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Stress symptoms are your body helping
Energy for what matters
Most people feel stressed and assume their brain and body are betraying them, so they try to feel less stressed. A racing heart or rising blood pressure is the body trying to give energy: the heart pounds faster, or pumps more blood with every beat, so there is energy to deal with whatever matters.
Sensing the heart
In moments of heightened stress the brain also prioritizes sensory information from the heart. A person can feel their heart more clearly even if it is not beating faster. That works as a pointer toward what they care about and who matters most.
Not hopeless, not trapped
A racing heart also means some part of a person believes they can do something here, so the situation is not hopeless and they are not trapped. One of the best ways to cope in the moment is to think about who or what matters most and what opportunity there is to act on it.
How does a racing heart help in a crisis?
Stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, and the adrenal glands release adrenaline. Heart rate rises and the heart can pump more blood with each beat, sending oxygen and fuel to muscles and the brain. Physiologist Walter Cannon described the pattern as fight or flight in his 1915 book Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage. Researchers since have distinguished a challenge pattern, with more blood pumped and widened blood vessels, from a threat pattern, in which vessels narrow.
Why can people feel their heartbeat more under stress?
The ability to sense one's own internal signals is called interoception, and the insula, a region deep in the cortex, is central to it. In a 2004 study in Nature Neuroscience, Hugo Critchley and colleagues found that activity in the right anterior insula tracked how accurately people could detect their own heartbeat. People differ widely in this accuracy. Heartbeat awareness is typically measured by asking people to count or time their beats without touching their pulse.
Can seeing stress as helpful change performance?
Jeremy Jamieson and colleagues at the University of Rochester and Harvard tested this with students facing a practice test modeled on the Graduate Record Examination. They reported in 2010 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that students told beforehand that stress arousal can improve performance scored higher on the math section than students given no such framing. Those students also showed a more efficient cardiovascular response, with more blood pumped per beat.
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