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Stress Management for BP Reduction
I have done just about everything in the lifestyle arena to manage my blood pressure without medication. (My BP is ok with medication, but the required dosage is slowly increasing.) I exercise, have normal weight, waist circumference under 32in, and get 7-9 hours of sleep every night. I even worked with a heart health dietician to optimize what was already a pretty good diet. The dietician before we started working together thought that getting my BP down and coming off the medication was a given ... no problem. Yet, after several months, the BP didn't really budge.
I tried stretching at the suggestion of the dietitian and it has really made me feel young again ... truly amazing ... but did nothing for my BP. The one thing I have not done systematically is stress management.
I am wondering if anyone has done some kind of stress management activity that was successful for them. What did you do? How did you fit it into your life? I have seen lots of different approaches, yet I am very interested to hear some experiences (and reasons to have hope)!! I'm grateful that my body responds to the BP medicine. Yet, I'd still like to get off it if I can.
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I know what you mean... I find I do better with scheduling, but I resist it. Then after multiple times or even weeks to months of not doing the thing, whatever it is...then I'll try scheduling...and suddenly I can fit it in more often. I think I'm resisting my nature lol.
It's really difficult managing anxiety after a heart attack or other medical condition... I have a chronic health condition, and in working with my therapists, PTs, and doctor (she is an integrative physician, which helps), I learned that medical trauma--meaning a traumatic stress response after a major health event or development of a chronic condition--is very common. But of course, it's not really something that specialists bring up, and if you do, they tend to want to throw more pills at it. But just after hearing from my care team that it's normal helped a lot.
I have POTS, and it's a condition that causes my heart rate to shoot up, which then causes symptoms of anxiety. It was worse when I didn't know what the problem was, but even now that I do know what the problem is, just being hyper-aware of it has the paradoxical effect of making me anxious because I worry about knowing what to do if it happens. And hyper-vigilance is a symptom of traumatic stress lol, so my doctors basically taught me to be hyper-vigilant, but when it goes too far, that's a problem too.
It's not a bad thing to use medication for it if you need it, but if you can incorporate even just 5 minutes a day of breathing practice or mindfulness, over time, it can really help. It doesn't even have to be complicated. My PT just taught me to focus on what's around me, i.e. there's a technique called 5-4-3-2-1, where you name 5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear, 3 things you can smell, 2 things you can touch, 1 thing you can taste. Just the act of focusing on a specific thing can stop the swirl of the over-activity in the amygdala. It's the same part of the brain that gets overactive with both pain and anxiety, which is why it's so common that one can exacerbate the other.