Do you know how stress could cause a seemingly healthy person to get a heart attack? Have you wonder how an emotional turmoil caused by stress can led to silent inflammation in the blood vessels?
In this article, we take a close look at the intricate relationship between stress, our heart and the body’s inflammatory response.
What is a Stress Response?
You’ve probably heard of the fight-or-flight response built into each of us: When we face danger, our stress level goes up, and our heart rate, blood flow, blood pressure as well as breathing increase to deliver more oxygen and nutrients to parts of the body that needed them most. Our alertness heightens and we are poised to take quick actions. Imagine a threatened cat — with legs and hairs that stand on end — and you’ll get the picture.
With energies diverted for immediate uses, functions that are deemed less critical during a stress response, such as our digestive, immune and reproduction systems, are slowed down or suppressed temporarily. This makes sense because when our life is in danger, the last thing in our mind is digest our food, fight against a flu virus or conceive an offspring. After all, these things are relevant only if we survive the immediate danger.
Once the danger is gone and we are alive to tell the tale, our blood pressure, heart rate and everything else gradually return back to normal, pretty much like nothing has ever happened.
Stress Response that Doesn’t Turn Off
This built-in stress response is a brilliant way to help us react to perceived danger quickly and keep us alive, at least during the Stone Age when we have to wrestle with saber-tooth creatures for survival. But in modern days, how many times a year do you actually encounter events that require you to literally run or fight for your life? More often than not, we wrestle with unseen threats, like the fears of losing our job and retirement funds, which often put our stress response on high alert.
But, that is not the original intention of having the stress response. It is meant to prepare us for short-term acute stress, not chronic psychological stress that we now face almost everyday.
As clever as our brain may be, it still can’t differentiate a stress caused by a hungry bear and one that is triggered by an impending job interview. Both situations activate the same stress response within us — elevated blood pressure, heartbeat and breathing, and suppressed immunity, digestion and reproductive function. Furthermore, while a life-and-death encounter with a bear may last only for a short period, an anticipated stressful event that keeps replaying in our mind is more likely to last longer, sometimes days or even months.
The price, however, we pay for turning on the stress response constantly is high. Much like chronic inflammation that never turns off, chronic stress takes its toll on our health, especially our heart, and can literally clog us to death.
Stress Promotes Inflammation
First of all, chronic stress induces blood pressure to stay high, causing hypertension. Chronically high blood pressure damages our blood vessels, wearing and tearing them down quicker than normal wear and tear. The otherwise smooth linings in the interior of our blood vessels suffer microscopic tears due to high pressure and become uneven. Small, tiny depressions are resulted that trigger an inflammatory response as the body attempts to repair them. A flurry of pro-inflammatory cells and hormones arrived at the sites of injury together with other fatty nutrients, such as cholesterol, in the blood stream.
To make matter worse, when we are stressed, our blood tends to thicken up, increasing the likelihood of clumps and blood clots forming. As a result, a mixture of different types of cells, hormones, fats and what-have-you clump around the inner linings of the blood vessels, forming plaques that constrict the flow of blood. When enough plaques accumulated to reduce blood flow, all sorts of possible health conditions, including heart disease, start to manifest.
Those thick accumulated plaques in the blood vessels are not immovable fixtures. They can become loose and break up due to increased stress and blood pressure. This may sound like a good thing since now we’ve less plaques to worry about.
On the contrary, that’s actually the beginning of our worst nightmare. A dislodged plaque travels freely within the blood stream and becomes a moving time bomb. If it gets stuck in one of our heart arteries, it triggers a heart attack, and if it gets trapped in a blood vessel in the brain, we end up with a stroke!
That’s one of the reasons why ‘healthy’ individuals with normal or even low cholesterol levels can also suffer from coronary diseases. In fact, only about fifty percent of those who have suffered a heart attack are found to have high cholesterol readings. It may well turn out that some people with healthy cholesterol levels have suffered sufficient damaged blood vessels for inflammation to take place, and for runaway plaques to form.
What You Can Do
Don’t let stress kill you! Coping with stress is one of the important ways to keep chronic inflammation at bay, and maintain a healthy heart. Check out some of these articles for useful stress-management and heart-friendly tips:
- How to Relax and Master Your Stress
- How to Meditate
- Reduce Stress & Anxiety with Humor
- How to Live at Peace with Your Emotions
- How to Prevent Heart Disease
- Foods that Melt Stress Away
Looking for ways to reduce inflammation? Then, be sure to check out our Anti-Inflammation Resources »
I’ve read that inflammation is the root of all illness. Not surprised that stress is a contributing factor. Great article!
Thanks, Clara. The link between inflammation and poor diet, smoking and environmental pollutants is easy to grasp and understand. But many don’t realize that mental stress can also promote inflammation even without external triggers. The thoughts we have, the negative emotions we keep inside and the stress level we perceive can create a series of reactions in the body that lead to dreadful health ailments.