Too high or too low, and we have a real issue. Maintaining a healthy blood pressure is crucial in keeping the rest of your body in check and reducing the likelihood of contracting health issues later on in life. Having a healthy blood pressure ensures that all your vital organs, including your heart, brain, and kidneys, receive the necessary nutrients and oxygen from your blood flow. Have I convinced you to give your blood pressure some TLC yet? If not, keep reading to see the importance of blood pressure, how you can maintain a healthy blood pressure and cool gadgets you can use to help you.
Importance of Blood Pressure
Too high? Your heart has to work ridiculously hard, causing it to get tired and lose strength. Also, the increased force of blood flow can cause damage to your blood vessels. This may seem minor in the short term, but in the long term, this can really harm your vital organs.
High blood pressure can result from so many different factors, it may be hard to pinpoint what exactly may be causing this change. The NHS provides a very thorough list, including sleep deprivation, drinking too much booze or caffeine, not getting enough exercise (see our previous blog post on how to get in shape), being overweight. The list goes on, but these are the factors that you can easily manipulate in your everyday life by making subtle changes, don’t get me wrong, no one wants to give up their morning coffee, and that is ok, but make sure you are not consuming more coffee than water in the day and try and cut back on any other caffeine in your diet.
Now, what about the other end of the spectrum? – Too low? Expect excessive dizziness, weakness, some fainting here and there, and an increased risk of injury. A low blood pressure starves your body of enough oxygen to function efficiently, which can cause irreversible damage to your heart and brain. The causes of low blood pressure are not as exhaustive, with the NHS solely detailing medical conditions, certain medicines, being pregnant or other unavoidable factors as the main cause. However, as with high blood pressure, maintaining a healthy lifestyle can reduce your likelihood of experiencing spouts of low blood pressure.
Maintaining a Healthy Blood Pressure
Maintaining a healthy blood pressure is directly related to your lifestyle decisions; how much alcohol do you consume? Do you regularly exercise? Would you class your diet as healthy? Are you a smoker? Do you find yourself stressed more often than not? These are questions you need to ask yourself so we can come up with the best plan of action for giving your BP some TLC.
Eating a healthy diet is top of the list for keeping your blood pressure in check. Still, it can also help prevent so many other potential diseases. I am not saying you need to live off vegetables for the rest of your life, but making healthier choices can have a massive impact on your health. Enjoy a takeout?
Try limiting this to once a week or once a fortnight, whack on an apron and get some meal prepping done of your favourite takeaway (which is so much healthier than buying it from your local takeout). Takeout is also very high in sodium, which needs to be limited in your diet if you do not want to risk altering your blood pressure.
No Smoke Zone
I remember when I was 16 (a very long time ago) and i had been to a club, pub or other communal venue and my clothes stank - my mother always used to question me if I had been smoking.
Did you know that around 15% of the British population are smokers? Well, I didn’t, and this figure shocked me. It is known as the silent killer, and rightly so, but people are not always aware of the other implications that smoking can have on the body besides the drastic conditions, such as lung cancer. The nicotine found in cigarettes significantly raises your blood pressure and heart rate, narrows your arteries, and makes your blood more likely to clot. This puts unnecessary stress on your body that can be avoided by simply cutting back on the number of cigarettes you smoke a day.
Frequent & Consistent Training
We are all aware of the benefits of regular exercise; we even have another blog post entirely dedicated to keeping in shape. However, besides the physique aspects, regular exercise has amazing effects on your body as a whole.
Your cardiovascular health improves, improving the strength of your arteries, lowering your overall blood pressure as your heart does not have to work as hard to provide the necessary oxygen to your vital organs. We don’t all have time to exercise for an hour plus every day, so simply making a conscious effort to be on your feet more throughout the day is such a small change that will have a massive impact on your blood pressure.
Blood Pressure Monitors
Addressing the causes of high blood pressure and adopting the above into your daily life might seem silly if you cannot actually see the effects your efforts are having on your blood pressure. Enter blood pressure monitors.
This may seem an excessive purchase, but they will motivate you to adopt the necessary lifestyle changes, especially when you can see the impact first hand. Think of it like exercising; you weigh yourself regularly to see your progress; well, blood pressure monitors do just that. They inform you where your blood pressure levels are at - if they are too high or too low, and then you can regularly use them to see if what you are doing is having a positive impact.