How to beat high blood pressure by lowering stress

A pretty solid body of research supports the common-sense theory that stress, anxiety, and hostility play substantive roles in the development and progression of cardiovascular disease, particularly hypertension. Here are some ways to control your stress and beat high blood pressure.

Are you a Type A or a Type B? A person whose patience is tried by every salesclerk with a room temperature IQ, or a laid-back, take-whatever-comes kind of person? The answer is important when it comes to your blood pressure.

• Researchers have always suspected that stress and anxiety contribute to hypertension, but they're coming to realize more clearly that the effect is due not to the events that cause stress per se, but rather to the way you react to them.
• For instance, researchers involved with the landmark Framingham Heart Study, which has been following residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, for more than 50 years to evaluate their heart health, found that participants who had high levels of anxiety in middle age were twice as likely as those with low anxiety levels to develop hypertension over the following 20 years.
• Another study found that young adults who had a strong sense of time urgency and impatience (the type who blow their horns in a traffic jam), also had a significant risk of developing hypertension later in life.
• Those who ranked high on hostility tests were 84 percent more likely to develop hypertension 15 years after they were studied than those who ranked lowest.

Physiologically, the stress/personality/blood pressure triumvirate works like this:

• When you're stressed, you have a "fight or flight" reaction from the days when stress meant something life-threatening, not a missed deadline. The human body, however, reacts to modern stresses in the same ways it did to long-ago dangers.
• That means you breathe faster (to bring in more oxygen), and your heart pumps harder (to send extra oxygen to the rest of your body). This combination results in a narrowing of blood vessels and an increase in blood pressure.
• In the short term, this reaction won't kill you or even necessarily cause lasting harm. But if you're constantly stressed, anxious, or impatient, a different mechanism kicks in, and you begin breathing more shallowly and quickly. This changes your blood chemistry as more carbon dioxide builds up and you begin retaining more sodium.
• Combined with the high amounts of sodium most of us get in our daily diets, that's a recipe for high blood pressure — and indeed, studies with animals have found that the combination is enough to generate progressive hypertension in a matter of days.

There's no way you can change your personality overnight (although there is evidence that your personality changes as you age). Instead, what seems to work is implementing stress-reducing, mind-body exercises such as meditation and yoga to reduce your anxiety levels.

• In one study, researchers found that nearly 70 percent of participants with mild to moderate hypertension who used techniques to reduce stress were able to reduce their medication after six weeks; after one year, 55 percent required no medication.
• The best place to start is with a phone call to your local hospital. Many hospitals today offer stress-management programs, sometimes at no charge. And they really do work.
• One analysis of 37 studies that examined the effects of health education and stress management found a 34 percent reduction in deaths from cardiovascular events, a 29 percent reduction in heart attacks, and significant positive effects on dietary and exercise habits, weight, smoking, cholesterol, and blood pressure.
• Another study found that when people with coronary artery disease received stress-management training, they had fewer recurring heart attacks and angina after five years than those who received only basic care.

Overcoming stress can be difficult, but it's not impossible. Lower your blood pressure with these simple methods and contact your doctor for more information.