Stress & Heart Disease – How Does Stress Affect Your Heart?
You have probably heard that stress is not good for your heart, but do you understand the reasons why this is true? In what follows, I will give you information that explains what stress is, how it affects your body, and what you can do about it.
When discussing heart disease, you have probably heard of the controllable and uncontrollable risk factors. Stress is considered to be a controllable risk factor, or something that you can change. This is unlike your family genetics for heart disease, which is something that you cannot change.
You may have heard about good and bad kinds of stress. Good kinds of stress are things like moving to a new home, tying the knot, or having a newborn to look after. Examples of bad kinds of stress are illness, death, or dealing with bullies at school or at work.
What is important to realize is that there are positive and negative types of stress. Positive types of stress include moving to a new city, having a work deadline to meet, or having a baby. Negative types of stress, on the other hand, include death of a loved one, loss of a job, and so on. However, when the stress does not go away and stays with you all the time, is when you can become ill.
Stress becomes pathological when it never goes away, and you are constantly dealing with it. Before long, you may notice that your body begins to feel like it's falling apart. You may feel nervous, anxious, clammy, have a high heart rate, be unable to sleep, have headaches, and so many other signs and symptoms.
When these two hormones take over due to stress that is always present, your heart has to work non-stop, and your blood pressure and glucose can rise to catastrophic levels. In other words, the fight or flight response never turns itself off. This is where the link between stress and heart disease comes in. If your heart is constantly working harder than it needs to, it can wear itself out. It can weaken, and stress is known to increase fatty deposits in arterial walls. Heart attack can be one of the results.
In order to minimize the effects of stress, and the ravaging effects on the body, start making positive changes in your life today.
In summary, making changes in your life will make a world of difference when it comes to your overall health and that of your heart.