some new meds.

Yesterday evening I felt very dizzy and unbalanced. I had hot/cold spells. Later I got very very cold. In the night I woke up very hot and sweating. I felt really really bad. Right now I have a mild fever and some light throat ache.. I feel terrible though. (Like when you would when having a very high fever.. dissociation/dizzy/outbreaks of sweat). In this case understanding whether or not this is due to panic or due to flu is probably the thing that could calm me down a lot. It would also change how I cope with it. When it would be coming down with the flu I would take a painkiller and sleep it of, where as when it is anxiety I'd probably try to push myself out of bed and get some distraction.

So long story short, does anybody recognise this and have any tips?