Give Yourself The Gift Of A Healthy Lifestyle
Engage in physical activity regularly. Do what you enjoy walk, swim, ride a bike or jog to get your muscles going. Letting go of the tension in your body will help you feel better.
Limit alcohol, dont overeat and dont smoke.
Relaxing for short periods during your workday, at night and on weekends may help lower your blood pressure. Another great stress-buster is to get regular physical activity.
Can Your Blood Pressure Go Up From Anxiety
Anxiety can increase your blood pressure. But its important to note that occasional spikes in your blood pressure dont mean you have high blood pressure. Elevated anxiety can cause temporary spikes in your blood pressure, which is not the same as having hypertension.
Long-term anxiety and stress can lead to chronic hypertension and increase your risk of developing heart disease. But if youre managing your thoughts with healthy coping mechanisms, your blood pressure should return to normal levels after a few hours.
It might be difficult for someone who lives with long-term anxiety to notice these short-term spikes in their blood pressure because they are so used to living with stress or worrying all the time.
Can Anxiety Cause High Blood Pressure
According to the Anxiety & Depression Association of America , anxiety disorders affect more than 40 million adults every year in the United States. Anxiety can cause a wide range of physical symptoms, including an increase in blood pressure levels.
Although anxiety isnt linked to chronic high blood pressure, both short-term and chronic anxiety may cause your blood pressure to spike.
In this article, well explore the link between anxiety and high blood pressure and treatment options for both.
doesnt cause chronic high blood pressure. However, it can lead to a short-term increase in blood pressure.
When you begin to feel anxious because of a stressful situation, your body enters fight-or-flight mode. This happens due to the activation of your sympathetic nervous system. During fight-or-flight mode, your adrenaline and cortisol levels rise, both of which can lead to an increase in blood pressure.
Although stress and anxiety can cause high blood pressure, its only temporary, and levels generally return to normal once youve calmed down again.
High blood pressure, or hypertension, is a chronic condition that occurs when blood pressure levels are elevated. Chronic high blood pressure can be quite dangerous and can cause significant damage to the body, especially the brain, heart, kidneys, and eyes.
Hypertension is classified into two categories:
Treatment options that may help include:
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How To Overcome Affected Blood Pressure
Your blood pressure is specifically monitored by your brain to ensure that your body is operating at an ideal level. Temporary spikes in blood pressure can cause concerns, but your body creates them for a reason.
It is important to make sure you learn to manage your anxiety to help ensure healthy blood pressure. Whether you have panic attacks, generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, etc., you still need to make sure that you’re treating your anxiety in order to also treat your anxiety-related high blood pressure.
Summary:
Anxiety typically makes blood pressure increase, and in some cases can make blood pressure decrease. However, blood pressure fluctuates throughout the day with or without anxiety. It is best to not be too concerned with ones own blood pressure, and instead focus on anxiety reduction.
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Anxiety And Your Heart
High blood pressure is a silent killer. It often doesnt feel like its affecting your body, but chronic high blood pressure can be dangerous and even deadly. High blood pressure is the leading cause of stroke and heart attack in the United States.
When youre stressed or anxious, your nervous system releases hormones called catecholamines that affect your blood pressure. The fight-or-flight response can increase your heart rate, which can increase your blood pressure. This is why managing your stress levels and anxiety is so important for maintaining healthy blood pressure levels.
Anxiety can also lead to other problems that can negatively affect your health, such as insomnia, which increases cortisol levels in the body and increases your risk of developing high blood pressure because cortisol affects our cardiovascular system by increasing the production of fatty acids that may lead to plaque buildup in the arteries.
Anxiety can also make you sweat more due to hormones being released when were feeling tense, which causes dehydration and increases our likelihood of developing high blood pressure. In this case, you may want to consider using an herbal supplement designed for anxiety relief such as L-theanine or 5-HTP to help with this problem.
Diagnosis Of Stress And High Blood Pressure
In many cases, chronic stress begins as acute stress. In such cases, you might not immediately notice that you are stressed. Stress may manifest in physical symptoms such as headaches, dizziness, chest pain, and trouble sleeping. Your healthcare provider can diagnose high blood pressure. A blood pressure cuff will be used to measure your blood pressure levels if you have consistent high readings over two or more appointments, you might be diagnosed with high blood pressure. Normal blood pressure levels should be less than 120/80mm Hg for adults.
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Treatment Of Stress And High Blood Pressure
Treatment for high blood pressure comprises a combination of medication and lifestyle changes. While stress doesnt need to be treated with medication, adopting healthy lifestyle changes will help you keep it in check. In specific scenarios, people with high blood pressure and experiencing severe stress might be prescribed beta-blockers. Beta-blockers are used to alleviate symptoms of stress.
Anxiety And Your Blood Pressure
Lately, maybe youve been feeling jumpy and anxious and wondering what all that worry could be doing to your blood pressure. Can anxiety cause high blood pressure?
Its kind of a chicken and egg scenario: Anxiety may lead to high blood pressure. But a diagnosis of high blood pressureand its implicationsmay also trigger feelings of anxiety.
Untreated high blood pressure can set the stage for heart attack, stroke and other complications by damaging blood vessels throughout your body. A blood pressure of less than 120/80 mm Hg is considered normal.
Systolic blood pressure, the upper number in a blood pressure measurement, refers to how much pressure your blood is exerting against your artery walls when your heart beats. Diastolic blood pressure, the lower number, refers to how much pressure your blood is exerting against your artery walls when your heart is at rest between beats.
Anxiety disorders are different from temporary stresslike the kind that kicks in before a big job interview or in the wake of a major life decision.
Anxiety disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and various phobias are characterized by near-constant worry and often physical symptoms that interfere with daily life. About 40 million people in the U.S. will have an anxiety disorder in any given year, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.
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How Stress Affects Your Health
In addition to the emotional discomfort we feel when faced with a stressful situation, our bodies react by releasing stress hormones into the blood. These hormones prepare the body for the fight or flight response by making the heart beat faster and constricting blood vessels to get more blood to the core of the body instead of the extremities.
Constriction of blood vessels and increase in heart rate does raise blood pressure, but only temporarily when the stress reaction goes away, blood pressure returns to its pre-stress level. This is called situational stress, and its effects are generally short-lived and disappear when the stressful event is over.
Fight or flight is a valuable response when we are faced with an imminent threat that we can handle by confronting or fleeing. However, our modern world contains many stressful events that we cant handle with those options. Chronic stress causes our bodies to go into high gear on and off for days or weeks at a time. The links between chronic stress and blood pressure are not clear and are still being studied.
Will Xanax Help Lower Blood Pressure
Yes, it may lower your blood pressure over the long term but regular uptake is not recommended.
Xanax is a powerful benzodiazepine and its not recommended for long-term use. The body becomes dependent on the drug at which point regular usage is necessary to avoid withdrawal symptoms.
When you stop taking Xanax, your blood pressure may go up. If you need to lower your BP, there are other options such as lifestyle changes, supplements, and herbal remedies that dont have the same risks.
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How Are Anxiety Disorders Treated In Nashville Tn
Anxiety disorders are often treated with a combination of prescription medication and therapy. Medications such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors , serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors , tricyclic antidepressants, and benzodiazepines have all proved to be effective at easing certain symptoms of anxiety disorders.
Therapy for anxiety can help people manage remaining symptoms and make healthy behavior changes. Cognitive behavioral therapy , dialectical behavior therapy , Spravato treatment, neurofeedback therapy, biosound therapy, AlphaStim therapy, and other services can be beneficial components of effective treatment for anxiety.
The specific elements that may be included in a persons customized anxiety treatment plan should be determined by factors such as which type of disorder they have, what types of symptoms they have been experiencing, and whether or not they have a co-occurring mental health concern. This is why it can be so important to receive care from a provider who will conduct a thorough assessment and develop a customized course of treatment.
Things That Can Increase Your Risk Of Getting High Blood Pressure
You might be more at risk if you:
- eat too much salt and do not eat enough fruit and vegetables
- do not do enough exercise
- drink too much alcohol or coffee
- do not get much sleep or have disturbed sleep
- have a relative with high blood pressure
- are of black African or black Caribbean descent
- live in a deprived area
Making healthy lifestyle changes can sometimes help reduce your chances of getting high blood pressure and help lower your blood pressure if it’s already high.
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Blood Pressure Changes And Anxiety
Anxiety is the activation of your fight or flight system a system designed to keep you safe from harm when no danger is present. The fight or flight system causes a number of physical changes that would help you respond to a predator or threat if one was present, but can be distressing when they occur without that danger.
Different types of anxiety can affect your blood pressure in different ways. To understand how anxiety can impact blood pressure, first you must gain a basic understanding of blood pressure and how it fluctuates.
Finally, it is always important to remember that blood pressure fluctuates throughout the day due to exertion, diet, hydration, and more. Blood pressure is not constant even if you do not have any anxiety. So “high blood pressure” may not be high blood pressure at all, and may instead be a reading during one of these fluctuations.
Acute Stress And Blood Pressure
Acute stress is temporary stress caused by a specific event, like the ones mentioned above. Bouts of anxiety, like having a panic attack, can also cause acute stress that raises your blood pressure.
If were in a stressful situation, the normal physiologic response is to increase blood pressure, Dr. Laffin explains. Acute stress can increase your heart rate and rev up your sympathetic nervous system, which, in turn, raises your blood pressure.
In these cases, your symptoms dissipate once your stressor is gone. You complete your deadline, you make up with your spouse, you catch your dog, you come down from your panic attack and soon, your blood pressure returns to normal, too.
Its normal to experience changes in blood pressure throughout the day, and your body is typically skilled at managing them. The body can handle acute changes in blood pressure pretty well, Dr. Laffin says. What were really worried about is chronically elevated blood pressure.
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Hypertension Fears Causing Anxiety
It’s also important to note that fear of hypertension can also lead to the development of an anxiety disorder and the overall fear of anxiety. Those who check their blood pressure regularly are extremely prone to this. Blood pressure changes throughout the day, and those who are always checking their blood pressure are bound to find several time periods where their blood pressure is high.
Similarly, those that have high blood pressure already may be more prone to panic attacks, because they have anxiety that their blood pressure might cause them health problems. Any change in the way their heart feels and their anxiety spikes dramatically, possibly leading to further high blood pressure and severe anxiety.
In both of these cases, hypertension is causing anxiety, but more in a secondary manner. Hypertension itself isn’t causing anxiety, but worries about hypertension are.
How Anxiety Affects Blood Pressure
- Anxiety has a complicated relationship to blood pressure.
- Typically, blood pressure changes from anxiety are not dangerous unless you have a pre-existing condition.
- We identify 4 different causes of blood pressure changes with anxiety.
- Those that frequently monitor blood pressure may also be giving themselves anxiety.
- Blood pressure varies throughout the day, even without anxiety, but an anxiety treatment plan offers a longer-term solution.
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High Blood Pressure Is More Common During Anxiety Attacks
Hypertension can affect any individual, and it has several risk factors however, it is quite common with those suffering from anxiety attacks, as stress and anxiety causes a rapid rise in blood pressure.
It’s important to monitor your hypertension. But it’s also important to trust your doctor, and recognize that:
- Not all hypertension is caused by anxiety.
- Anxiety does not always cause hypertension.
You’re likely aware of the former. Hypertension is a natural part of aging and diet. It’s something you should monitor and try to control, but it’s also something that cannot always be controlled easily.
What you may not be aware of is that anxiety itself – a condition that is associated with extreme stress – doesn’t always cause hypertension, even when you’re anxious. That’s because when a healthy person with normal blood pressure experiences anxiety for an extended period of time , the body actually adjusts your blood pressure levels to account for the anxiety. So while anxiety can cause hypertension initially, chronic anxiety is considered unlikely to cause hypertension after the body adjusts to it.
Ways To Reduce Stress And Anxiety And Raise Your Bp
Exercising
Being active has long been linked to lowering blood pressure. This may be because being active requires you to be physically and mentally active which triggers the relaxation response.
As weve covered, stress and anxiety can affect your blood pressure. If this is the case for you, try to relax and change your conversation. A quick stroll in nature or taking a relaxing bath can do wonders.
Relaxing music
Many people find that listening to relaxing music helps them relax and fall asleep. You can use a playlist on your phone or computer or download an app that allows you to add relaxing sounds.
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What Can You Do If Anxiety Is Contributing To Your High Blood Pressure
Physical and mental health are closely linked, and anxiety and blood pressure are no exception. There are lots of self-care tools available to reduce stress levels that may help reduce high blood pressure:
- Visit your healthcare provider as recommended. Annual checkups are important, and additional visits are crucial if something doesnt feel right. Communicate openly with your provider. This makes them aware of what youre experiencing so that they can best help you.
- Connect to your family or a supportive community. You may have a loved one with similar issues, and it can be helpful to seek support and share ideas.
Tips For Decreasing Anxiety
- Eating a healthy diet that can improve heart health
- Practicing mindfulness or meditation
- Reducing as many life stressors as you canthis may mean saying no more or re-prioritizing tasks and accepting that you may just not get to some things.
- Medications are sometimes appropriate as either a short-term step or a longer-term management tool for people diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.
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