Chill·ax: /'CHilaks/ (verb) calm down and relax
I’m Under A Lot of Stress, Doc!
Boy, do I hear that a lot. What is stress? In the dictionary the definition is four numbers: 2020. Stress is an unpleasant and/or challenging thing in life.
Sudden Stress and Heart Attacks
There is no better way to connect the dots between stress and heart attacks than to study what happens with earthquakes. On the day of the 1994 Northridge, California earthquake, there were 24 heart attack deaths compared with only 4 four deaths from heart attacks on any other day. As a side note, most heart-attack-causing earthquakes are greater than 6.0 on the Richter scale and heart attacks can increase for weeks after one.
Stress Really CAN Break Your Heart
A sudden jolt of stress can stop parts of the heart from moving. I’ve seen patients come into the hospital with heart attacks. They have a procedure to find a blocked artery, but none exists. On further questioning, it becomes clear that these people have had a recent stressful experience. Examples include the sudden death of a family member, being outbid on a home purchase, an intense argument, or having a breakdown at work. Thankfully, the heart will return to normal after a few weeks. There’s about one episode a week that comes through our hospital.
Long-Term Stress and Heart Attacks
Long-term stress is incredibly dangerous for the heart. In a study of 15,000 people, the longer people felt “out of control” in their lives, the more likely they were to have a heart attack. The study showed that it didn’t matter what was causing the stress (finances, relationships, work, home, etc.); instead, IT WAS THE LENGTH OF TIME ONE HAD STRESS AND HOW ONE HANDLED THE STRESS that predicted the heart attack.
What Kind of Work Stress Causes Heart Attacks?
Work stress is twice as likely to cause a heart attack if work is competitive, hostile, and time consuming without much prospect for promotion. One Dutch study found that men who had stressful jobs and got divorced wound up with a retirement plan that involved an early grave.
Does Divorce Cause Heart Attacks?
One study followed divorced men and women over 18 years. Women who were divorced showed the same risk of a heart attack as someone who smoked or had diabetes. When women remarried, this risk did NOT disappear. Divorced men were also more likely to have a heart attack, BUT if men remarried, the heart attack risk disappeared! No comment there.
Does Being Poor Cause Heart Attacks?
The amount of money one made had no bearing on the risk of a heart attack. It was the constant burden of debt one had that caused stress. With that in mind, this man is probably a better preventive cardiologist than I am.
How Does Stress Cause Heart Disease?
This is cool. In a Harvard study, 293 people had part of their brain (the amygdala) imaged for stress activity. It was shown that the more “stress” seen in the amygdala, the more active the immune system was and the higher the amount of heart-attack-causing inflammation was present in the blood vessels. More importantly, the higher the stress activity in the brain, the more likely the person was to have a heart attack.
How Else Does Stress Cause Heart Attacks?
Constant stress can cause people to eat a lot of ice cream! Stress can also lead to higher blood pressure, anger, weight gain, and poor sleep – all of which can increase your chance of a heart attack.
Gaining Control
The bottom line: the more people feel in control of their lives, the less likely they are to have a heart attack. Here are a few proven ways to gain control of your life and prevent a heart attack:
1) Go to Church (and stay awake or not): Do you know what the best vitamin is for a believer? B-1. In Israel it was observed in a 1986 study that 80% of heart attack patients did not attend church. People who attend church weekly for most of their lives live on average 7 years longer. Read about this in a prior post.
2) Say “I love you” to your spouse (if you don’t have one, go find one): Happily married men and women really do live longer.
3) Take a hike (but not a long one off a short pier): In England, they found that those who spent more than two hours a week in nature were more likely to stay in good health. Check out the prior post here about nature.
4) Make friends (and love your enemies): Making friends promotes healthy heart beats. . . no joke.
5) Turn down the volume (move your teenagers to the other end of the house): As chronic background noise increases beyond normal conversation (50 decibels), heart attacks increase. Living around noises like car traffic, airplanes, manufacturing plants, etc. is associated with a higher rate of heart attacks. Read more about noise in a prior post.
6) Take a nap (another reason to go to church): One to two naps per week for about 20-30 minutes at a time reduces risk of heart attacks. You could even compete in the Napping Olympics as seen in a prior post.
7) Get a dog (not a cat): One study in patients with heart attacks showed that owning a dog made your heart attack risk four times lower. Read all about dogs in a prior post.
8) Say thank you everyday (and mean it): Heart attack patients who were found to be “grateful” people were more likely to take their medications, eat healthy, exercise, and report less depression and anxiety. Figure out how to tell if you’re grateful in a prior post.
9) Laugh (but don’t drink root beer at the same time): In a survey of over 200,000 Japanese men and women, those who “almost or never laughed” were 21% more likely to have a heart attack. Read about laughing in a prior post.
10) Sleep 7 hours (zzzzzzz): People who have difficulty going to sleep, staying asleep, or waking up feeling “unrested” are more likely to have heart attacks. Another study showed that those who slept about 7 hours per night had the “youngest” blood vessels compared with those who slept less OR more. Read about heart-healthy sleep in a prior post.
11) Find a purpose in life (don’t just be good – be good for something).
12) Treat depression (it’s not just in your head): Depression is a real disease like heart attacks or cancer. Don’t ignore it. Treating it prevents heart attacks.
