Stress May Be Hurting You in More Ways Than One

Podcast Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to Love Your Heart, brought to you by Cleveland Clinic’s Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart, Vascular and Thoracic Institute. These podcasts will help you learn more about your heart, thoracic, and vascular systems, ways to stay healthy and information about diseases and treatment options. Enjoy.

Luke Laffin, MD:

Hi there. My name's Luke Laffin, and I'm a Preventive Cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic. And it's great to speak with you today about stress and the heart. And what we're really going to focus on is how important it is to be aware of stress and how it can impact, ultimately, heart health.

Luke Laffin, MD:

It's been a rough last couple years for everyone, okay. Going through COVID pandemic amongst other factors throughout the United States. And so, I'm seeing in my practice, and many of my colleagues are too, increasing levels of stress, and this manifests in a variety of manners, okay. We can have acute stress, which are short periods of time. But with this ongoing pandemic of two-plus years, we can see chronic stressors as well. How we react to stress is important, but also the impact that chronic stress has on some of our specific lifestyle factors can play a big role in terms of cardiovascular health.

Luke Laffin, MD:

What we oftentimes see with chronic stress is people are not making the right heart-healthy choices. So, they're less apt to be making their own meals, okay. Maybe more eating out in that scenario because they don't have the time, or the energy, or the inclination to do that. And so, they're choosing dietary patterns that are high in sodium, potentially high in fat. One other factor, and it relates to dietary factors as well, are the increased alcohol consumption that we can oftentimes see.

Luke Laffin, MD:

People use this sometimes as a coping mechanism. It's not a great coping mechanism, of course, to do that. There's good data showing that over the COVID-19 pandemic, alcohol consumption significantly increased. Both of those factors can have adverse impact on blood pressure, cholesterol, and just overall heart health. The other thing that we've seen when stress and the heart is that people don't make the time to get regular exercise. When you don't regularly exercise, it starts this downward spiral, particularly, once you get past about 40, 45 years of age where you just get more tired, and you're more or less, excuse me, you're less likely to want to exercise, and just becomes this downward spiral.

Luke Laffin, MD:

You get more deconditioned, so you don't want to exercise because you get tired when you do it. So, it's really important to try and break out of those habits as much as possible. And we know exercise is good for so many things. Blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, and just overall general well-being. The other factor that we oftentimes see that is increasingly explored is the impact of sleep on heart health and how stress impacts sleep. Of course, if we have a stressful day at work, we may tend to have more difficulty sleeping if our mind is racing, and if that is prolonged and happens more than once or multiple nights, or we have insomnia, or just disrupted sleep that can have very negative impacts on our overall well-being, our ability to function the next day, and then in terms of our blood pressure as well.

Luke Laffin, MD:

What we generally say is we want to be aiming for six to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep a night. And so, if you're not getting that, it's best to talk to your doctor about nonpharmacological measures, so non-medication ways to help you sleep better, particularly involving things like a good bedtime routine, et cetera. And then, if those don't work, then talking about short courses of some medicines to try and help you sleep as well.

Luke Laffin, MD:

Now, the one question that I oftentimes get is, what's the best way to manage stress? And I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all to do this. When we see it most times, it has to be individualized to the person. So, if exercise is your outlet, then you have to try and find a way to make that a part of your day. Even if it's just 20 minutes during the day, that can be very beneficial and helpful in that setting.

Luke Laffin, MD:

If it's due to your job, then it's talking with your supervisors or people that work around you, and trying to say, how can I continue to do my job but also bring that stress level down? And we see that oftentimes with people with very uncontrolled blood pressure, maybe they work a night shift, something like that, or their job is very stressful, and in rare circumstances, but it does happen, that sometimes they have to quit their job or find something new to do because it's so poor for their health.

Luke Laffin, MD:

So, these are just a few things that we really need to focus on as we know that stress does impact heart health, particularly over a long-term basis. Thanks very much for chatting with us today.

Announcer:

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