Stress is a factor that often contributes to ill health in moms – especially heart attacks and hypertension. All stress and tension is hard on the heart as it makes it pump more strongly.
If you are a person who is naturally prone to stress or if you work or home environment is overly stressful, you need to learn how to keep your stress levels down.
Doing so is the only way that you will be able to reduce your blood pressure if stress is a major contributory factor, so learning how to effectively combat stress is essential.
There are many different things that you can study and learn about which will help you to master the art of controlling stress.
The first thing that you should consider is taking up a discipline or hobby like yoga or meditation that can teach various different techniques for keeping stress under control.
The best thing is that as a starting point, there is a great deal of the information that you need to see whether yoga or mediation is ‘your thing' on the net, for free. This means that you can start learning and practicing yoga or meditation in the comfort of your own home and that once you have mastered the basics, you can then take things another step further by joining a local group or class.
Practicing yoga is a great way of acquiring the discipline that you need to be able to switch off at those times when stress might otherwise take over. As you can read, there are various different types of yoga that you can practice ranging from ‘gentle' (sometimes called ‘hatha') yoga to the far more impressive sounding ‘power' (or ‘vinyasa') yoga.
Another factor about yoga to consider is that there are several yogic asanas (poses) that are believed to help relive high blood pressure as well. Various asanas such as suryanamaskar (the ‘sun pose'), matsyasana (the ‘fish pose'), vajrasana (the ‘thunderbolt pose') and shavasana (‘corpse pose') are all useful for reducing high blood pressure with regular practice. This is obviously another good reason for thinking of taking up yoga.
Even something as simple as disciplining yourself to breathe deeply and slowly whenever you encounter a situation which otherwise might become stressful can be an extremely powerful way of learning to control your emotions. As with the other disciplines highlighted in this chapter, there are many different ways of teaching yourself how to breathe deeply and slowly when things start to go wrong, but perhaps the easiest strategy for learning how to control your breathing is to adopt the Pavlov method of learning to breathe deeply.
It is one that I would definitely recommend you adopt to teach yourself how to breathe deeply and slowly whenever stress threatens. Do this and you can significantly reduce the amount of stress you feel in your life, which should in turn help to reduce your hypertension.