How Stress is Damaging Your Heart

It’s right time for Breaking up with Stress because it is slowly killing your body.

Stress has been slowly growing in magnitude and establishing its existance like food. We have it daily. Its one of the bad food with damaging effects on our body.

Stress originates in Brain but affects the heart and blood vessels most.

Let’s learn the relationship between Stress and Heart Health.

Heart having chambers named as atria and ventricles (visible). The blood vessels overlying it are coronaries.

• Firstly, Heart is a muscular organ having ventricles which pumps the blood.
• Pumping involve well regulated series of contractions and relaxations.
• Heart contraction is called Systole (Duration 0.3 seconds) and relaxation is called Diastole(Duration 0.5 seconds). This 0.8 seconds cycle is called Cardiac Cycle.

• Secondly, imagine what happens when you are extremely late, you are driving fast and brakes of your car fails or you hit someone. Sweating, Palpitations, Nervousness, Breathlessness, fear, anxiety… These are some of stress responses.
• These are due to surge of adrenaline released in response to stress by activation of Sympathetic system. This adrenaline is secreted every time we get stressed, the levels of which depend upon the degree of stress.
• The adrenaline increases the heart rate so that more blood is supplied to muscles for running, dilates the pupil to see far objects better, bring vasoconstriction in blood vessels to channel blood supply to high demand organs like brain and muscles rather than bladder. Everything to make you fight better.
• Chronic daily stress keeps this sympathetic system awake and it is never at complete rest.
• Sympathetic system keeps the heart rate up.
• Now, if heart is beating let’s say 100 times per minute, the duration of cardiac cycle decreases. One cardiac cycle is being completed in less time than normal. [{ 60 seconds/72 beats =0.8 sec per beat}, {60 seconds/ 100 beats= 0.6 sec per beat}]
• It is the diastole that we are more concerned with because Heart receives its blood supply during diastole.
• Now with this decrease in diastole, the time of blood supply to coronaries (vessels that feed heart) also get decreased.

That was one aspect, the heart rate. The second aspect is Vasoconstriction.

• The vasoconstriction cause shortening of diameter of blood vessel.
• The decreased vessel size coupled with increased heart rate cause increased pressure at the blood column. This increased pressure is termed as Hypertension. The word itself include tension.
• When this already elevated blood pressured vessel experiences surge in emotional stress further get filled up with adrenaline causing more vasoconstriction, more blood pressure.
• The high blood pressure can damage the blood vessel and plaque deposition can cause its stenosis or blockade.
• Considering our food priorities, we might already have some plaque deposition contributed by pizza, burger, french fries and sugar.
• Clotting due to damage over the plaque can block the artery partially or completely.

Damage to blood vessel initiate plaque formation and recurrent damages can block the artery completely.

• Coupled with this, increased heart rate cause decreased blood supply to coronaries.
• Less blood or no blood to coronaries means no nutrition to heart muscles.
• This persistent deprivation of nutrition cause muscle injury. Muscle stops working, stops pumping and get necrosed. Heart Failure!

When heart muscle get damaged, chest pain (Angina) occurs which rapidly proceeds to Myocardial Infarction.

Evidences from epidemiological studies.

The INTERHEART study investigated the relation of chronic stressors to incidence of MI in a sample of ∼25,000 people from 52 countries. Stress was defined as “feeling irritable, filled with anxiety, or as having sleeping difficulties as a result of conditions at work or at home.” After adjusting for age, gender, geographic region, and smoking, those who reported “permanent stress” at work or at home had >2.1 times the risk for developing an MI.

The increased risk associated with work-related stress was similar at 40% (pooled relative risk = 1.4, 95% CI: 1.2–1.8).39 Chronic stressors have also been linked to worse prognosis in patients with existing CVD.

Stress Management is life management. If you take control of it, your life will thank you for it!

How to manage Stress

1. Daily exercise is the prime stress busters.

• Research conducted by Wendy Suzuki, Professor of Neuroscience proved that physical activity improves the mood.
• It also generate new cells in hippocampus that increases the long term memory.
• Physical activity for 3–4 times a week each for 30 minutes improve your mood, improve heart health and also increases concentration & focus.
• So running tomorrow would be the best recommendation for beating up stress.

2. Food is the biggest stress for heart health.

• We are so deep rooted in culture of eating pizza, burger and coke that these are the main and prevalent components towards bad heart health.
• Junk food provide empty calories that assimilates in our body and increase weight and heart rate.
• Releasing yourself from the chains of such habits would be fruitful to your attire and heart. It would not only prevent heart and many diseases but in turn would protect you too from some.

3. Meditation.

• I do not practice meditation so I cannot preach it but I have read many stories of patients of depression and those who practice it. Meditation proves boon for many for relaxing and managing stress.
• In addition to managing stress, it brings balance in life, improves concentration and establish peace.
• Headspace is great app for guided meditation.

Living healthy is not a responsibility but a right of an Individual.

Stay Healthy Stay Happy