Can Anxiety Affect Your Heart Rate? Understanding the Link Between Stress & Cardiac Symptoms

Many people notice changes in their heart rate during periods of stress or anxiety. This leads to a common question: can anxiety affect your heart rate? The short answer is yes.

When you feel anxious, your body activates the “fight or flight” response. Stress hormones such as adrenaline are released, causing your heart to beat faster. This can result in palpitations, a racing heart, or a sensation of skipped beats.

For most people, these changes are temporary and harmless. Once anxiety levels reduce, heart rate usually returns to normal. However, the symptoms can feel alarming and may mimic those of heart conditions.

Anxiety can also increase awareness of normal heart sensations, making benign and common changes (single extra beats called ectopics, for example) feel more noticeable. This can create a cycle where worry about the heart increases anxiety, which then further affects heart rate.

That said, it’s important not to assume anxiety is always the cause of symptoms in the chest, and expert help is freqeuntly needed to unpick what is a “benign” and harmless feature of high adrenaline levels, versus a concerning first symptom of heart disease. Central chest discomfort, for example, is a potentially serious symptom and should not be ignored. Palpitations are more nuanced, and frequently occur purely due to anxiety alone. Episodes that are frequent, severe, or new, may indicate that a cardiac assessment is needed to rule out underlying heart rhythm issues.

Understanding the relationship between stress and heart symptoms can be reassuring. With proper evaluation, many patients gain confidence that their heart is healthy and learn strategies to manage anxiety more effectively.