My Dance with Blood Pressure and How to Take Your Blood Pressure Correctly

Both lowering and monitoring BP involve more than just a few elements

A nurse checking a woman’s blood pressure incorrectly (Photo by RDNE Stock Project on Pexels)

I’ve been taking my blood pressure for a while now, but I wasn’t taking into account everything that such a reading involves. Also, my position, on a couch with the arm in my lap, wasn’t right.

My situation does not surprise me, because I did learn how to take my BP from my mother rather than read about it, and sometimes when we rely on word-of-mouth advice it’s very easy to get only a few things right. My mother doesn’t take her blood pressure, but she needed to take my father’s when he developed high BP, and she did it the best she knew how. Maybe a health professional told her a few things, such as wrap the cuff on the person’s bare biceps and wait a while after eating or drinking. Also, don’t talk while the monitor inflates the cuff and calculates the BP values.

When I started taking my own BP now and then several years ago, it was because I felt stressed out and I was worried about my diastolic BP. This is the second, smaller number. For at least two decades of my 48 years, I have had high diastolic BP, between 80 and 90 mmHg, which is stage 1 BP despite the good reading, below 130 mmHg, on my systolic BP. In recent years, however, I’ve had stage 2…