I started having severe and debilitating chest pain when I was 19. I would have episodes for 10-45 mins, just in the fetal position and not understanding what the issue was. I have always been a competitive athlete and even now, as a 31 year old I am super active. I understand why they didn’t assume it was my heart, but no one cared to actually look into this for me.

I was told by numerous doctors that it was my anxiety that was causing the chest pain. I even had the principal at the school where I used to teach (even after telling her I was seeing a cardiologist) assume that the chest pain was due to anxiety. It wasn’t until I was 25 when I was finally diagnosed with printzmetal angina.

Thankfully it’s not life threatening and I have medication to prevent it (daily) and nitroglycerin if I have an attack. It’s only really severe pain more than anything else, but wow, I was starting to think it was all in my head. What kills me about all of this is that my mother was diagnosed with the same condition only a few years earlier and I would tell doctors that and they still denied that I may have been suffering from the same condition.

I have this and I always struggled with math. I was terrible at mental math and I wanted to be better. I changed all of my clocks to military time so I had to do a very small and easy mental math problem if I wanted to know the time. I started to get better at it and now I am better than most people I know (not by a whole lot, and it does still take me a while to get more difficult problems done). I now enjoy trying more difficult problems just for fun. I also developed some interesting methods to chunk problems in my head so they are easier to manage.

It’s not about hours of practice. Small incremental changes over time can be a better way to go about it.