The short explanation
Palpitations — feeling your heartbeat racing, pounding, fluttering or skipping — are very common, and most of the time they are harmless. Caffeine, tea and coffee, stress, anxiety, poor sleep, dehydration, fever, pregnancy and hormonal changes around periods or menopause all bring them on. They are still worth mentioning to a clinician, because a small number are caused by a heart rhythm problem, an overactive thyroid or anaemia, and those are treatable once they are found.
What depends on your situation
The parts of this that change from woman to woman. Uncertainty is stated, not hidden.
- What helps most at the appointment is a description: how fast, regular or irregular, how long it lasts, what you were doing, and what else happened with it. If you can, check your pulse during an episode or take a short video of a watch or phone reading.
- An ECG taken while it is happening is the most useful test, so clinicians sometimes arrange a monitor worn for a day or longer.
What this answer cannot determine
The boundary of online education. These need a clinician who can see you.
- This cannot tell you what your palpitations are. An ECG and sometimes blood tests are needed to separate an ordinary extra beat from a rhythm problem.
Questions for your clinician
Take these with you. You can add any of them to an appointment card.
- Does what I describe sound like an ordinary extra beat, or should we look further?
- Should I have an ECG or a heart monitor?
- Should my thyroid, haemoglobin or other blood tests be checked?
- Is there anything I am taking or doing that could be triggering it?
When to seek help
Clinician-approved guidance for this topic. When in doubt, being seen is never the wrong choice.
- Get emergency care now (call 112 or 108) if palpitations come with chest pain, breathlessness, fainting or nearly fainting, or if a fast heartbeat does not settle.
- See a clinician within days if palpitations are frequent, getting worse, or happen with exercise, or if anyone in your family died suddenly and young.
Sources
The evidence this explanation is built on.
- Heart palpitations NHS
- Heart palpitations MedlinePlus (US National Library of Medicine)
Who wrote and reviewed this
Every AskHer answer names its author. A clinically reviewed answer also names the clinician who signed it off — if no clinician is named below, it has not been clinically reviewed.
- Author
- AskHer Editorial (AI-assisted draft) AskHer's editorial team — not an individual clinician Works in English, தமிழ், हिन्दी
- Clinical reviewer
- Nobody yet No clinician has signed this answer off, and no person on the editorial team has read it yet. That is what the “Written with AI assistance” label means. It is queued for an editor to read, and then for a clinician who works in this area. The sources it was drafted against are listed above.
- Review status
- Written with AI assistance — not yet reviewed by a person
- Last reviewed
- Not yet reviewed by a person
- Version
- 1
Correction history
Substantive changes are listed, not quietly edited away.
No corrections have been made since this answer was first published.
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