Slowing your heart rate isn’t always helping your POTS.

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]If you have POTS, beta-blockers might actually be making it worse. The elevated heart rate is not the disease.

[00:00:05]The elevated heart rate is the compensation to the underlying problem.

[00:00:08]In many cases, what it's doing is it's actually helping your body work harder, but keep blood flow in your brain, which is a pretty useful tool. When you take a beta-blocker, you're slowing that down, and in some ways that lets your heart kind of catch up, it can pump more per beat. The problem is we're stealing that underlying compensation. What can happen is even though sometimes it makes some of those symptoms feel a little bit better, the trade-off can be that it can start to compromise that cerebral blood flow again. People may feel a little bit better kind of seated like I am, laying down, relaxing because that system calms down a little bit. When we need to put it under load, walking around, going through the grocery store, standing up, we're back in that same scenario where we can't keep up with maintaining that cerebral blood flow because we've taken away our number one tool. If you're interested in learning more about that, follow us for more, and we can actually see what's driving your symptoms and what you can do about it.