I'm starting to get heartburn

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I never, ever had heartburn until the last year or so. I suppose it's due to getting older.

I don't get it all the time but it sometimes occurs when I'm laying in bed after having a drink before bed (I don't mean alcohol, I just mean normal squash drinks or even milk or water). I feel it trickles back into my throat and causes a weird sensation in my ears and sinuses. It doesn't hurt in my chest though, I just get a cold feeling at the back of my throat that gradually goes when I sit up, and I feel a fizzy sort of feeling like I might do one of those gross high-pitched burps, but I don't really burp and also I don't think I would want to, as I would probably get a sour acidy taste in my mouth.

Yep, I'm really heading towards middle age now. I feel like my physical youth is slipping away and I'm becoming an ailing middle-aged woman.

You’re not even close to middle-aged.

I bet your heartburn is caused by your anxiety.

I get heartburn when I drink too much non-decaffeinated coffee.

Well if I tell anyone the first thing they'll say is "well you're getting older". Just like when I started putting on weight and had to watch what I eat, even though before I used to be able to eat loads and not have to worry about my weight.

Heartburn is a middle-aged/old people thing. Well, I know young people can get it too but if you've never suffered it before then begin to it means you're not a youngster any more.

I learnt something new.

The cure is to drink something acidic like lemon juice or apple cider vinegar (diluted).

The problem is that those things are bad for the teeth so have to be washed down with water...
the apple cider vinegar tastes ok diluted but terrible without dilution....and it can irritate your bladder!

So I stick to lemon juice.

I've had a struggle with acid reflux since I was 24 or 25. It turned out that I had hiatal hernia when I finally went to see the doctors.

I spent way longer than I should have on proton pump inhibitors (longer than a decade with some breaks).

What I finally figured out:

1) I need to be very careful of coffee - the effects of it creep up on me over years and it goes from being an energy booster to coughing after meals to then constantly coughing and then not being able to sleep because I wake up at 2AM coughing my lungs out. I had to give up on the coffee, it actually got much worse after I did that for a while because - as I understand it - the acidic component of the coffee tamps down stomach acid production but the caffeine weakens the diaphragm over time? Something like that.

2) Aloe juice works really well for me. I've been mixing something like a shot and a half of that in a full glass of water and drinking that over the course of a day. It helps a lot.

I'm not entirely sure if it'll ever leave and even now, after being off of routine caffeine consumption since the middle of last year and losing a lot of weight (only eating breakfast and lunch, no dinner), I still have a cough after meals and can still have it hit me occasionally. Not sure if it'll ever fully go away.

Point being - I'm not sure how much age necessarily plays a part. I guess it depends on a lot of factors.

I know 32 may seem young to 62-year-olds here but I'm not in the "young adult" age group any more and you do start to notice little changes in your body that tell you you're not a teenager/young adult any more.

Like when I started putting on weight in my mid-20s. I used to eat loads when I was a teenager and in the first half of my 20s, and I was always so slim and petite and never put on any weight. Then all of a sudden when I was 25, my mum said that I was starting to look a bit tubby around my middle, and she said that I was still slim but was losing my "teenage build" I once had. I shrugged it off and carried on as normal, thinking that I won't start piling on the pounds until nearer the time I hit menopause. But then when I was 27, I suddenly became incredibly fat, which didn't look right on me because I'm naturally a slim person. But my mum said that it's just part of getting older and she taught me how to diet by watching my calorie intake. I just wasn't used to having to watch what I eat, so it was all a bit overwhelming for me, especially when she said that I'll basically have to watch what I eat for the rest of my life now otherwise I'll just pile the weight all back on again. She said "welcome to proper adulthood".

So other things can start to change in your body when you're in your 30s, not life-threatening or serious or anything like that yet, but things like your body reacting more to what you eat (storing fat and digesting slower).

Buy the Dr Oatker bicarbonate soda, the thing you put in cakes, probably in the cake isle in tesco - put like 3 tea spoons in a glass and drink with water, it's gross but it gets rid of the heartburn.

usually i rub or pat my chest to relieve heartburn because i will burp and so after getting rid of the air the heartburn seems to go away

heartburn burps are always gross though iv even smelt my own burp but it is relieving

so try and burp and see if that help