How Stress and Risk LOWERS Blood Pressure

I frequently preach the importance of tackling stress to lower blood pressure. That’s stress hormone production, rather than just emotional stress.

But an interesting study from the University of California and published in The International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health shows that doing one of the most stressful jobs there is may actually lower your blood pressure.

This will turn blood pressure management upside down.

Firefighters have one of the most stressful, demanding jobs you can imagine. So researchers decided to analyze how their job affects their blood pressure.

Of the 330 firefighters they studied, 11% had high blood pressure. Of these, 50% had uncontrolled high blood pressure.

Now compare that to the general public, where almost 30% of adults have high blood pressure.

Since firefighters need to be in optimal physical shape, this shows that no matter how much stress you’re under, if you workout, you’re already ahead of the game.

But it didn’t stop there…

The researchers gave the firefighters a questionnaire to collect information about their working conditions:

1. Those who received FEWER calls tended to have higher blood pressure than those who were out fighting fires all the time. Meaning, sitting around doing nothing was much more stressful than dealing with situations.

2. Older, senior-ranking firefighters with more job demands had higher blood pressure than younger men with less responsibility. So the emotional and mental stress of having the load of responsibility was more burdensome on high blood pressure than the physical risk of fighting fires.

3. Longer, less regular work hours piled up blood pressure more than those with more regular, shorter shifts. We can assume that part of the problem here is not just working more but the negative effect irregular long hours have on the firefighter’s home and social lives.

All these results add up to one big conclusion…

Physically strenuous and even high-risk work doesn’t cause high blood pressure in the same way as emotionally and mentally stressful jobs that have low physical demands.

This is because adrenalin is the kick ass function of the physically active, risk job. Whereas the other stress hormone, cortisol, takes over in long-lasting emotionally and mentally challenging situations.

Cortisol piles up over a long period of time. And it can stay in your system for years after the emotional or mental challenges are not there anymore. That’s why simply retiring doesn’t help if you already have high blood pressure.

Our easy blood pressure exercises reboot your system and therefore flush out the cortisol pileup. Learn more and test-drive the exercises for yourself here…