Bed Mobility & Sleep Guides for POTS

With POTS, getting out of bed isn’t just stiff or painful — it can make your heart pound, your vision grey out, and your body feel like it’s being drained. The simple act of going from lying flat to sitting upright causes a blood pressure drop and a heart rate spike that can leave you dizzy, nauseated, and shaking before your feet even touch the floor. So mornings become something you dread, and even turning over at night can cause enough of a positional shift to trigger symptoms if your blood volume is low or your autonomic system is having a rough day.

The underlying issue is that your autonomic nervous system isn’t compensating properly for gravity. When a healthy person sits up, their blood vessels tighten to keep blood in the upper body. With POTS, that compensation is delayed or insufficient — blood pools in your legs and abdomen, your heart races to compensate, and your brain gets less blood flow than it needs. A bed turn is a milder version of the same problem: any position change that shifts blood volume can trigger the tachycardia response, especially if you move quickly or go from fully reclined to partially upright.

The guides below focus on staged positional transitions — how to go from lying to sitting to standing in a way that gives your cardiovascular system time to adjust at each step. They cover pre-turn muscle tensing techniques (ankle pumps, leg squeezes) that push blood back toward your heart before you move, pillow arrangements that keep your upper body slightly elevated overnight, and specific getting-out-of-bed sequences designed to avoid the standing heart rate spike. These are practical, body-position methods — not general POTS management advice.