You’re about to give a presentation. Your palms are sweaty, your stomach churns, and your heart feels like it’s about to explode from your chest. Anxiety doesn’t just hijack your mind; it takes over your body, and nowhere is this more apparent than in your racing heart

Anxiety is the most common of all mental disorders, it is a persistent state of worry or fear about uncertain outcomes, often without a clear cause. It involves physical symptoms like rapid heartbeat and restlessness, as well as mental effects like intrusive thoughts, impacting daily life and well-being.

The increase in anxiety worldwide can be attributed to a mix of societal, technological, environmental, and individual factors, including constant connectivity to social media and digital communication, which lead to overwhelm, fear of missing out (FOMO), and a distorted sense of reality, as well as information overload.

Ways to slow down elevated heart rate caused by anxiety

Since 2020, the rise in anxiety has been notably significant, with percentages jumping to 4.3% in 2020 and 4.4% in 2021, compared to the relatively stable range of 3.7% to 3.8% observed over the previous 30 years.[1]

This might coincide with the COVID-19 pandemic which brought unprecedented challenges, including health concerns, social isolation, economic uncertainty, and a general disruption of daily life.

Anxiety’s impact on heart rate is one of its most concerning physical effects. That rapid, pounding heartbeat you feel during moments of worry is more than discomfort—it’s a sign of how deeply anxiety affects the body. But the good news is there are effective strategies to help you manage both anxiety and its physical symptoms.

Key Takeaways

  • Anxiety can cause a rapid heart rate and heart palpitations by triggering the body’s fight-or-flight response, even in non-threatening situations. This is a natural biological mechanism but can become disruptive in modern life.
  • Nighttime heart palpitations may indicate underlying anxiety or stress. When the mind becomes quieter at night, worries and stressors can surface, triggering symptoms like a racing heart.
  • Managing heart palpitations caused by anxiety involves addressing the root cause. Short-term methods like deep breathing or relaxation can help, but therapies such as hypnotherapy and psychological intervention offer long-term solutions.

Connection Between Anxiety and a Fast Heart Rate

Anxiety increases heart rate by triggering the release of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol.  Here is a breakdown of how hormones work together to prepare your body for immediate action but, when prolonged, can lead to lasting effects on your heart health.

How Hormones Impact Your Heart

Adrenaline’s Role: Adrenaline affects the heart’s function in several significant ways. It shortens the phase where the heart contracts without pumping blood (isometric contraction) and increases the speed at which the heart muscles contract. It also enhances the heart’s efficiency by increasing the amount of blood ejected from the left ventricle during each beat. Additionally, adrenaline amplifies the sounds of the first and second heartbeats, reduces diastolic blood pressure, and increases the range between the highest and lowest pressure in the arteries (pulse pressure).

Cortisol’s Role: Meanwhile, cortisol narrows the arteries, forcing the blood to pump harder and faster as part of the fight-or-flight response. While this mechanism helps the body respond to immediate threats, chronic anxiety or high-stress living can lead to constant cortisol production, keeping the heart in overdrive and potentially straining the cardiovascular system over time.

Why Anxiety Causes Heart Palpitations and How to Find Relief

This ancient biological response is ideal for physical threats, but in modern society, it’s often triggered by psychological stressors like work, finances, or social pressures.

Why Anxiety Triggers Heart Palpitations

The mind perceives these psychological stressors as threats to safety, activating the same fight-or-flight response. Since the body can’t distinguish between physical danger and mental stress, it releases stress hormones to increase blood flow even in non-threatening situations. This is what causes heart palpitations!

Finding Relief: Addressing the Root Cause

Finding relief from heart palpitations caused by anxiety starts with addressing the root causes rather than just managing the symptoms. While medication and relaxation techniques can provide short-term relief, psychological interventions that focus on the mind offer more sustainable results over time. For example, hypnotherapy for anxiety is one such approach that can help individuals uncover and reframe subconscious stressors, retraining the brain to stop perceiving them as threats. Other therapies, such as cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) and psychological intervention, also target the thought patterns and mental triggers driving anxiety.

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How to Slow Down a Racing Heart

Without professional intervention, determining the root cause of your anxiety can be challenging. Each individual experiences anxiety differently, making it a complex issue to resolve. While addressing the underlying cause is key to finding lasting relief, this process isn’t always straightforward or immediately achievable.

In the meantime, there are proven methods to help calm your racing heart and regain control. These strategies provide not only temporary relief but can also serve as part of a broader, long-term approach to managing anxiety effectively, at least until you’re able to seek guidance from a professional.

Recommended Techniques to Reduce Heart Rate

1. Controlled Breathing Exercises
Slowing down your breath can signal your body to relax. Techniques like diaphragmatic breathing involve inhaling deeply through your nose, holding for a few seconds, and exhaling slowly.

Breathe deeply and slowly, it activates the vagus nerve, which is like a messenger that tells your brain, “Everything is fine.” Your brain then switches off the stress response because slow breathing is what your body does when it’s relaxed, not when it’s under threat. So, it’s essentially a feedback loop: calm breathing tells your brain to calm the body.

Additionally, the British Heart Foundation also notes that deep breathing can lower heart rate and blood pressure, helping to keep them from climbing too high during stress. [2]

2. Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR)
Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR) is a simple yet powerful technique where you tense and relax different muscle groups in your body. By focusing on releasing tension, you send a message to your brain that it’s safe to relax.

When you feel stressed or anxious, your muscles naturally tighten. PMR helps reverse this process by:

  • Releasing Muscle Tension: Tensing and relaxing muscles can help reduce physical strain.
  • Activating the Parasympathetic Nervous System: The relaxation signals sent to your brain can help slow your heart rate and reduce blood pressure.
  • Interrupting the Stress Cycle: By focusing on physical relaxation, you can break the connection between mental stress and physical symptoms.

The benefits of PMR are supported by a 2024 systematic review published in Psychology Research and Behaviour Management, which analysed 46 studies involving over 3,400 adults across 16 countries. The review concluded that PMR significantly reduces stress, anxiety, and depression, with even greater efficacy when combined with other interventions such as guided imagery or music therapy. [3]

3. Cooling Down the Body
Cooling the body helps slow down a racing heart by engaging physiological mechanisms associated with the parasympathetic nervous system. Techniques such as splashing cold water on your face or applying a cold compress to pulse points activate the mammalian dive reflex, a natural response that slows heart rate and reduces blood pressure. This reflex is an evolutionary adaptation that conserves oxygen and redirects blood flow to vital organs, counteracting the “fight or flight” response triggered by anxiety. [4]

By calming the body in this way, these cooling techniques signal safety to your nervous system, helping to reduce the physical symptoms of anxiety, including a rapid heartbeat.

How Hypnotherapy Can Help Calm a Racing Heart

Each of these techniques plays a valuable role in calming your racing heart, offering immediate relief from the physical symptoms of anxiety. However, while they are effective in managing symptoms, they don’t necessarily address the deeper triggers rooted in your subconscious mind—the real drivers of your anxiety. For those seeking lasting results, hypnotherapy stands out as a solution, going beyond surface-level management to resolve the underlying causes of anxiety.

Here’s how a hypnotherapist would specifically help, supported by the science behind each step:

  • Guided Relaxation to Calm the Body: Hypnotherapy activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which counteracts the fight-or-flight response by lowering cortisol levels, heart rate, and blood pressure. This shift is supported by slower brainwave activity (alpha & theta waves), promoting deep relaxation and calming the body. [5]
  • Exploring Triggers Through Hypnotic Inquiry: In hypnosis, increased theta wave activity allows access to the subconscious, where anxiety triggers—like unresolved fears or automatic stress responses—are stored. This state bypasses the conscious mind, making it possible to identify and address the root causes of anxiety.[6]
  • Reframing Stress Responses: Hypnotherapy uses neuroplasticity to replace negative thought patterns with positive associations. Guided visualisations and suggestions help retrain the brain to respond to stress calmly, creating new, healthier neural pathways [7]

Nighttime Heart Palpitations

Nighttime is often when the mind becomes quieter, allowing worries and stressors to surface more easily. This phenomenon, known as the “rumination spiral,” occurs because the brain associates bedtime with problem-solving, negative emotions, and overthinking, a pattern called conditioned arousal. Stressful life events can disrupt sleep, and when this cycle repeats, the brain begins to treat the bed and bedtime as a trigger for worry and anxiety instead of relaxation. This heightened mental activity can amplify anxiety symptoms, such as heart palpitations, especially in the stillness of night.

As a result, if you frequently experience heart palpitations at night while caught up in worrying thoughts, it could be an indicator of anxiety. This pattern of nighttime rumination, combined with physical symptoms like palpitations, often signals the presence of underlying stress or anxiety and can serve as a cue to address your mental health.

How to Stop Heart Palpitations Due to Anxiety at Night?

  • Avoid Devices Before Bedtime: Devices are a major culprit due to blue light, which signals the brain to stay awake, and stimulating activities like social media or work emails. Avoid screens for at least an hour before bed to improve your chances of falling asleep.
  • Establish a Relaxing Bedtime Routine: Engage in quiet, soothing activities that help the brain wind down, such as reading, meditating, sewing, or praying. These activities signal to the brain that it’s time to relax and prepare for sleep.
  • Recondition the Brain to Associate Bed with Sleep: Avoid using the bed for worry, problem-solving, or other wakeful activities. If you find yourself ruminating in bed, get up and engage in a calming activity until you feel sleepy again to break the association between the bed and stress.
  • Limit Stressful Thoughts Before Sleep: Address stressors earlier in the day or use journaling to offload concerns before bed, preventing the mind from spiraling into overthinking while in bed.

Is Your Average Heart Rate Too High When Stressed?

For context, the average heart rate for humans varies depending on factors like age and gender. A study of over 3,500 American men and women found average resting heart rates of 71 bpm for men and 73 bpm for women. [8]

Did you know? Stress and anxiety can have overlapping effects on the body, but they are not identical. Both trigger the body’s “fight-or-flight” response, leading to physiological changes, but the underlying causes, duration, and impacts can differ. Stress is typically a response to external demands or pressures while anxiety often arises from internal perceptions of danger or worry, even without an immediate external threat.

Learn more about effective stress management techniques: Stress Management

If your heart rate suddenly rises to 100 bpm or higher without physical activity, it could be a sign of anxiety or stress. However, it’s important not to focus solely on the heart rate reading to determine if you’re experiencing anxiety or stress. Pay attention to other symptoms, such as dizziness, shortness of breath, and irregular heartbeat, which can provide a clearer picture of your condition.

Take the First Step Toward Lasting Relief

Your heart deserves peace, and so do you. Whether it's a racing heartbeat, restless nights, or the weight of anxiety holding you back, now is the time to take control

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Sources

  1. Statista. Percentage of people with anxiety worldwide. Retrieved January 8, 2025, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1035153/percentage-of-people-with-anxiety-worldwide/
  2. British Heart Foundation. (n.d.). 3 breathing exercises to relieve stress. Retrieved January 8, 2025, from https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/wellbeing/breathing-exercise
  3. Psychology Research and Behaviour Management. Khir, M. S., Yunus, W. M. A. W., Mahmud, N., Wang, R., Panatik, S. A., Sukor, M. S. M., & Nordin, N. A. (2024). Efficacy of progressive muscle relaxation in adults for stress, anxiety, and depression: A systematic review. Retrieved January 8, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.2147/prbm.s437277

  4. Physiology. Panneton, W. M. (2013). The mammalian diving response: An enigmatic reflex to preserve life? Retrieved January 8, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.1152/physiol.00020.2013
  5. Psychology Today. The Neuroscience of Hypnosis. Retrieved January 8, 2025, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/understanding-hypnosis/202401/the-neuroscience-of-hypnosis
  6. Boulder Hypnotherapy Institute. The Neuroscience of Altered States: How Different States of Consciousness Affect the Brain, Body, and Mind in Hypnotherapy. Retrieved January 8, 2025, from https://www.boulderhypnotherapyinstitute.com/the-neuroscience-of-altered-states-how-different-states-of-consciousness-affect-the-brain-body-and-mind-in-hypnotherapy/
  7. Institute of Hypnotherapy. Hypnotherapy and Neuroplasticity: Rewiring the Brain for Positive Change. Retrieved January 8, 2025, from https://www.instituteofhypnotherapy.com/hypnotherapy-and-neuroplasticity-rewiring-the-brain-for-positive-change/
  8. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Heart rate. In Wikipedia. Retrieved January 8, 2025, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_rate
  9. World Health Organization. (2022, March 2). COVID-19 pandemic triggers 25% increase in prevalence of anxiety and depression worldwide. Retrieved January 8, 2025, from https://www.who.int/news/item/02-03-2022-covid-19-pandemic-triggers-25-increase-in-prevalence-of-anxiety-and-depression-worldwide
  10. Acta Physiologica Scandinavica. Kjellberg, S. R., Rudhe, U., & Sjöstrand, T. (1952). The effect of adrenaline on the contraction of the human heart under normal circulatory conditions. Retrieved January 8, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-1716.1952.tb00849.x.