HOW ANGER, COLD CAN HURT YOUR HEART
Many people believe that losing your temper is a great way of letting off steam and putting a grudge or a troubling situation behind you. They are wrong. Anger hurts you far more than the person bearing the brunt of your vitriolic venting.
A little anger is a normal and healthy emotion, but it becomes destructive if it gets disruptive and out-of-control. Even short outbursts can trigger heart attack and stroke, reported a study in the European Heart Journal. People are more prone to having heart attacks, strokes, and disturbances in heart rhythm within two hours of an anger outburst, found the review of scientific papers published between 1966 and 2013.
Cold weather can also stop your heart. Winter cold doubles the risk of heart attack and stroke in people with high blood pressure, with people over 65 being at most risk. In the cold, blood vessels constrict to help conserve body heat, which pushes blood pressure up and puts a strain on the heart. The cold also activates the sympathetic system — which is responsible for the fight or flight syndrome — that increases the secretion of hormones called adrenaline and noradrenaline, which further raises blood pressure, increases heart rate and pushes up the body’s oxygen demand.
The most common time of day for heart attacks is the morning — around the time when a person is waking up from sleep — which are also the most damaging. Heart attacks that occur between 6 am and noon are likely to leave a 20% larger area of dead heart tissue (infarct) than an attack at any other time of day. Early treatment with clot-busting drugs and angioplasty can limit damage.
The common cold is another trigger. According to the American Heart Association, decongestants raise blood pressure and should not be used by people with high blood pressure, who should instead opt for decongestant-free cold medicine, if needed.
Complications such as pneumonia and chest congestion associated with the flu can make it hard for the lungs to absorb oxygen efficiently, making the heart pump harder and putting it at risk of a stress- related breakdown.
While regular physical activity is recommended for managing heart disease and lowering the risk of death from high blood pressure, stroke and Type 2 diabetes, too much exercise can kill you too.
Heart attack survivors who exercise excessively are at increased risk of dying from heart problems, concluded a study of 2,400 physically active heartattack survivors published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
The research recommended about five hours of vigorous exercise per week as the safe upper range for long-term heart health, additionally warning that people should rest one or two days a week.
There are other ways in which emotions can hurt your heart. Strong emotional stress can trigger takotsubo cardiomyopathy, popularly referred to as the broken-heart syndrome, which results in the weakening of the heart’s left ventricle, its main pumping chamber. This condition, which is usually found in post-menopausal women, is associated with strong emotional or physical stress.
Typically, the symptoms begin just minutes to hours after exposure to severe and unexpected stress, such as grief, fear or anger, or physical stressors such as a stroke, seizure, asthma attack or significant blood loss.
The symptoms are not psychosomatic. People have characteristic heart-attack symptoms: acute chest pain, shortness of breath, congestive heart failure, low blood pressure, abnormal electrocardiogram (ECG) readings and blood tests readings that show high levels of heart disease-related enzymes — but tests show normal heart function and blood flow. In a typical heart attack, blocked arteries show up and the heart cells starved of blood die.
While there is no data for broken-heart syndrome in India, it accounts for 1% to 2% of admissions for suspected heart attacks in industrialised nations, reports the British Medical Journal. In four in five cases, the symptoms disappear without a trace within a couple of weeks; heart damage persists in the rest. In rare cases, the shock causes severe heart muscle weakness that can lead to congestive heart failure and life-threatening heart rhythm abnormalities.
None of us can avoid life’s stressors, but it’s easy to remember to stay warm in cold weather and to work at moderating our responses to emotional situations. After all, no outburst or trauma is worth permanently hurting your heart.