How does your blood pressure increase when you’re angry or stressed out

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I know the blood pressure is the pressure inside your arteries. If your heart pumps the exact same amount of blood with each beat, then the only way for your blood pressure to increase would be to have smaller arteries. I get that this can happen over time due to diet, disease, etc.

So, how can it increase for a couple of minutes and then come back down?

If your heart beats faster and the pressure doesn’t have enough time to come down between beats, I could see that. But then that means you’re raising your blood pressure when doing aerobic exercises, which doesn’t seem correct.

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2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because your blood vessels themselves can expand and contract.

When you are stressed or angry or in a high emotional state, some of the hormones that enter your blood stream cause your blood vessels to contract and narrow up, so you have the same amount of blood getting “squeezed” by the blood vessels. Increasing blood pressure.

And example for when the opposite happens in inflammation. When you get a bump or an injury or an infection that gets swollen, that’s because the vessels in that area have expanded, allowing extra blood, nutrients, and immune system cells to flow into that area and heal the injury

Anonymous 0 Comments

Arterial blood pressure is proportional to cardiac output and total peripheral vascular resistance. Cardiac output is heart rate (beats per minute) times stroke volume. Stroke volume is equal to ventricular end diastolic volume times ejection fraction

Anything that can increase one of these factors, increases blood pressure.

When you’re angry, stressed out, afraid, …. there is an increased amount of adrenaline coursing through your blood vessels. This adrenaline can make the heart beat more forcefully (increasing ejection fraction), and faster (heart rate). The above effects are also induced by nerve signaling from your thoracal spinal cord to your heart, which is mediated by the neurotransmitter noradrenaline.

Adrenaline also net increases peripheral vascular resistance, by restricting blood flow for example to skin, gastrointestinal system.

All the above increases blood pressure.