Adventures with low blood pressure
(Nimue)
For some years I suffered badly with low blood pressure. This made it difficult to do anything very physical and gave me a lot of days when my options were sorely limited. There are various things that can cause low blood pressure – including anemia. It can kill people. There’s startling little information out there about what might cause it or how to deal with it.
I did some serious reading around during the period when I had to lie on the sofa a lot. It looks like the hormone responsible for maintaining healthy blood pressure in the body is noradrenaline and that we make it when we are happy. I found some science papers, I’m afraid I don’t have the links, and this all seems to be tentative, but if it’s right then the implications are huge.
In terms of my own body it turns out that sleep makes a huge difference. If I get enough good quality sleep then I tend to be ok – not always great but wholly functional. One or two bad nights are enough to cause me significant problems. Mostly I’ve been sleeping very well of late, but there were some rough nights when Keith was recovering from operations and the impact was obvious.
Sleep is really important for wellbeing – this is hardly news. There are all kinds of things our bodies do to regulate themselves that depend on sleep and don’t work as well without it. Exhaustion will make any problem far worse than it would otherwise have been, and sleep certainly has a big impact on mental health. Of course these things are all connected, they all happen to our bodies as a whole and you can’t separate mental and physical health.
Having better blood pressure means I can walk more, socialise more, do more. All of that has impacted in a good way on body and mind alike. That in turn contributes to my being less stressed which makes it easier for me to sleep. Stress has definitely been the reasonI struggled with sleep in the past.
A lot of what goes on in the human body is circular. We tend to think of cause and effect as a more linear process, but often it’s more of a spiral. Once something goes wrong, it can knock other things out creating a spiral into every greater difficulty. Equally, if you can push the other way, you can get a virtue cycle where improvements build on each other. That’s been how the last nine months or so have been for me.
Some problems do not have answers. Sometimes the margins of success are small but I think even the small wins are well worth having. After years of experiencing serious limitations it feels miraculous to get anything back, and I’m taking great delight in being able to be more myself. I’m fortunate in this regard and it is a source of daily gratitude for me.
