I posted a question here earlier in the year as am trying to find the reasons why I awake after about 5 hours sleep every morning feeling unwell.
I have had some blood tests etc since but have not really made any progress with this particular problem. I do know that I have some kind of problem with my heart from some abnormalities shown in an ecg before a hernia op in 2019 which they believed dated back to a time when my blood pressure wasn't controlled well. The op was able to go ahead though following an angiogram.
I have been on bisoprolol ever since and discovered I have a low heart rate when using my own bp machine and pulse oximeter and I am very curious to know whether perhaps this might go even lower during the night and, if so, whether perhaps it could cause me to feel so unwell around 5am every morning. Can anyone recommend a way of monitoring my heart, please? Thank you.
P. S. In case it is relevant, I do not have an iPhone, but I do have an Android.
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Channeal
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I personally have an Apple Watch which records my heart rate consistently throughout the day. As you don’t have an iPhone, a Fitbit is compatible with most android phones. Fitbit is also a lot cheaper than an Apple Watch too.
What kind of fit bit do you recommend as I would like to know what my heart rate drops down to at night cause I have upper back pain when I first lay flat which ridiculously hurts and I keep waking up. Maybe hot weather ain't helping x
I don’t know too much about Fitbit. The Fitbit 3 however, seems to be popular. Within this collection, there is a different range of Fitbit 3 watches you can choose from. You can pick one which you think is most suitable for your needs. The prices also vary a bit depending on your choice of Watch.
I have upper back pain as a result of my angina when I lie down as well, however I know that this is the cause of it. Maybe speak to your doctor at your next appointment? X
There’s the Fitbit Versa 3 and the Fitbit Inspire 3 which are both geared towards health & fitness. It will all come up on a quick Google search. Unlike the Apple Watch, Fitbit’s are also available on offer too so you might be able to get it cheaper than the original price x
I have the inspire 2 from fitbit, about £50 in John Lewis and Argos. It was this that first alerted me to the fact I had af and told me to get to a doctor pronto. It gives you your resting heart rate, your rate as you move around and also constantly moniters you while asleep with a report in the morning. Best £50 I ever spent. It also gives you steps , how well you sleep, are restless, and how much you are awake during the night
I certainly wouldn't recommend fitbit charge 3 .I would bin Mine except my other fitwatch won't sync well with my slimming app.Ridiculous readings on all workouts.
Sorry not very clear.the Fitbit does not accurately track heart rate.When I use exercise settings for outdoor walks ,excercise at health centre & bowls it tells me my HR is 140 or 160 when other means say 80 to 110 and manually I know no way it is that high.My Huawei is the one that won't sink with the slimming app
oh that would cause me so much stress and unwanted anxiety. My resting heart rate is bout 90-100 or when I just wake up 60-80 something so I need something thats gona track my heart rate accurately and not cause me to panic 24/7 that's why I got rid of my other one. I would like to have one to sync to my phone a huwawie. And something that tracks my steps and good for tracking my exercise. x
I use a Huawei watch fit 2.It should be easy to sink with your phone.The only probs with it is it maybe a little low at the lower end of the scale particularly during night but I know this . occasionally shows a drop to 48 but doesn't stay there.And other than wearing a 24 HR monitor or polar I have no way of knowing.I know it is low at night anyway.
I have only once or twice used my kardia equivalent when I have been unable to sleep for hours and was worried my AFib had started.And then we are talking 58.
Thanks that's helpful. Any good deals on the huwawie watch? x I do have ventricular Tachycardia and I'm on calcium channel blockers for that I just want a watch that can do an accurate reading well relatively normal reading. Thanks again x
I use watch fit 2 .on offer at Argos & Currys at 109.99.it gives you lots of info on your excercise.Continous HR monitor.SPO2.I used it in AFib but can't comment on VT.Texts ,what's app & even phone calls.I have even phoned my hubby from my phone to his to tell him TV was too loud & I am trying to sleep.
Hope you are well, I am sorry to hear about your recent feelings of being unwell in the night. Regarding your post, you can purchase a wearable heart monitor, or for Android a FitBit, do some reasearch and find one best suited to your needs, and make sure to get one thats got a good accuracy rating.
There is always a disclaimer with any smart watch / wearable though in that; Heart rate monitors are devices that can detect and track your heart or pulse rate continuously. Most of these devices are wearable, and many are highly accurate. While these devices can be valuable tools in monitoring your health, they aren't as accurate as approved medical devices, and you shouldn’t use them in place of medical care.
It is important to note that on average healthy peoples heart rate is lower whilst at rest, and can go lower still whilst sleeping, how low can depend on fitness, and some people naturally just have a low heart rate, it isn't usaully something to be concerned about, however I would advise discussing this with your GP, especially as you feel unwell, try to keep a note of symptoms and wether or not this happened before or after beta blocker use.
I have a similar experience recently around beta blockers (in my case Propanolol) and low heart rate. I was given them for there off label use of anxiety and after using them for a couple weeks, I would get low heart rate warnings via my apple watch when resting, or whilst sleeping. However I got a mixed reaction from my GP whose response "Take the watch off, they are a nightmare".
Overall, there is options for you for a device to wear whilst sleeping, but I would be cautious around accuracy and also the possibilty of causing yourself any anxiety with low heart rate warnings. It's not uncommon for low heart rate to be a side effect of beta blocker usage, but I would always recommend reaching out to your GP with any concerns, just to be on the safe side, they could always arrange for a ambulatory ECG, which you can wear for 24 hours to a Week dependnt of what's needed. The advantage to these is, its continually monitoring, and also it won't notify you or ping, which can be helpful in that, you won't constantly be getting moment to moment info on your heart rate, which can lead to obsessive checking and anxiety around it.
I hope you get to the bottom of whatever is causing you to feel unwell, and especially as it's disrupting your sleep, it can become a vicious circle. I'd also recommend perhaps the BHF Heart Helpline, which i'll link below, you can contact via phone or email, that way a qualified cardiac nurse can give you some advice on how best to proceed.
Good Luck, and Best Wishes with your future health.
Hi so sorry to hear about how you been feeling 💔😥, And it's even worse when it's affecting your sleep. I have an oximeter which helps maybe get one and see how you get on. I find as soon I wake up my blood oxygen level is 96-97 and resting heart rate is bout 60 - 80 something. Do you know what yours is first thing in the morning, maybe speak to your doctor again x
I use a Fitbit Charge 5, noting the caveats on accuracy, I find it very helpful.
Not only does it track heart rate (including at night because it has a 7 day battery life), but heart rate variability, and sleep patterns.
I use it to help with sleep hygiene and it has really helped me be disciplined around consistency of sleep & wake times.
If you're waking in the night you may be able compare your heart rate to your sleep record (it tells you when you're awake versus deep & REM sleep) and if there's a pattern maybe something to look into.
I use a Viatom O2 ring to measure both my heart rate and oxygen levels overnight. I was waking in the morning feeling like I hadn’t slept all night. I was also getting episodes of atrial fibrillation starting at night so wanted to see what was going on. The ring continuously measures h/rate and O2 all night and downloads the data to a phone app via Bluetooth in the morning. Using it, I discovered I have sleep apnoea, confirmed with an NHS study, so I am now on CPAP therapy.
I hope you find a solution to your problem. All the best TC
Hi sorry your feeling unwell may I ask how old you are to monitor your heart rate your bloodpressure your oxygen buy a fitbit watch download the app to your android it also let's you see how many steps you do in one day it also most importantly so your not worrying measures your sleep routine and your sleep pattern you will see what time you fall asleep also the quality off sleep your receiving mines actually rings I can read my messages from it and answer calls it was only about 15 pounds on amazon I preferred the round faced one but there are others if I can help further please let me know also how you feeling now have you spoken to gp and depending on age we do start to sleep less I am currently in hospital with cardiac flair ups and I've as yet not slept at all I am going to try now all the best xx
I have just checked Which and the best android watch is a Samsung Galaxy watch 4. This costs approx £215. It gets better results than any other watch, including an Apple. I personally have an Honor Watch Pro, quite cheap, also a which best buy and extremely accurate.
Good morning Channeal. I would think your best bet is to ask your surgery for a heart monitor to monitor your blood pressure overnight and see if this can identify a problem while you are asleep. Hope you get some answers and feel better soon. Take care and enjoy your day. Brian
As others have said a Fitbit watch worn at night recorded your heart rate minute by minute. I have a 5 which is cheaper and works just as well. Amazon can be cheaper than Argos
Like many others I wear a Fitbit charge 4, this provides lots of data, I accept they are not always 100%accurate but they give you the trends over 30 days, which I find really helpful.
Alcohol, meds and hydration all affect blood pressure both day and night.
Have a look at the Polar range of watches and chest straps. It’s normal for your heart rate to drop considerably during deep sleep, but it shouldn’t make you wake up feeling ill. Speak to your GP about it.
Hi. I personally use a Garmin Forerunner 55. I'm not a runner, due to my heart condition, but I did find it useful recently when my resting heart rate went up by over 30 BBM overnight which led me to go to A&E to get checked out and ended up in hospital for 4 days while they stabilised things (I ended up on bisoprolol). While in hospital I was able to compare the HR on the Garmin to the monitor in the hospital and it compared pretty closely. It's relatively inexpensive compared to other smart watches and I use it to record walks and monitor my HR while I'm out and about as well so it's turned into a really good buy for my circumstances. Hope this helps
I use a smart watch to monitor my sleep and heart rate etc and I fully recommend them. It’s helped me understand what’s going on with my heart.
Being on Bisoprolol can lower my heart rate to 42 bpm at night. Even during the day it’s regularly below 50 bpm. I don’t wake up because of my low HR, if anything it makes me slightly sleepier.
Nothing to worry about, but you should mention it to your GP next time you see them
I’ve heard that if you eat quite late at night that can be a reason for getting woken up in the night (something to do with digestion and energy release) Could be worth investigating that too, maybe keep a diary and look for patterns. And of course speak to a health care professional who can give you some better advice than this
I have had both Fitbit and now an Apple watch. Although medics sometimes say theses are not accurate the readings have always corresponded well with heat rate measured by hospital blood pressure machines (which I've also been told are not particularly accurate as they can miss weak pulses). I am on Ivabradine and was aware from my watch that my heart rate would drop below 40 at night. On my last trip to hospital this kept triggering the alarm on the pulse monitor and probably kept the whole ward awake! After several days of monitoring the Cardiologist eventually agreed that my pulse was a bit low and halved the Ivabradine dose !
I think Fitbit is better than Apple watch for this as the Fitbit app will give you chart of heart rate over the day rather than just the range of heart rates
Channeal, before you lay out a lot of money for a watch or Fitbit you need to establish with your GP why you were prescribed so many medicines and whether you could stop taking some of them, because your problems are quite likely to be related to the side effects of your daily cocktail.
Your resting heart rate of 40 bpm is much lower than most healthy people other than super-fit athletes. It will naturally reduce while you are asleep because your body isn't using much energy. However, the four blood pressure and heart rate medications that you are taking will almost certainly be responsible for the low heart rate.
You are also taking medication for hypothyroidism and this should be monitored with regular thyroid blood tests, because over or under medication can cause all sorts of symptoms.
The PPI (Omeprazole) was probably prescribed to help protect your stomach from ulcers when you were first prescribed aspirin, However, long term use of a PPI (more than a year) can be problematic, especially in the elderly, so you need to ask if you still need to take the aspirin and PPI.
Your GP has a duty to regularly review your medication and you should insist on an appointment to do this and get a justification for every medicine that you have been prescribed. You also need to ask exactly what heart issue was detected on the ECG that you had in 2019.
Thank you so much for your comprehensive reply to my post.
I agree that my meds do need reviewing. I saw a different doctor a couple of months ago and I did briefly refer to the bisoprolol with her. She did not comment on the number of drugs I am on though. I will ask her when I see her again on the 6th September.
The thyroid drug was only given for my (at that time) borderline thyroid problems because the doctor I saw back then thought it might account for me feeling do unwell in the mornings.
The omeprazole was started when my hernia problems were causing me to vomit regularly and were generally messing up my stomach. They were not given because of the aspirin - which was started along with the bisoprolol just before the hernia was operated on.
One thing I did get from this new doctor when I saw her was a printout of the letter sent to my GP by the doctor who performed my angiogram, immediately before my hernia op. I have copied the letter below.
Thanks again for all your help.
#########
1st February 2019
This 67 year old lady had been awaiting elective hernia repair but has been declined by the anaesthetist for a second time due to an abnormal ECG with signigicent T wave inversion. She has a background of hypertension and hypercholesterolaemia and I note a previous echocardiogram in December 2018 showing preserved LV function. Due to her being declined again for surgery, we proceeded to perform coronary angiography today as an assessment of peri operative risk.
Findings were as follows:
Left main stem - this was normal.
Left anterior descending artery - there was minor plaque but it was unobstructed.
Left circumflex artery - there was a minor plaque but this was also unobstructed.
Left circumflex artery - this was dominant and normal artery.
Left ventricular cineangiogram - this showed preserved LV systolic function with evidence of left ventricular hypertrophy
This lady has only minor plaque disease and essentially unobstructed coronary arteries. She also has preserved LV function on cineangiogram today.
It is likely that the abnormal ECG is due to underlying hypertension with left ventricular hypertrophy.
She should remain on medical therapy for her minor coronary artery disease. I therefore do recommend that she continues on Aspirin and a statin in the long term. Blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes checks should be done regularly by the GP.......
(He then recommend that the operation could go ahead).
We do not need to see her again at this time from a cardiology perspective and I am discharging her back to your care.
I currently sleep 4 or 5 hours, then wake. I go to the loo and when I get back to bed, I feel really unwell. I just need to wait for a while with my head and shoulders raised slightly. Usually it is one to two hours before I feel sufficiently well to try to get back to sleep. Quite often I do not get back to sleep, other times I get up to two hours extra sleep. If I am especially tired after a few days with little sleep,
I occasionally do manage to get back to sleep pretty quickly, but that usually results in me waking up again pretty quickly, still feeling unwell. To sum up..... in order to ensure this won't happen, I need to have been fully awake for some time - but by then, it is difficult to make myself feel sleepy again! 😊
Just wanted to thank you all so much for your replies. It is a bit confusing reading about all these different watches etc. I am not going to do anything at all until after I have seen my doctor (I have a visit scheduled for the 6th September), but if I do end up going down this route I am leaning towards the ring ones rather than a watch as I have had a disability from birth which affects my left hand and means that fixing a watch onto my right arm and operating it would be difficult.
I will reply to a couple of you directly, but just wanted to first thank everyone for taking the time and trouble to respond to my post. It is much appreciated.
This is pretty esoteric, but deserves consideration. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, each organ system in the body has a corresponding clock time for regeneration/refresh of that organ every 24 hours. The organ that corresponds to the clock time of 5 - 7 a.m. is the large intestine, so maybe your body is trying to tell you something in a subtle way. I don't know this system well, just that it exists. You'd need to follow up with someone who does acupuncture or Chinese medicine.
I was havingvthe same experience as you. I eventually bought a portable ECG, which helped me to find out at hospital with angiogram that i have a lerge upper left heart chambe. I was also quite intolerant to meds. Short story is i now have a pacemaker which was on the way to have an AV node ablation. After the pacemaker was fitted it was found i didnt need that ablation. I feel so well now its unreal.
Thanks for your message, I am glad the portable ECG solved your problems.
You must have missed the fact that I have already had an ECG which threw up some anomalies. Yesterday I posted the results of my subsequent angiogram in my reply to engineer46. Apparently they only found some relatively minor problems.
At the moment I am just waiting to see my GP again on the 6th September. (I have some other health problems too, so it is sometimes difficult to know which problems should be dealt with first! 😊)
I will post on here again if I get any further in solving this mystery!
Thanks for the clarification Channeal. I do feel you need much more sleep as 5hrs is really not much and not good for your heart or any part of you. If I get less than 9hrs I feel pretty rough but I do have a lot of health conditions and am pretty poorly.
I was on beta blockers in the past prior to my Ablation for my Atrial Fibrillation and I found it made me have Bradycardia.. so they took the dose down. I felt dreadful! This was 8yrs ago now. Do they monitor your meds ie are you seen by Cardiology every year? Can you discuss with your GP if not and ask for a review?
With regard to monitoring your heart, I have just the other week invested in an Apple Watch 8 and a new Apple 13 (cash influx for a sad reason allowed me to do this, as previously had an Apple 7 which was on it's last legs!) and it really has opened my eyes to my sleep patterns and heart health, my activity and all sorts of things.. It's wonderful. It also monitors your bpm through the night.. Mine is often 45bpm apparently...which is quite low I think. I am sure everyone has told you of things to get for other types of phones - but Which ? Mag is very fond of Apple iPhones and watches... and I can see why. There are certainly second hand ones available and it might be worth the investment for you?
Ah yes, can see a lot of people are saying the same as I re your meds.. I do hope you can get things sorted out asap... ask for an urgent meds review with a GP who knows you and/or ask for a cardiology review. And maybe ask about trialling some meds to help you sleep... although if you drink coffee, do try and stop as this ruins sleep.. end of. I can't go near the stuff, sadly. Also I drink night time tea bags, take melatonin, magnesium and calcium near bed time which is essential.. and stay off these things ie computers and phones or at least make the light go right down to the darkest setting if I need to read something. Keeping hydrated all day will also help and get some kind of exercise.. plus a good diet with lots of green veg etc and try not to eat chocolate as has caffeine in.. I am very sure you know all of that.. There are tons of health articles on the web on how to get better sleep, and I always like to try something new.. I do have to take Nytol 25mg of antihistamine thing, but for you I would say definitely do nothing like that until you've had your meds review - asap.
Hoping this helps, and everyone seems to have been very helpful too, as always. I love this site.
Do let us know how you get on in if you feel like it - great for everyone else too.
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