First time poster.

I have had pcs for 1.5 years now. It's been a roller coaster at times, with a continual, gradual, albeit very slow, improvement. I'm still seeing gradual improvement and hope to someday be fully recovered, although if I'm honest, I don't believe I ever will.

In any case, I want to put this observation out there and see if any others have noticed a similar connection between their resting heart rate and their rate of recovery. I have had a Fitbit for a year now, and my resting heart rate has steadily risen over the last 12 months as my health has improved. In addition, as my teaching work load/efforts piled up through a 5 day week, I'd notice my RHR decrease along with an increase in my symptoms. A weekend of rest would see the RHR uptick slightly. Catching a flu/cold virus would see a steady 10 day decline as I wore down. I also have bumped my head causing setbacks with accompanying symptom spikes lasting 1-3 weeks, and along with that my RHR nosedived during the period as symptoms resolved.

It seems clear to me that there's a connection, and am wondering if others can corroborate, or provide additional insight.

Canuck,

Welcome to NeuroTalk.

I have never seen anything that uses RHR as an indicator or recovery. Your changes appear to be opposite of what would be expected. You don'tsay what the changes are so they could be just normal fluctuations. According to Mayo, Keep in mind that the RHR number can be influenced by many factors, including stress and anxiety, circulating hormones, and medications such as antidepressants and blood pressure drugs.

Your head bump and setback could be a result of anxiety/stress hormones increasing and once they returned to normal, a drop in RHR would expected.

I think you should be careful about following your RHR. Paying too much attention can feed an OCD-anxiety issue. The more valuable heart rate is the one that accompanies an increase in symptoms. Checking your max heart rate after a physical effort to note how much your system will tolerate without an increase in symptoms is worthwhile. That is part of the Buffalo Protocol of recovery.