High blood pressure’s relationship to stress, anxiety, nervousness, or feeling tense is often misunderstood. Feeling excited, anxious, or fearful can indeed raise blood pressure, but usually only temporarily due to the surge of adrenaline that often accompanies these feelings. But those are not symptoms of high blood pressure. You can be a calm, relaxed person who never gets anxious or fearful and still have high blood pressure. And you will probably not have any indications that anything is wrong. Most of the time, people don't have any noticeable symptoms that their blood pressure is high, so the only reliable way to detect the condition is to have your blood pressure checked regularly using a blood pressure arm cuff