SnowyLynne said...
The more you check it the more anxious you will be........................
That's probably true.
I was recently on a kick where I checked my temperature all the time. I know it's silly, but for a while there I would check it whenever anxiety would come on just to see what it was doing to me. There was this thermometer that I had that must've been inaccurate, too, and that led me to believe I was actually sick once. All the sudden it started reading 100+ and that was a long night, let me tell you. Finally I went out to the 24 hr. pharmacy and bought a new one, and my fake fever just magically disappeared. Sometimes I'd check my temperature with the old thermometer and it would read a little high even though I was feeling fine, and a few times that was enough to get the anxiety started. Getting the new thermometer was a good idea, I guess...but I shouldn't have been at its mercy to begin with.
It's probably not a good idea to check your vitals all the time, just like it's not a good idea to look up your symptoms on the internet. Sometimes it can reassure you but it's a really, really bad habit to get into because without realizing it you're LOOKING for things to go wrong.
As for heart rate, I don't really know what's low. I actually thought low was good, assuming the heart is still beating which yours apparently is. In any event, I do know that heart rate (like temperature) fluctuates a lot during the day. Activity, emotions, metabolizing calories...a lot of things can affect it. Monitoring it constantly wouldn't really do any good whatsoever unless you were charting the results in an effort to determine if a pattern existed, but then you'd need to do it automatically in real time. That's unrealistic unless you're in the hospital or you own your own holter device.
My advice would be to squeeze a tennis ball or something whenever you feel the desire to check your heart rate. Victoria's right that this sort of thing can become a compulsion, just like me and that stupid thermometer.