Brief Synopsis

Bree has kindly agreed to put all of my health information into an easy to understand graph that I can post on the site. I will have that information up as soon as I get a moment. However, I first wanted to make a few general observations about the numbers and what I think they mean.

If you remember, I said that the goal was to track my stress levels and try to measure how levels of stress impacted my body. Specifically, my hypothesis was that higher levels of stress would result in more headaches and higher blood pressure. On a few days, I also had Julie take my pulse. I wish this is something I would have done throughout because I feel like this too might have been a good indicator to watch.

After a general review of the information, I would have to say my hypothesis was not supported by the data. It appears from the readings that the days where my perceived stress level was highest, my blood pressure actually was abnormally low.

My highest stress day was a single 9 on February 17. While this was far and away my worst day, my systolic blood pressure was only slightly elevated at 128/62. Contrast this with my only reading of 1 on my stress chart, and my blood pressure on that day was 122/80. This represents a slightly lower systolic bp, but the diastolic number is actually a good deal higher. So from these two preliminary variables, I certainly did not see a large gap in pressures as I was expecting.

Now check this out: my two lowest readings came on days where I had high stress levels of seven and eight. On these two days, I had readings of 118/48 and 118/52 respectively. Then the next two lowest were on low stress days of two and three where I had readings of 118/72 and 118/76 respectively. Again, these recordings do not seem to indicate any appreciable impact of stress to my blood pressure.

In fact, my highest reading was on a day where I estimated my stress as only intermediate, at a four. Headaches also did not seem to favor high stress versus low stress, as they were pretty evenly clustered throughout many different stress level days.

In conclusion, I have a couple observations to make. It seems to me highly suspect that high stress levels would not impact bp in a meaningful way, but that is what the information here is telling me. However, what may actually be more telling is that the stress that I feel in my mind may not actually be representative of the stress levels in my body as much as I thought. When I felt like my heart was racing and my stomach was tied in knots, the measurements we took seem to suggest just the opposite. I propose that perhaps a lot of the stress people deal with on a daily basis, most of which is manufactured by uncertainty or doubt in the mind, may not be due to any meaningful physiological change in the body. There are those of you with knowledge far broader than mine in this area, so check the graph when it is up and tell me what you think.