breathing

[Pet59]

Im in bed petrified. Does anyone else "forget" to breathe when drifting off to sleep.

[Fishmanpa]

Breathing is an automatic bodily function like our hearts and yes... breathing. You cannot "forget" to do so.

Positive thoughts

[MyNameIsTerry]

Yes, and I think this is something many people with anxiety will understand in some form or other.

As FMP says, it's autonomic so you can't forget. It is controlled at a subconscious level involving various other inputs that are there to protect you. For instance, if you hold your breath for as long as possible, you don't die because your body reacts to the inputs and forces you to take a breath.

When you relax or fall asleep your breathing will slow and you may be drifting in & out of consciousness. When you are struggling with anxiety you can be on the lookout for any possible sign of a potential threat and noticing you feel like you should have taken a breath fits the bill.

You will find people on here and elsewhere who have been through issues with "manual breathing" where you start to think you need to consciously take a breath. This results in you breathing in unnatural ways and you end up with muscular tension, fatigue, more anxiety, etc. I've had it a few times and I know I've seen people raise threads about it. The more extreme form is Sensorimotor OCD where you believe you have to control it constantly unlike manual breathing which you can distract yourself from more easily.

In any of these cases, your autonomic function will always take over when it is needed. Even those people with OCD will sleep at some point and it will still keep them alive.

So, treat these types of issues as normal things that you are not viewing in a normal manner, like a lot of anxiety. Trust in your body, it has kept you breathing from birth and will continue to do so as you cannot fully take over a bodily function like this no matter what you may believe.

I think these things are like when we are nodding off and get a "hypnic jerk". They scare us because we don't understand them and think we need to control things again. That is the last thing we need to do, we need to accept them, trust our body to do what nature has evolved it to do and forget it.