What’s missing?

After experiencing an incident that caused me severe stress over two or three months, I developed strange symptoms.

First I noticed that I had a slight tremor that was getting worse every week. It was subtle in the beginning and it started at the base of my spine and moved up, sometimes making my hands shake as well. It was only noticeable when I sat still or when I lay down to sleep.

As the weeks passed by, I developed other symptoms including insomnia, anxiety and heart palpitations. Occasionally I would also get tingling in my fingers and even had a few panic attacks.

I was feeling dizzy and nauseous and my digestion was really giving me a hard time and I was getting headaches (for the first time in years!), I was just plain exhausted!

What’s wrong with me? I pleaded.  Nobody was able to give me an answer.

Doctors told me it was stress-related anxiety and prescribed anti-depressants, which I refused to take. The Chinese doctor said it was excess yang (heat) in the body due to stress and worked with acupuncture to clear it, which helped but didn’t resolve the issue. My masseuse told me it was a lot of tension held in different parts of the body. My Cranio-sacral therapy sessions revealed that I was ‘holding onto something because of fear of letting it go’. Ayurvedic doctors told me it’s excess Vata that needs to come into balance.

That’s all great. But by that time, I was having frequent episodes of trembling and fainting.

Finally, a thorough blood test revealed I had a B12 deficiency.

B12 (now I know more than ever) is a crucial vitamin that is so often neglected and missing in people. It gets wiped out from the body with stress.

If you’re not sure you have a B12 deficiency, look up B12 deficiency symptoms online. And I would also suggest a blood test to test your B12 levels (more people than you think are deficient and stressed).

If you have a B12 deficiency, your doctor might prescribe B12 injections for a few weeks. You could also take B12 supplements although they are not always well-absorbed. Better options are sublingual B12 or B12 patches.