5 Best Lifestyle Changes To Support Your Heart
1. Stress
Nearly half of all premature deaths may be due to unhealthy lifestyle choices, such as insufficient exercise, poor diet, and smoking. These risk factors increase the risk of high blood pressure, diabetes, heart attack, and stroke.
While there are various lifestyle choices that can drastically improve your heart health, the number one will always be stress reduction. Stress plays a far more prominent role in our health than we may know.
Luckily, most, if not all, of the lifestyle choices you can make to improve your heart health also help lower your stress levels.
We must schedule more downtime and breaks. Given today’s fast-paced lifestyle where time is money, the majority of us devote our time to trying to increase our net worth.
The result is that we rarely make time to relax, let alone sleep. Doing so acts as a disservice to our health and creates a situation where we have to work even harder to gain traction.
When we become stressed, our bodies struggle to get enough oxygen to the brain and the rest of our body.
This excess strain on our brain makes it almost impossible to complete our daily tasks. However, when we take time to relax, it allows our body to work more quickly and efficiently.
Just like that, we can get more while doing less. Yet, so many of us still fail to take a much-needed break.
As a rule of thumb, try scheduling in your breaks first and every hour either change topics or step away for five to ten minutes. This trick helps your body to feel like it is getting a break.
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2. Exercise
The following lifestyle choice that can improve heart health is often overlooked. Exercise seems like a no-brainer when it comes to supporting your health. However, due to our sedentary lifestyles, most of us fail to get enough movement in.
As many as 250 000 deaths per year in the United States are attributable to a lack of regular physical activity.
In addition, studies that followed large groups of individuals for many years have documented the protective effects of physical activity for a number of noncardiovascular chronic diseases, such as non–insulin-dependent diabetes, hypertension, osteoporosis, and colon cancer.
A sedentary lifestyle is one of the 5 major risk factors (along with high blood pressure, abnormal values for blood lipids, smoking, and obesity) for cardiovascular disease, as outlined by the AHA.
Evidence from many scientific studies shows that reducing these risk factors decreases the chance of having a heart attack or experiencing another cardiac event, such as a stroke, and reduces the possibility of needing a coronary revascularization procedure (bypass surgery or coronary angioplasty).
Regular exercise has a favorable effect on many of the established risk factors for cardiovascular disease.
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Exercise supports improvements in muscular function and strength and improvement in the body’s ability to take in and use oxygen. As one’s ability to transport and use oxygen improves, regular daily activities can be performed with less fatigue
Exercising 30 to 40 minutes a day 3 days a week is enough to dramatically reduce your risk of heart disease.
When it comes to our overall health another lifestyle habit that is often under valued is sleep quality and quantity.
3. Sleep
Sleep is absolutely essential for our overall health. While stress can directly effect our sleep quality and quantity sleep disruptions can lead to long-term health issues.
Researchers found that sleep disruption activates a molecule that triggers inflammation and leads to fatty buildup in arteries.
The findings underscore the importance of getting enough quality sleep to maintain heart health. It also suggests new targets for fighting heart disease.
When we sleep our bodies naturally detox while also providing our organs with some well deserved breaks. Even as little as a 90 minute sleep loss can effect our cognitive ability.
Resulting in brain fog and verbal irregularities. Inflammation has a vital role in supporting our immune system. It allows white blood cells and nutrients to reach any area in need during a possible treat.
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4. Addictive habits
One of the most common lifestyle choices we make that are counter productive to our health comes in the form of addictive habits.
Things such as smoking, alcohol consumption, and excess caffeine have been directly linked to compromised heart health.
While the benefit of light to moderate alcohol consumption is somewhat controversial, excessive alcohol consumption is associated with increased risk for death, heart disease, and liver disease.
Studies show harm occurs when individuals consume more than 100 grams of alcohol, or about 7 drinks, per week. Worldwide, smoking is thought to account for almost 36% of first heart attacks.
Not only does smoking cause heart disease, but once you develop heart disease, if you keep smoking your heart problems will likely become much worse, much faster. And you will have a much higher chance of dying from your heart disease.
Caffeine is an incredibly popular stimulant. More than 85% of the United States population consumes at least one caffeinated beverage each day, and 96% of that consumption comes from coffee, tea, and soft drinks.
Caffeine affects the heart in multiple ways. Firstly, it promotes the release of noradrenaline and norepinephrine.
Among other things, these hormones increase heart rate and blood pressure. Additionally, caffeine can act on enzymes that stimulate heart contractions, causing the heart to contract with more force.
The body adapts to the effects of caffeine. Therefore, healthy people who regularly drink coffee are unlikely to experience symptoms such as heart palpitations.
Caffeine can cause heart palpitations in people with a sensitivity to caffeine and those with an underlying heart condition. If you’re new to caffeine consumption or drink excess amounts, you’re more likely to experience heart symptoms.
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5. Nutrition
The last lifestyle change is hands down one of the most important. Nutrition is without a doubt the unspoken hero to improve your overall health. Not all foods are created equally when it comes to heart health.
However, there are cardinal rules to follow when identifying which foods to increase and which to avoid. Sodium is one of the leading causes of cardiovascular issues.
A high sodium intake markedly enhances cardiac sympathetic activity in salt-sensitive and salt-resistant hypertension. Sodium increases inflammation throughout the body which in turn increases bloodpressure, hypertension, and heart disease.
Given that Americans consume an average of more than 3,400 milligrams (mg) of sodium each day. But the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend that Americans consume less than 2,300 mg of sodium each day as part of a healthy eating pattern.
Ideal foods to support and improve your heart health should be high in fiber, low in sodium, low in sugar, monounsaturated fats, and omega-3’s.
