High Blood Pressure
High blood pressure is a condition that causes no detectable symptoms in the person who has it but which also wreaks havoc on a person’s body. Reducing high blood pressure can increase the quality of a person’s life simply by reducing the chances of getting various types of heart diseases as well as stroke.
One problem is this: the heart beats about 100,000 times per day. In that tiny bit of time between beats, it’s supposed to get a rest. But a person who has high blood pressure is not only straining the heart during the actual heart beat but also pushing it during the rest period. Your doctor will tell you two numbers for your blood pressure. The first number (written down as the top number) is your pressure when your heart is pushing blood through beating. The second number (lower number when written down) is the pressure when your heart is supposed to be taking its little rest.
You can imagine if your boss pushed you to work and work and work with no rest, you’d eventually give out and be unable to work. The same thing can happen with the heart.
Fortunately, along with the many possible prescriptions for drugs that help with high blood pressure, there are some ways you can change your life to give that heart the rest it deserves.
Every doctor in the world and every article on blood pressure will tell you to get to your optimal weight by exercising. They will also tell you to eat properly, particularly reducing sodium. And if you are given medication to take, take it according to instructions.
Along with eating, exercising, and taking medications properly, reducing stress is an important help to lowering blood pressure. One of the easiest stress reducers is to make sure you get enough sleep. Just remember, when you are tempted to give the excuse that you don’t have time for eight hours of sleep, that heart attacks take a lot of time out of your schedule, lots more time than giving up a couple hours of your “day” (probably late night) in order to get a sufficient amount of sleep. Getting enough sleep will also help with any necessary weight loss.
A diagnosis of high blood pressure is also an opportunity to rethink how a person interacts with the world. Many of us have a high need for control and when we don’t have control over a situation, we feel significant stress. Yet the stress we feel does not help us to gain control over the uncontrollable. All it does is release a bunch of not very good in the long run chemicals in our bodies.
So, we have to differentiate between situations where we have control and situations where we don’t. The Serenity Prayer used by 12-step recovery groups offers some ideas on which to meditate: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Learning this will take time but it will also reduce stress over the long run, which will contribute to a healthier you.
A diagnosis of high blood pressure is a wake-up call. If you don’t hit the “snooze” button and ignore the diagnosis, you can lay the foundation for an even better quality life than that which took place before the diagnosis.