Is the Internet Raising Your Blood Pressure and Slowly Killing You?

Most people have discovered that the Internet consumes an increasingly large part of their time. In fact, nowadays many of us depend on the Internet for our jobs, entertainment, social life, and education.

Scientists have now warned that it is not only your annoyance with your slow computer or biased bloggers that can chase your blood pressure up. There is more you should know.

But there is a simple trick to completely reverse all negative affects of Internet use on your blood pressure.

In 2014, researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit published a study in the Journal of School Nursing that concluded that heavy Internet users had an increased risk of high blood pressure compared to light and medium users.

They republished the study in October 2015 to widespread media exposure.

Of the 134 heavy Internet users in their study, 26, or 19.4 percent, had high blood pressure. They defined heavy users as people who spent 14 hours or more per week online.

All this means that two hours per day online can raise your blood pressure, which is pretty depressing considering that most people probably spend significantly more time online than that.

Even more alarmingly, the authors found that their heavy users spent an average of 25 hours online per week, amounting to about 3.5 hours online per day. When you add up the time you spend working online, chatting on Facebook and Skype, reading email, reading your favorite websites, shopping, and banking, you may well find that you spend considerably more time online than the study’s average heavy user.

Incredibly, their light users with normal blood pressure spent less than two hours per day online, four or fewer days per week. It’s rather amazing to think that such people still exist in the 21st-century!

So what must you do?

Give up your online job, isolate yourself from your online friends, collect almost no information on the things that interest and help you, and return to 1980?

Luckily, the study contains some clues. They discovered that 43 percent of the heavy Internet users were considered overweight compared to 26 percent of the light users, from which they concluded that the heavy users did too little exercise.

Little other research has been done on the relationship between Internet use and blood pressure. If the problem with high Internet use is the amount of time you spend sitting down, studies on other sedentary activities and occupations can shed some light on the subject.

In the International Journal of Medical Sciences, Indian researchers found in 2005 that people in sedentary occupations had a higher risk of hypertension than active laborers. Nigerian researchers discovered in 2014 that sedentary bankers had a significantly higher risk of hypertension than somewhat active traffic wardens (34 percent vs 22 percent).

If it’s the sedentary nature of Internet use that is the problem, the solution is relatively straightforward.

In 2010, the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise published an article that concluded that riding in a car and watching television for 23 hours a week (combined) increases men’s risk of death from cardiovascular disease. However, the paper also found that those who engaged in enough exercise had a lower risk of cardiovascular death, regardless of their level of sedentary behavior.

If this is translatable to those who have not yet been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease too, it means that you have to get off that chair for at least an hour a day for a dedicated exercise session. It will also help to walk around the house or office, tend to your garden, clean your house, and engage in other active tasks in-between.

By far the most effective exercises I’ve come across are our high blood pressure exercises. These three easy exercises have been proven to drop blood pressure below 120/80 in as little as 9 minutes…