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Anxiety Effect on the Heart Rate

When you perceive a threat you react with the "Fight or Flight" response. Your nervous system initiates a complex physiological, biochemical, emotional and behavioral state of arousal that prepares you to attack or run away. Increased heart rate is a physiological component, and fear and anxiety are emotional components of this response.

  1. Brain Response

    • When your ears or eyes detect a stimulus, various areas of the brain instantaneously collate your memories of this situation. If the situation is deemed a potential threat, you feel fear or anxiety, and your brain signals your adrenal and pituitary glands to release "stress" hormones into your blood stream.

    Autonomic Response

    • The stress hormones stimulate the sympathetic branch of your autonomic nervous system, which prepares your body for action by increasing "automatic" functions such as heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, and more. Blood is directed away from your skin (so you will bleed less if cut) to your deeper muscle tissues, where blood and oxygen aid in muscular exertion.

    Duration

    • Once stress hormones are released into the blood stream, it takes 20 to 30 minutes for them to be metabolized.

    Individual Differences

    • Different people have different physiological expressions of anxiety. Some have an increase in heart rate, others have an increase in blood pressure, and others show an increase in galvanic skin response (electrical conductivity of the skin) or respiration.

    Polygraph Test

    • The polygraph, often referred to as a "lie detector", measures these autonomic functions of heart rate, blood pressure, respiration and galvanic skin response to presumably detect a lie. In fact it uses these four measures to detect anxiety.

    Heart Rate Response to IQ Test

    • In one study, the administration of a brief IQ test caused an average increase in heart rate of 10 beats per minute.

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