Heart palpitations are a sense of pounding, fluttering, or rapidly beating heart. Most traditional medicine providers explain the cause as related to stress, exercise, medications, or underlying medical conditions. Patients report a feeling of heart fluttering rapidly or skipping beats, beating very fast, a flip-flop feeling, or even a pounding feeling in the neck, throat, or chest and they occur at rest or during activity. In some cases, these may be related to more serious problems and may lead to chest pain, shortness of breath, fainting, and dizziness.
Some home remedies to consider include the following: quit smoking if you smoke; drink plenty of fluids and maintain good hydration status; get plenty of high-quality sleep at night; exercise regularly; eat at regular intervals to avoid dramatic swings in blood sugar levels; practice relaxation techniques such as meditation, prayer, yoga, breathing exercises, or other methods that help stress reduction; and avoid excessive caffeine and alcohol.
What can also happen is that heart palpitations come on out of the blue. None of the above factors are an issue, thus people seek care from health care professionals, often cardiologists, which is a good thing. If heart disease is ruled out, then the person is still left baffled. One possible explanation as to why seemingly healthy individuals, having been checked out by a cardiologist, have cardiovascular-type symptoms with no clear explanation is related to issues of instability of the boney structures of the neck!
The vagus nerve is responsible for slowing the heart rate or bringing the heart rate down after an event that caused it to rise such as exercise or doing something strenuous, fear, anxiety, panic, or fright. Sometimes the vagus nerve does not get this message. Why? Because something is blocking or interfering with the message. This may occur due to cervical instability and vagus nerve compression.
The sensory nerves that tell the brain what is going on, moment to moment, regarding heart rate and blood pressure are carried by the vagus nerve and the glossopharyngeal nerve. If the messages that these sensory nerves need to deliver to the brain are blocked or impaired, the symptoms described above can develop. How?
The person’s cervical bones are moving too much, thus these nerves can get compressed and stretched, and some of the nerve impulses are blocked, producing symptoms such as heart palpitations. The symptoms may come and go because the issue is positional, meaning it occurs when the person moves their head in a certain direction causing the blockage/pinching to occur.
You may be wondering how neck structures become loose. Well, hold the phone! We mean, drop the phone! “The facedown lifestyle” of constantly looking at some kind of device is the main culprit. We cannot encourage you enough to put the phone away – for many reasons – but the health of your neck depends on it. If these issues do not resolve, strengthening the neck with specific exercises and working on proper posture can help correct the problem. If the neck is too far gone then regenerative medicine treatments to strengthen the looseness may be in order.
