How to manage stress and keep your heart healthy

Posted on August 18th, 2011 by Alexis Cala No Comments

Courtesy of Gabriela Camerotti (via Flickr)

Between unemployment, the market, keeping food on the table, taking care of your family, retirement, debt, credit cards, and life in general, it’s not surprising if you’ve been stressed out lately.

But all that stress, all the time, could be seriously hurting your health – it could even lead to a heart attack.

Here are just a couple of ways stress can hurt your heart:

Stress from an upcoming job interview, bills, hungry mouths, etc. activates a stress response within us which leads to elevated blood pressure, faster heartbeat and breathing, and suppressed immunity, digestion and reproductive function.

High stress = high blood pressure. Chronically high blood pressure is very harmful to your blood vessels, wearing and tearing them down quicker than usual. Which can lead to inflammation, plaque and eventually a heart attack or stroke.

So, when life has you stressed, what can you do?

Here are just 4 stress-management and heart-friendly tips from the conscious life:

Be sure to also check out these healthy living tips from the Beehive that can help you show your heart some love, nix the stress and live well:

And, of course, the American Heart Association has a lot of information and tools on how to live healthy and ways to deal with stress.