HH339: Stress-It Increases Your Blood Pressure!

Welcome back to another episode of health hacks as I continue talking about the impact of stress on our health, and today, I want to talk about the fact that stress can impact and increase your blood pressure because it causes your blood vessels to constrict, and that will elevate blood pressure because the the blood vessels are getting narrower, and so the heart has to work harder to push the blood through, and that then increases the blood pressure in those narrower vessels, and that can increase the risk of heart disease. So in terms of one of the things that is been correlated with heart attacks as well. That can help if you get more of it is sleep. So when we get enough sleep, it allows us to be more stress resilient through the day, and we all, as human beings, as adults, need between seven to nine hours of sleep every night, nine hours if you're feeling like you're getting sick and coming down with something, and perhaps it's closer to seven hours if you're feeling healthy and thriving. However, that is ideally what the human body needs in order to thrive. And many of us aren't getting that much sleep, so that is an area that I work with a lot of my clients on, is helping to improve their sleep and giving them tips and tricks in order to start to get more sleep. And it's really profound, the difference they notice in themselves when they start sleeping more. And it's really helps us to be able to manage our stress, because you know, as well as I do that, when you're not well rested, you are more likely to be irritated by smaller things and fly off the handle and get instantly triggered and into that stress state, whereas if you've had a good night's sleep, you can respond in a much more calm fashion. And there's also been research that actually shows a direct correlation between the amount of sleep people get and their risk of heart attack. And we see that every year, when we go on and off daylight savings, when we go on daylight savings, we lose an hour's sleep at night, and hospitals show an increase in the number of heart attacks the following day of 24% and when we go off daylight savings in the fall, we gain an hour sleep, and hospitals actually show A decrease in the number of heart attacks by 21% and that's just from one hour of sleep, and we see that twice a year. So something that you can start to work on in terms of lowering your risk of heart disease and blood high blood pressure is to ensure that you are getting adequate sleep, and that will allow you to be able to go with the flow more in life and manage the stresses that are being thrown at you. We all have stress in our life. Stresses will be thrown at you. It's a matter of how you handle them, and the more capable you are of handling them, the less impact, negative impact they have on your body and on your health. So if sleep is something that you need support with in terms of improving your sleep, I have a six steps to better sleep, self guided course that you can take. I'll drop the link to that. I've recently added to that a sleep meditation, and I also have many other tools that I can share with you. If that's something you'd like to know more about, please feel free to reach out to me. Melissa, at your guided health journey.com. And happy sleeping.