How chronic stress affects your heart

When you’re under emotional stress, it’s not just a mental health concern. Stress can increase your risk for heart disease and trigger symptoms like chest pain, a racing or irregular heart beat or fatigue. Here’s what to know about stress and your heart.

Short-term stress and your heart

Temporary situations that cause fear, anger or excitement lasting a week or less are referred to as acute stress. Such situations could range from changing jobs to dealing with the effects of earthquake damage. Acute stress can increase the likelihood you’ll experience heart symptoms in the short-term.

Long-term stress and your heart

Unlike acute stress, chronic stress can go on for months or years. It could be a combination of difficulties you face regularly, like work or caregiving stress, financial difficulties or living in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe. Chronic stress can raise your risk for heart problems.

Stress and high blood pressure

Increased blood pressure is one of the key ways stress can affect your heart. When you’re facing a stressful situation, your blood pressure goes up temporarily. When you face a lot of stressful events, your blood pressure can often be higher than it should be.

Stress can also raise your risk of:

• Heart attack
• Inflammation in the blood vessels
• Irregular heartbeats (arrhythmias)
• Plaque buildup in your blood vessels (atherosclerosis)
• Reduced blood flow in the heart
• Stroke

Some people who already have heart disease have less blood flow to the heart when they’re stressed. Research has found they are at higher risk of heart attack or heart failure in the years after mental stress. 

Negative ways of coping

Stress is not only bad for your heart — it also makes you more likely to make choices that are bad for your heart. When you feel overwhelmed, you may:

• Drink too much alcohol
• Not take your medications as prescribed
• Reach for comfort foods, which tend to me less nutritious
• Skip your workout or scale back physical activity in general
• Sleep too much or not enough
• Smoke more 

How to help control stress

You can take steps to control stress and reduce its impact on your heart health.

• Figure out what’s causing your stress. Sometimes, it’s easy to point at things like work deadlines or family responsibilities that are piling up. In other cases, you might feel anxious without knowing why. When you can identify what’s causing your stress, you can figure out the best ways to reduce or manage it.
• Get the sleep you need. Sleeping for at least seven hours a night can help. But try not to oversleep or take long naps, since they can disrupt your sleep schedule.  
• Get treatment for other mental health conditions. Depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can also impact your heart health, so be sure you’re getting treatment if you need it.
• Learn stress management techniques. Lots of times, you can’t eliminate the stress in your life, but you can learn how to reduce its effects. Consider trying activities that bring you joy, biofeedback, deep breathing, mindfulness, meditation, prayer, reading or yoga.
• Move as much as possible. Physical activity can feel like a struggle when you’re emotionally strained, but even a short walk can help your heart and improve your mood, especially if you walk outside.
• Seek out support. You may find it helps lower your stress if you talk to a friend. If there’s a specific situation that’s behind your chronic stress, like caregiving or a health condition, consider joining a support group and sharing your experiences with others who understand what you’re going through.