Low blood pressure, generally defined as a reading below 90/60 mmHg, can often be improved through a combination of dietary changes, physical techniques, and lifestyle adjustments. The right approach depends on whether your blood pressure drops when you stand up, after meals, or stays persistently low throughout the day. Most people can raise their blood pressure meaningfully without medication, though prescription options exist for more severe cases.
Increase Salt and Fluid Intake
Salt is one of the most straightforward tools for raising blood pressure. Sodium helps your body hold onto water, which increases the volume of blood circulating through your vessels. For people with low blood pressure, a daily intake of at least 6 grams of salt is a common recommendation, which is roughly double what heart-health guidelines suggest for the general population. You can increase your intake by salting food more liberally, eating broth-based soups, or snacking on salted nuts and olives.
Drinking more water works alongside salt to expand blood volume. In studies of people with autonomic failure (a condition that causes severe drops in blood pressure upon standing), drinking about 480 ml of water, roughly two cups, raised standing blood pressure within 15 minutes. For everyday management, aim for 2 to 3 liters of fluid per day, spread throughout the day rather than consumed all at once. Keeping a water bottle nearby and drinking before you stand up from a long sitting or lying position can help prevent sudden drops.
Use Physical Counter-Pressure Maneuvers
When you feel lightheaded or sense your blood pressure dropping, specific muscle-tensing movements can push blood back toward your heart and brain quickly. A meta-analysis found these maneuvers raised standing systolic blood pressure by nearly 15 mmHg on average, which is enough to prevent or delay fainting in many cases.
Effective techniques include:
- Leg crossing with tensing: Cross your legs at the ankles and squeeze your thigh and calf muscles together.
- Squatting: Drop into a squat, or bend forward with your head between your knees (sometimes called the “crash position”).
- Hand gripping: Squeeze a ball or clench your fists tightly for 15 to 30 seconds.
- Lower body tensing: Contract your abdominal, buttock, and thigh muscles simultaneously while standing.
- Calf raises and marching in place: These activate the muscle pump in your legs, pushing pooled blood upward past one-way valves in your veins.
One important note: avoid holding your breath or straining during these maneuvers. Bearing down increases pressure inside your chest, which actually reduces blood flow back to the heart and can make things worse.
Adjust How and What You Eat
Blood pressure commonly drops after meals, especially large ones rich in carbohydrates. This happens because your body diverts blood to the digestive system, leaving less circulating elsewhere. In a study of elderly patients with postprandial hypotension, a low-carbohydrate meal (25 grams of carbs) caused a blood pressure drop of about 28 mmHg, while a high-carbohydrate meal (125 grams) caused a drop of 40 mmHg. The duration of the low-pressure episode was also significantly shorter with fewer carbs, and symptoms were less frequent and less severe.
Practical steps to manage post-meal drops include eating smaller, more frequent meals instead of three large ones, reducing starchy foods like white bread, pasta, and rice at any single sitting, and avoiding alcohol with meals since it dilates blood vessels further. Some people find that drinking a glass of water 15 minutes before eating helps blunt the post-meal drop.
Wear Compression Garments
Waist-high compression stockings prevent blood from pooling in your legs and abdomen when you’re upright. They work by physically squeezing your veins, which forces blood back toward your heart and keeps your circulating volume higher. The key detail is that waist-high stockings are more effective than knee-high ones, because a large amount of blood pools in the abdomen and thighs, not just the calves. Wear them during the day and remove them at night when you’re lying down.
Abdominal binders serve a similar purpose. Some people find a combination of both garments provides the best relief, particularly if blood pressure drops significantly upon standing.
Change How You Sleep and Stand
Elevating the head of your bed by about 10 degrees, roughly 9 inches at the headboard, can help manage overnight blood pressure regulation. This slight tilt reduces the amount of fluid your kidneys flush out during the night, so you wake up with more blood volume and are less likely to feel dizzy when you first get out of bed.
How you transition from lying down to standing matters too. Sit on the edge of the bed for 30 to 60 seconds before standing. Flex your feet and pump your calves while seated to get blood moving. When you do stand, tense your leg and abdominal muscles for the first few seconds. Avoid standing up quickly after long periods of sitting or lying, especially first thing in the morning or after a hot bath.
Medications for Persistent Hypotension
When lifestyle changes aren’t enough, several prescription medications can help. These are most commonly used for orthostatic hypotension, the type where blood pressure drops upon standing.
One first-line option works by tightening blood vessels directly, raising blood pressure through increased vascular resistance. It’s taken three times per day and acts quickly, but needs to be timed carefully since it can cause high blood pressure when lying down. Another first-line medication is a precursor to a natural stress hormone. Your body converts it into a chemical that constricts blood vessels and raises blood pressure, also taken three times daily.
A third option takes a different approach entirely. It’s a synthetic hormone that tells your kidneys to retain more sodium, which pulls water into your bloodstream and increases overall blood volume. It also makes your blood vessels more responsive to constriction signals. This one is taken once daily but requires monitoring for side effects like swelling and low potassium levels.
All of these medications require careful dose adjustments, and they work best as an addition to the lifestyle strategies above rather than a replacement for them.
Identify and Address the Underlying Cause
Fixing hypotension long-term often means figuring out why it’s happening. Common and correctable causes include dehydration, medication side effects (particularly from blood pressure drugs, antidepressants, and prostate medications), prolonged bed rest, and nutritional deficiencies like low iron or vitamin B12. If you started a new medication around the time symptoms appeared, that connection is worth exploring with your prescriber.
Some causes are harder to reverse, including nerve damage from diabetes or Parkinson’s disease, which can impair your body’s ability to regulate blood pressure automatically. Heart conditions that reduce how much blood the heart pumps with each beat can also cause persistent low readings. In these cases, the strategies above still help, but they’re managing the symptom rather than curing the root problem.
Symptoms that signal something more urgent include confusion, cold or clammy skin, rapid shallow breathing, blurred vision, or fainting. A sudden drop in blood pressure after an injury, infection, or allergic reaction needs immediate medical attention, as these situations involve fundamentally different mechanisms than the chronic low blood pressure that lifestyle changes can address.