Put Away the Blood Pressure Cuff!

And maybe turn off the news too...

Right now, in homes across America, someone is attaching their home blood pressure cuff, inflating it and writing down a number that they believe is just a little higher than they think it should be.

A few minutes later, worried about their safety, they will check it again. It will, of course, have risen just a bit. Or a lot. This will cause that person to feel even more anxious and they will check it once, twice or thrice more. And as you guessed, it will probably rise.

Over the course of an hour or several hours they will likely develop a sense of chest pressure, shortness of breath or headache. They will become frightened. They may call a medical family member or a medical advice line. They may go to a local walk-in clinic. There, that blood pressure will be even higher and they will be advised (by someone not that familiar with the issue) that if they don’t go to the ER, they will probably have a stroke. They will learn, to their horror, that they have a ‘stroke blood pressure.’ (FYI, it’s not a thing.)

They may call 911, and arrive to the hospital tearful and fully convinced that the end is nigh.

Others will do the same with their heart rate. Or, as we have seen since COVID, with a pulse-oximeter which they use to follow their oxygen saturation and heart rate.

Photo by Mockup Graphics on Unsplash

Others will track their heart rhythm with their Fitbit or some other device which will warn them that they should be very concerned about their condition.

And much of this will occur even when they started out feeling quite fine, but just wanted to check their numbers ‘to be on the safe side.’ Ultimately too many will end up with sleepless nights, or with ambulance and ER bills. And overwhelmingly they will do well.

We see similar behaviors when children have fever and are brought to the hospital by worried parents, despite the fact that they are climbing the rails of the hospital bed like tiny, febrile lemurs, and eating and drinking everything in sight.

This obsession with data, this need to check, track and fret over our numbers, has become a national obsession. Sadly, it is an obsession that makes us (both healthcare workers and patients) more anxious and unhappy with every passing year.

I am of the opinion (and I am not alone) that one of the worst things to happen to human happiness was the ability to do home blood pressures around the clock. I have seen patients bring notebooks full of their data, hour to hour, with days of entries. (If it’s a spread-sheet you can be sure that they are, or were, engineers.)

I don’t say this because blood pressure doesn’t matter. I say this because blood pressure changes generally occur gradually and need to be treated gradually, unless someone is having symptoms that would have brought them to the hospital whether or not they ever checked their systolic and diastolic pressure on a (likely inaccurate) home device.

In terms of the happiness of our population, I believe that the home blood pressure monitor is immediately behind the 24 hour news cycle and the smart-phone in terms of producing emotional distress and general unhappiness. All give their users nonstop access to reasons for worry when worry isn’t indicated and won’t help.

I suppose that it’s not surprising. It may be that those blood pressure cuffs and smart watches are symptoms of a greater problem. We are a ‘monitoring’ people. We are a hyper-vigilant, hyper-stimulated people, endlessly consuming caffeine and nicotine. We are a text reading, email checking, news cycle obsessed species now.

All day and all night, information pours in and we try to assimilate. This as the producers of that information (whether news organizations, search engines or websites) do the deeply disturbing work of making us believe that we should watch the news constantly. (And buy medical products.) ‘Just to be on the safe side.’

BREAKING NEWS has become a bit of a joke. Much like the alarm fatigue of hospitals, in which we learn to ignore beeps and flashes because almost everything beeps and flashes. BREAKING NEWS no longer means much of anything, except that it’s time for the hourly news cycle to repeat itself. Yawn.

But this emphasis on the immediacy of the news seems particularly cruel in the way it impacts our seniors, who are often powerless to impact what is happening in the world, but are still as susceptible to anxiety (likely more so) than when they were younger.

So, add a 24-hour blood pressure cycle to a 24-hour news cycle and it’s off to the Anxiety Olympics for all too many of our citizens.

We’ve lost the peace that came with simply existing, with simply not knowing. Yes, there are dangers. However, there was a time, well most of the time humans have existed, that we didn’t know our blood pressures or our heart rates, or every detail of every campaign for president or tribal chief or every new reason to be afraid in the night. We simply knew that we felt alright or we felt poorly. And danger wasn’t anything new.

In those halcyon days, we knew that our lives, to the extent we could control them, were good lives, even in their imperfection. And later, much later, when we read a news story in that archaic device, the newspaper, we usually knew that it was a thing that might touch our lives, but probably wouldn’t. And if it did, it would probably not be in the near future. None of it had the screaming intensity of modern reportage.

Like those blood pressures, the news we consume can be reassuring or misery provoking. And like those machines, those infernal machines, we can go back and check the news (or our symptoms on our phones, or whatever), and do it hour by hour, minute by minute.

But both generally make us feel worse, ramping up unneeded fears and symptoms.

Here’s my suggestion, doctor’s orders. Put away the blood pressure cuff and the smart watch, put down the smart phone, log-off of the news. I know, it’s an addiction. No need to go cold turkey.

But just exist, un-monitored and uninformed, for a couple of hours every day.

I suspect your blood pressure will thank you. And the world will march on with all its insanity and drama without your eyes or ears to witness it.