Heart Health Part V: Manage Stress

This is the final segment on modifiable lifestyle risk factors for heart disease to wrap up “American Hearth Month.” My other blog NewMexicoRD.blogspot.com, discusses foods and heart disease.

Stress management. It seems like a silly thing to some people and downright impossible tp others. Unfortunately the people who are most likely to stress out about things are probably the ones who are at higher risk for heart disease.

People who are “type A” personality, the ones who stress easier than others, are more likely to have the heart disease as a result. I’ve noted before, it isn’t the stressor that causes the stress, but the individual response to the stress that causes it.

There is some research indicating there is a relationship between heart disease risk and the amount of (perceived) stress in ones’ life.

Health behaviors can contribute to stress. Smoking, inactivity, and/or high fat diet can contribute more to the stress. However exercise and a healthy diet can help the body physically deal with stress as well as help us relieve some stress (a walk around the block perhaps).

High stress can lead to high blood pressure. Chronic stress can lead to chronically elevated blood pressure, a risk factor for heart disease.

Find some coping strategies to help when you are stressed. Find a hobby and work on it for an hour or two. Plan to take a day off – tomorrow or in a few weeks. Don’t tell anyone and relax and read a book or see a funny movie or be alone in a bath. Go for a very long, relaxing walk. Even if you can’t take a day off, take an hour or two to read, watch a movie and be distracted from your thoughts for a while.

Develop some coping strategies to deal with intermittent stress that you can’t walk away from such as counting to ten or a mantra such as “a year from now, will this matter?” Sometimes it will, but a lot of times it won’t.


It takes practice, and moving from a high stress person, to lower or even moderate stress person doesn’t happen overnight or even in a couple of weeks-months. It takes time and patience. But keep working on it. I often tell people who say they don’t have time to do these stress management techniques: you will have plenty of time when you are in the ICU following your by-pass surgery. Take time today to relieve your stress.