Thank you! All my years with this and never understood why I was SOB with good stats! Still have a lot to learn and no better place than her sharing our experiences. I have found I get anxious when I have to leave the house and I have trouble breathing! Once I am out I calm down and am ok...now I wounder if all this time it has been my breathing causing the anxiety? Going to do the purse lip breathing today when I get ready to leave and see if it helps! Again, thanks! We can always learn from each other.

Carole Burnett: being sob means simply being short of breath. You can become sob because your have exerted yourself too hard and have caused your O2 sats to go down, or because you have reduced your reservoir of space for O2 to the point that you have no room for more O2 (this is when you get sob and your sats are still good). Usually being sob is something you can recover from very easily by doing Pursed Lip Breathing and relaxing. Sometimes you find yourself more sob than normal and nothing seems to help. That's when being sob can be a symptom, along with other symptoms, of a "flare" or an exacerbation (same thing, just different terms).

An exacerbation or flare generally requires the intervention of a doc: new or additional meds (nebulizer, antibiotics, prednisone) to get over.

I hope this explanation helps.

Anxiety causes me to have shortness of breathe!! Even when I have no reason to be anxious it still happens! Having overnight company or going to stay with family overnight seems to cause it! Maybe being tired? what is the difference between sob and a flare-up? I am new to all of this!

RonaldL, thank you for the clarification. I'm relatively new to this and like everyone else I suppose am learning as I go. What would be some indicators that I should seek outside help. Or is it more like you'll know when you feel it.

Anxiety can certainly cause shortness of breath. I suppose if you can't get it under control and it goes on too long, it could cause a flare. A stroke is not a flare; that's a completely different problem. I don't want anyone to think that a stroke isn't serious; it's just not a flare of your COPD. Under ordinary circumstances, anxiety wouldn't result in a flare of your COPD.