Pill in the pocket experience?

Hi folks. 37F here with a fresh afib diagnosis. I’ve had three episodes in the past 7 months. I’m super active and live a very healthy lifestyle - I exercise daily, rarely drink alcohol, and am a healthy weight. I even I teach yoga and breathwork.

The cardiologist originally said I was probably having panic attacks because he didn’t think it was likely I was experiencing afib. Wore the heart monitor for 2 weeks but didn’t have afib it during that time so he had nothing else to go on. Eventually I got an apple watch and took him my afib ecg readings so he could actually diagnose me.

I’m relatively young and don’t have any risk criteria, and it doesn’t run in my family. Echocardiogram showed a structurally normal heart.

From what I can tell, I’ve had episodes when I was tired, stressed, or dehydrated, and in one case it happened on a day that I exercised a lot and had a glass of wine at dinner. I’ve gone from 1-2 drinks a month to zero since that’s clearly a trigger for me. But I’m not sure what else I can do. Was this caused by drinking, smoking etc when I was in my 20s?

The cardiologist said he doesn’t recommend ablations right away because they are invasive. He recommended the pill in the pocket method for now (metoprolol and propafenone) and just monitoring things I guess.

I’m lucky because breathwork, sauna/cold plunge circuits, and running have not triggered afib for me. It would be really hard to give up any of those. So far all of my episodes have self corrected in 5-12 hours but I find them scary, and they leave me exhausted for days afterwards.

I haven’t had afib since getting the pill in the pocket prescription so I’m not sure what to expect when it does happen.

Any advice or experience would be helpful.