How to Have a Better Relationship with Your Body (POTS Edition)

• Increase salt intake through food and/or electrolyte drinks/tabs 
  • Have a saltshaker by you during mealtimes to use as needed. 
  • Intake electrolytes for an extra boost of potassium, magnesium, and calcium.

• Increase water intake 
• • Find what type of water container works best for you! Personally, I love having big containers with straws as I find it much easier and faster to consume the water. 
  • Meals, especially carb-heavy ones, can be a trigger for POTS as the blood rushes to the stomach area to help with digestion, causing blood pooling issues in extremities such as feet. Increasing water intake before a meal can help to increase blood volume, decreasing symptoms.

• Wear compression clothing  
• • Compression socks are becoming more popular so there is a wide variety of options available. 
  • Compression bodysuits are also an effective way to help with POTS symptoms.
• Avoid long periods of standing
• Rise slowly after lying down
• Start slowly with exercise, but check with healthcare provider first (not recommended for those who have or may have ME/CFS) 
  • Exercise with POTS is a bit complicated but doing slow controlled movements in bed while lying down can be very beneficial!
• Talk with your doctor about beta blockers 
  • Your healthcare provider can help establish if beta blockers are the right path for your POTS symptom management. 

Another way in which we can help heal our relationship with our bodies is by better understanding our symptoms. Now that we’ve already covered the basic symptom management tools, let’s talk about how we can optimize those tools! Having access to the proper information regarding your body helps to track and manage POTS symptoms.

A great way to keep track of your symptoms is through the Cardiogram app. The Cardiogram app connects easily with Apple Watch, Fitbit, Garmin, and Wear OS by Google so you can avoid inputting the information manually. There is also a section where you can write notes about anything that these devices don’t pick up, bridging the information gap. All of the information is stored in one place so it’s easy to see patterns and the bigger picture of your health. This makes it easier to identify which problems should take priority. The Cardiogram app also displays information in a condensed way, making it easier to show to healthcare providers in a quick and efficient manner.  

By keeping track of your POTS symptoms and learning how to manage them with your daily management tools, such as electrolytes and compression clothing, it’ll become easier to trust your body. It’ll also become easier to understand what your body needs and figure out which triggers affect which symptoms. Information about our bodies is a major part in building our relationship with our bodies rather than feeling like we’re fighting against it. 

While living with a chronic illness like POTS affects our relationships with our bodies, it’s possible to grow into a relationship where it teaches us to show love to our body and ourselves in a different way. Self-care is often portrayed as face masks and baths, but it can also mean electrolytes and rising slowly out of bed. At its core, self-care is about being good to yourself and your body. With POTS, we have even more chances to practice self-care and self-love because that’s what our bodies need from us to get a chance to thrive.

There is a lot of power in logging symptoms and experiences and learning from them to know what to expect when making choices which may not be the best for your POTS. The goal is to live our best lives with POTS and learn to understand our bodies in order to better work with them, so that we can make the right decisions for us to live the happy lives we deserve!