After her divorce, when Sarah Cunningham, then 36, was navigating her new life as a single mom to a young daughter, she came to accept feeling anxious all the time. “Constant pressure in my chest, overthinking, trouble sleeping, worrying about money—that sort of thing,” she said. She thought it would pass as she found her footing in her new normal.
Only it didn’t.
Two years later, Cunningham had gotten her life back on track. “I was in a better place in my career. I was financially stable,” she says. “But those waves of anxiety were getting worse and worse.” And now there were other symptoms too: shortness of breath, excessive sweating, brain fog, and generally feeling sick to her stomach.
She took up running in the hope it would help relieve stress—and trained for the Chicago Marathon. She followed the prescribed plan to the letter, running long distances, most days, for months. She was ready. But the night before the race, over dinner at the Hyatt Regency, while all the women she’d trained with were talking and laughing, Cunningham started sobbing.
She declared to her friends that she wasn’t ready for the race she had spent more than six months training for.
“I had a panic attack. I had convinced myself that something awful was going to happen to me on the course.”
She did finish the race the next day—“It was a slog,” she says—and as soon as she got home to Baltimore, she saw a doctor.
She walked out of the appointment with a prescription for Lexapro for anxiety. She worked with a therapist too. But “nothing shifted,” Cunningham said.
Coincidentally, an integrative health service was offering free consultations to employees at Cunningham’s workplace. Hoping it might lead to answers about her unrelenting anxiety, she signed up for an appointment, which included a full blood panel. It was that blood test that revealed she had been living with hyperthyroidism, or an overactive thyroid.
Some of the symptoms of hyperthyroidism that you may notice first—trembling, sweaty palms, a racing heart, feelings of doom—look a lot like anxiety. You might chalk any of these up to anxiety, especially if you can pinpoint a reason for feeling that way. But they can also be signs of hyperthyroidism.
“I had gone to the doctor. I was seeing a therapist. And nobody ever said, ‘Have you thought about checking your thyroid?’”
