When it comes to high blood pressure, researchers from England and Finland have now identified the single main culprit.
They cast their nets wide, with their study looking at 7000 people for clues about the main drivers of this damaging condition.
And, contrary to many previous studies, this one didn’t blame it all on diet or lack of exercise.
If you want a clue, it begins with the letter ‘S’…
The ‘S’ word behind high blood pressure is stress, which is unsurprising because of the way that it exacerbates or encourages so many other conditions.
Plenty of people will tell you that they don’t feel stressed, but this research digs into decades of findings to show that everybody suffers some degree of stress of one sort or another.
Even the things that you happily take in your stride everyday count as stress: whether it’s work worries, relationship difficulties, physical illness, environmental noise or poor dietary choices, they all add up to pressure which the body can’t resolve, and which quietly builds up.
The result of this constant overload is disease in mind and body. When the body can’t cope with the load, it eventually breaks down.
This landmark study appears in the European Heart Journal, and it underlines the need for greater stress awareness. As modern lives become more complicated, we face a mountain of stressful challenges that pile up on a daily basis.
People with the highest stress levels are twice as likely to suffer a heart attack as those with the lowest.
The researchers were surprised to find that people with high stress levels were not unaware of what was happening, but they often didn’t help themselves. They knew it was affecting their health, but they didn’t use the proven therapies that have been shown to help.
This is a huge shame, because they could easily be cutting stress out of their lives using nothing more than some simple relaxation and mind-body awareness techniques. They could get their blood pressure down to 120/80 in 24 hours.