I was watching The Diplomat on Netflix some days ago.

In one scene, a politician (no spoilers here) was on the receiving end of some really bad news. In the next moment, he clutched his chest and fell to the ground as he was dying from a heart attack.

It's a bit of a cliché, but it points to something interesting about the connection between stress and heart disease.

Did you know that on average, someone in the US suffers a heart attack every 40 seconds? (Source)

We all know that chronic stress can be detrimental to our heart health, but why is it so?

Let's take a look.

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Stress and Blood Pressure

When you experience stress, blood pressure will rise to prepare you to handle the situation. This is great, because heightened blood pressure ensures that your body can fight or run away immediately, keeping you safe (and alive).

In "normal" situations, blood pressure will go back down after the threat is gone. But in the modern world, we deal with stress about work, finances, world events et cetera.

These stressors don't really go away in the same manner that a physical threat does.

Unless managed, this stress can become chronic, and so does the heightened blood pressure.

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The effects of chronically high blood pressure

The definition of blood pressure is how hard the blood pushes on the walls of your blood vessels when it flows through them. When blood pressure goes up, it means that the blood vessels experience more strain. If blood pressure stays high for too long, the blood vessels may get small tears in them.

To repair the damage, the body will send cells that stick to the damaged area. The problem is that other substances like cholesterol and fat can also begin sticking to the area.

These substances are often released into the blood stream by the same stress response that caused the high blood pressure in the first place, creating an unfortunate feedback loop.

This is how plaque is formed. Plaque is a build-up of substances on the walls of the blood vessels and it represents the beginning of many heart conditions.

On the topic of cholesterol, this seems to suggest that cholesterol isn't bad in and of itself. It seems cholesterol becomes problematic in the presence of damaged or dysfunctional blood vessels.

Cholesterol is a complex topic so, take this with a grain of salt. Not literally though. (That was a sodium joke. Sorry.)

How to fix high blood pressure?

The classic strategies for healthy living still apply:

• Maintain a healthy body weight
• Eat a high quality diet
• Get sufficient high quality sleep
• Avoid alcohol and tobacco
• Get regular exercise (at least 30 minutes a day)

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In addition to this, you need to effectively manage psychological stress. All the strategies above will certainly help you do this, but you also need to have a mindful approach to everyday stressors.

We talk about this all the time in this newsletter - we can stress ourselves out just by thinking about something that feels stressful. Expecting stress can create the same stress response as an actual threat.

So - as we're approaching the holidays, we hope you'll take the time to chill out a bit :)

PS.

In the future, we want to have a more positive spin on this newsletter and we'll publish more about how to effectively deal with stress and improve your quality of life.

However, we think it's important to gain a clear understanding of how stress affects us.

The goal is to lay the foundation for "soft skills" like emotional intelligence, communication skills and mindfulness to be considered serious strategies for health.

Thanks for being part of this mission :)

By the way, this newsletter was inspired by Dr. Robert Sapolsky's book and lecture series on "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers". More on this series in future newsletters.

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Happy holidays!