What Can I Do to Make My Blood Pressure Go Up?

Drinking a large glass of water, crossing your legs tightly while standing, and wearing compression stockings are among the fastest, simplest ways to nudge blood pressure upward when it drops too low. Most people searching for this question deal with orthostatic hypotension or another form of chronically low blood pressure that causes dizziness, lightheadedness, or fainting, and the good news is that several non-drug strategies can help in the moment or over time. Some work within minutes; others require a longer-term routine.

Drink Water, and Drink It Quickly

One of the easiest and most studied ways to raise blood pressure in the short term is simply drinking about two cups (roughly 500 mL) of water in a few minutes. This triggers what researchers call the osmopressor response: the water activates sympathetic nerve pathways at the spinal level, causing blood vessels to tighten. In people with severe autonomic failure, drinking water raised systolic blood pressure by over 30 mmHg within about half an hour.¹ The effect is most dramatic in people whose nervous system has trouble regulating blood pressure on its own, but even in healthy individuals, a quick water bolus produces a measurable bump.²

This trick is especially useful before meals, because eating can pull blood toward the digestive organs and cause a further drop. Drinking water about 15 minutes before eating helps buffer that decline.³ It costs nothing, has no side effects for most people, and works fast enough to use as a pre-emptive move before situations you know tend to make you dizzy.

Physical Counterpressure Maneuvers

If you feel lightheaded while standing and need to stop a near-faint, a handful of body-tensing moves can raise your systolic blood pressure by roughly 15 mmHg within seconds. These are called counterpressure maneuvers, and they work by squeezing large muscle groups hard enough to push blood back toward your heart and brain.⁴ The most commonly studied ones include:

Leg crossing and tensing: Cross your legs at the ankles and squeeze your thigh and calf muscles as hard as you can. This traps blood in the legs and forces it upward.
Squatting: Drop into a full squat or bend forward at the waist. Both positions increase pressure in the abdomen and chest, boosting blood return to the heart.
Hand gripping: Squeeze one fist inside the other hand and pull outward, engaging your arms and chest muscles simultaneously.

These moves are free, require no equipment, and can be done almost anywhere. The catch is that they demand conscious effort at the exact moment you feel worst, which can be hard if you are already lightheaded. Practicing them regularly so the response becomes almost automatic helps. Researchers have noted that practical limitations can restrict how consistently people actually use these maneuvers in daily life, but for those who do, they remain one of the most effective on-the-spot tools available.⁴

Compression Garments

If low blood pressure is a recurring daily problem rather than an occasional nuisance, wearing compression stockings or an abdominal binder can make a meaningful difference. The idea is simple: external pressure on the legs and belly keeps blood from pooling in those areas when you stand up. A controlled study of older adults with progressive orthostatic hypotension found that lower-limb compression bandages prevented the systolic blood pressure drop on standing and reduced symptoms like dizziness.⁵

Thigh-high stockings with at least 30 mmHg of pressure are generally more effective than knee-high ones, and adding an abdominal binder gives an extra boost. The downside is comfort: they can be hot, hard to put on, and socially inconvenient. Many people find that wearing them during the morning hours, when orthostatic symptoms tend to be worst, is a workable compromise rather than wearing them all day.

Adjust What and How You Eat

What you eat and how you eat it can either stabilize or sabotage your blood pressure throughout the day. Meals heavy in carbohydrates tend to cause the biggest post-meal drops in blood pressure. In a study of elderly patients with postprandial hypotension, a low-carbohydrate meal produced a significantly smaller systolic blood pressure decrease than a normal- or high-carbohydrate meal, and symptoms were less frequent and less severe afterward.⁶

Splitting your food into six smaller meals instead of three large ones is another strategy that keeps blood from being diverted to digestion in one big wave.³ And for people whose doctor has cleared them to do so, increasing salt intake is a classic approach. Extra sodium helps the body hold onto more fluid, expanding blood volume. This is not advice for the general population, where excess salt is linked to high blood pressure, but for someone whose baseline pressure runs persistently low, a doctor may specifically recommend it.

Sleep With the Head of Your Bed Raised

Sleeping with the head of your bed elevated by about 15 to 20 degrees, sometimes achieved by placing blocks under the headboard legs rather than just using extra pillows, trains your body overnight to handle upright posture better the next morning. In young healthy volunteers, sleeping with the head end raised roughly 18 inches reduced the drop in systolic blood pressure when they stood up and also improved standing cardiac output.⁷

This works because lying completely flat all night allows your kidneys to dump excess fluid (you urinate more overnight), reducing blood volume by morning. A slight tilt counteracts that process. As a bonus, for people who have both orthostatic hypotension and high blood pressure when lying down, a fairly common combination in neurological conditions, head-up sleeping can lower supine blood pressure while simultaneously reducing the severity of drops when standing.⁸ It takes several nights to see the full effect, so stick with it for at least a week before judging.

Caffeine as a Short-Term Boost

A cup of coffee or strong tea can raise blood pressure for an hour or two. Caffeine works partly by stimulating the sympathetic nervous system and partly by increasing resistance in peripheral blood vessels.⁹ For someone prone to dizziness in the morning or after meals, timing a caffeinated drink before a risky period can help bridge the gap.

The limitation is tolerance. People who drink coffee daily develop a blunted pressor response to it over time, meaning the blood-pressure-raising effect weakens. If you already consume several cups a day, adding another is unlikely to help much. Some clinicians suggest using caffeine strategically, saving it for moments when you need the boost rather than sipping it continuously, to keep the effect sharper.

Cold Exposure

Cold temperatures raise blood pressure reliably. When your skin senses cold, your sympathetic nervous system kicks in and tightens blood vessels to conserve heat, and the blood pressure increase follows proportionally. All types of cold exposure, whether applied to an arm, a leg, or the whole body, have been shown to push both systolic and diastolic pressure upward.¹⁰ The underlying mechanism involves a surge in sympathetic vasoconstrictor activity in the muscles, which both raises vascular resistance and resets the level at which your baroreceptors operate.¹¹

From a practical standpoint, splashing cold water on your face or holding a cold pack against your neck when you feel pre-syncopal may buy a few extra mmHg. This is not a long-term management strategy, but it is a useful emergency trick to pair with counterpressure maneuvers when dizziness hits suddenly.

Exercise and Its Paradox

Exercise raises blood pressure during a session, sometimes dramatically. Heavy resistance exercise can produce extreme systolic spikes because of the combination of muscular compression, a strong pressor reflex, and the Valsalva maneuver (bearing down against a closed airway).¹² Over the longer term, though, regular aerobic exercise tends to lower resting blood pressure, which seems counterproductive if your problem is already-low pressure.

The paradox resolves when you consider what exercise actually does for people with orthostatic hypotension: it improves the cardiovascular reflexes that prevent blood pressure from crashing when you stand. A stronger heart and better-conditioned blood vessels respond more briskly to posture changes. The acute spike during a workout is temporary, but the improved vascular tone lasts all day. People with chronically low blood pressure are generally encouraged to stay active rather than avoid exercise, but recumbent forms of exercise like rowing, recumbent cycling, or swimming can be safer starting points because they reduce the risk of fainting mid-workout.

Breathing Techniques

Taking a deep breath and holding it transiently raises blood pressure. Research on healthy adults shows that repeated breath-holding episodes following a deep inhalation cause significant increases in both systolic and diastolic pressure at the breakpoint of each hold.¹³ Inspiration itself enhances blood return to the heart by harnessing what is sometimes called the respiratory pump, which increases cardiac filling and output and helps maintain cerebral blood flow.¹⁴

In a practical sense, if you feel dizzy, taking several slow, deep breaths and briefly holding each one at the top of the inhale can pair with leg-crossing and tensing as a combined rescue strategy. The effect is small compared to, say, drinking water or using compression, but it is always available and costs nothing.

Prescription Medications

When lifestyle changes are not enough, doctors have a small but well-established toolkit of medications. These fall into two main categories: drugs that expand blood volume and drugs that tighten blood vessels.¹⁵

Fludrocortisone: A synthetic hormone that mimics aldosterone, prompting the kidneys to retain sodium and water. The expanded blood volume raises baseline pressure. It requires monitoring for potassium loss and swelling.
Midodrine: An oral drug that directly constricts blood vessels by activating alpha-1 receptors. It works within about an hour and lasts a few hours, making it useful before periods of upright activity. Because it can raise supine blood pressure too, the last dose of the day should be taken well before bedtime.
Droxidopa: A newer option, approved by the FDA in 2014 for symptomatic neurogenic orthostatic hypotension. It converts into norepinephrine in the body, providing a more natural boost to both heart function and vascular tone.¹⁶

These medications are typically reserved for people with a diagnosed condition such as neurogenic orthostatic hypotension, and all require a prescription and ongoing medical supervision. They can overshoot and cause dangerously high blood pressure while lying down, so dose adjustments are common.

Things That Raise Blood Pressure but Probably Should Not Be Your Strategy

A number of everyday substances and behaviors will reliably push blood pressure upward, but using them as a management tool introduces risks that outweigh the benefit.

Licorice is a well-known culprit. The compound glycyrrhizin, found in real licorice root, suppresses the hormones that regulate sodium and potassium balance. Even a modest daily intake raised systolic home blood pressure by about 3 mmHg in a controlled crossover trial, with measurable suppression of renin and aldosterone.¹⁷ That might sound helpful, but chronic licorice consumption can cause dangerous drops in potassium, fluid retention, and a form of pseudo-hyperaldosteronism that is hard to reverse quickly. Candy labeled “licorice” in many countries uses anise flavoring with no glycyrrhizin, so the effect only applies to products made from actual licorice root.

Nicotine raises blood pressure acutely by stimulating the sympathetic nervous system and releasing catecholamines.¹⁸ But smoking or using nicotine products to manage low blood pressure would be exchanging one health problem for a much larger one.

Chronic sleep deprivation also raises blood pressure. Losing sleep shifts the body toward higher sympathetic tone, elevates nighttime blood pressure, and increases cortisol.¹⁹²⁰ But the metabolic damage from sustained sleep loss, including increased appetite, inflammation, and insulin resistance, makes this a terrible trade-off. Interestingly, mental stress has a similar acute effect: a challenging cognitive task raised systolic pressure by about 12 mmHg in healthy volunteers.²¹ Again, not a tool anyone should deliberately reach for.

When Blood Pressure Goes Too Far in Either Direction

It is worth understanding that the body’s blood pressure operates within a relatively narrow safe zone. Too low and you faint or, in severe cases, vital organs get inadequate blood flow. Too high and you risk organ damage from the other direction. A systematic review of hypertensive emergencies found that the most common forms of organ damage were stroke and heart failure, with in-hospital mortality running close to one in ten.²²

This matters because any strategy to raise blood pressure carries the theoretical risk of overcorrection, especially if you combine multiple approaches at once or if you are also taking medications that affect blood pressure. Someone using midodrine, compression garments, extra salt, and caffeine simultaneously could end up with supine hypertension that is just as problematic as the hypotension they started with. Work with a doctor to find the right combination, and monitor your pressure at home if possible so you can see whether you are hitting the sweet spot or sailing past it.

Pain and the Sympathetic Surge

Pain is a surprisingly potent blood pressure elevator. When you experience any significant painful stimulus, the nociceptive signals traveling up the spinal cord recruit sympathetic reflexes that constrict blood vessels, speed up the heart, and increase stroke volume. The response scales with the intensity and duration of the pain.²³ This is why a stubbed toe or a blood draw can make you feel flushed and momentarily hypertensive.

Clinicians sometimes exploit a milder version of this reflex during tilt-table testing, using noxious stimuli to see how a patient’s cardiovascular system responds. For everyday use, though, pain is obviously not a practical intervention. What it does explain is why people with chronic pain conditions sometimes show persistently elevated blood pressure, and why conditions that blunt the body’s pain perception, such as peripheral neuropathy, may also impair the pressor responses that normally keep blood pressure stable.