so i’ve been logging symptoms since month three, and for the first year i was tracking what i did, not what my body was doing underneath. activity hours, sleep, how i felt at noon. standard pacing log. around month 14 i added a continuous HR monitor and the thing that jumped out wasn’t my heart rate during activity - it was resting HR the day or two before a crash.
my resting HR normally sits around 62-65 lying down. twice now i’ve caught it at 78-82 on a morning where i felt… fine? like, not great but functional.
the kind of morning where i would have said ok to a slow walk or a longer phone call. both times i ignored it and both times i was on the floor 36 hours later. the annoying part: as a PT i’ve talked to patients about HRV and orthostatic HR as recovery markers. i knew this was a thing in an athletic context.
it took me 14 months to apply it to my own PEM pattern. what i still don’t have figured out: is the elevated resting HR the cause, the early signal, or just a coincidence that’s happened to repeat? three data points isn’t a pattern. i don’t want to turn into someone who cancels every plan when their HR ticks up 10 bpm.
but i also can’t keep ignoring it when it’s been right twice. i haven’t found a clean way to use it yet. some days HR looks fine and i crash anyway. some days it’s elevated and nothing happens.
the signal is real but it’s noisy. anyone else tracking resting HR alongside symptoms? curious whether there’s a threshold that’s actually predictive for you, or whether the data just adds more noise to an already messy picture.