How Your Resting Heart Rate Offers a Health Snapshot

There’s an easy way to catch a glimpse of your overall health. Just see how your heart is behaving when you aren’t asking it to do anything.

Your resting heart rate is the number of times your heart beats every minute when you are at rest. It’s a number – typically between 60 and 100 – that tends to be stable from day to day. Some people, athletes for example, tend to be lower on the range, while people who are anxious tend to be higher.

The number can evolve naturally as you age, but it can also reflect changes in your health.

Outside the Numbers

There is no such thing as a perfect resting heart rate. It varies from person to person. Your doctor may become concerned, however, when your number falls outside the normal range. The direction it goes – low or high – can mean different things.

A slow heart rate is known as bradycardia, falling below 60 beats per minute. A slower heart rate isn’t necessarily a cause for concern and is fairly common during sleep and in highly trained athletes. But it can be a sign that your heart isn’t doing enough to pump oxygenated blood throughout your body. Symptoms include chest pain, confusion, unexplained fatigue, shortness of breath and dizziness.

Of greater concern is a fast heart rate, known as tachycardia, where the heart beats faster than 100 times a minute. It’s not always a sign of trouble. It’s natural, for example, for your heart rate to be elevated when you are stressed. But it can be an early warning sign of trouble down the road, including heart failure, stroke or sudden cardiac death.

When To Be Concerned

It’s not just an elevated heart rate that will draw your doctor’s attention. Also important is the rhythm of your heartbeat. A healthy heart can experience a temporary increase as a result of exercise, stress, fever, severe anemia and anxiety. Pregnant women also tend to have an increased rate. As long as the heart rhythm is normal, an increase up to 120 beats per minute is generally considered acceptable, especially when there is a physiologic reason behind it. But if it goes higher than that, or if there is an abnormal rhythm, it could be a sign of a more serious condition, including:

• Atrial fibrillation (AFib): This most common type of tachycardia is caused by irregular electrical signals in the upper chambers of your heart. It can feel like a fluttering or thumping in your chest and may not go away unless treated.
• Ventricular tachycardia: This irregular beat starts in the lower chambers of your heart. As a result, your heart beats too fast to allow those chambers to fill up with blood, which can deprive your body of oxygen. The condition may only last a few seconds, but it can be life threatening.
• Supraventricular tachycardia (SVT): This is general term for abnormal heart rhythms starting in the upper part of the heart. It can cause episodes of abrupt heart pounding.

Tracking Your Heart Rate

Particularly as you get older, it’s a good idea to keep track of your resting heart rate. Fortunately, that’s easy to do at home. For many people, it’s as simple as looking down at the fitness tracker on your wrist. But if you prefer to do it the old-fashioned way, try this:

1. Press your middle and index fingers together on your wrist, just below the point where the fleshy part of your thumb begins
2. Feel around gently until you find the pulse.
3. Once you’ve found it, count the number of beats over 15 seconds. And then multiply by four.

Lowering Your Resting Heart Rate

If your rate is between 60 and 100, there’s really no reason to worry about lowering it. But if you are at the higher end of the spectrum and want to bring it down, there are some things that might help:

• Exercise: Athletes and people who are more active tend to have a lower heart rate.
• Cut the stress: Relaxation exercises (including yoga, meditation and tai chi) can lower the stress that’s affecting your heart.
• Lose weight: The more you weigh, the harder your heart has to work to feed your body with oxygenated blood.
• Stop smoking: Tobacco users tend to have a higher resting heart rate.