The Precious Heart

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Help Your Heart at Natural Solutions Magazine

The Precious Heart

Our hearts are powerful yet vulnerable organs. Despite major advances in the understanding and treatment of heart disease, it continues to be a leading cause of suffering in our society. The costs are severe on every level—physical, emotional, and economic.

More than 7 million Americans suffer with heart disease. Each year more than half a million angioplasties and more than 300,000 coronary artery bypass surgeries are performed at a cost of almost $8 billion. Heart attacks exact a toll on the most productive members of our society; more than 45 percent of heart attack sufferers are younger than 65.

Linking the emotional and physical heart
Most people are well aware of the standard risk factors for heart attacks, such as smoking, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol levels, diabetes, and inadequate physical exercise. The strong influence of emotional well-being on heart disease is generally less well known, although most people intuitively understand the intimate link between their emotional and physical heart. Learning to effectively handle emotional stress improves both mental and physical well-being.

Living beings are programmed to protect themselves when threatened. The most primitive reaction we express when we feel endangered is called the fight-or-flight response. When this response is activated, our nervous and hormonal systems compel us to aggressively respond to a potential threat. Our blood pressure rises, our hearts beat faster and harder, we breathe more rapidly, our blood sugar rises, we sweat, our adrenal glands pump out adrenaline, and our tiny blood clotting cells called platelets become stickier.

The danger of the fight-or-flight response
All of these changes are potentially helpful when facing a real threat to our survival. If a mountain lion is chasing us, the fight-or-flight response may help us escape from or fight off the predator. Unfortunately, we often activate this response even when the stress is primarily emotional or psychological. Elevated blood pressure and sticky platelets may be adaptive when you are running away from a fierce beast, but they are not useful when you find yourself stuck in rush-hour traffic, learn that your child is failing algebra, or discover that your car was side swiped in a parking lot.

The tendency to react aggressively when things do not go the way we want puts our hearts at risk. Creating balance through daily meditation, exercise, balanced nutrition, and conscious communication supports our emotional and physical heart.

The story of painful hearts
In one of his early books, Travels, the popular writer Michael Crichton described a discovery he made while he was a medical student at Harvard. While doing his cardiac rotation, he asked patients, “Why did you have a heart attack?” Everyone had an answer, and it was not that their cholesterol level was too high or that they didn’t exercise enough. The responses were personal and meaningful. One man said he got a promotion but his wife didn’t want to move. Another said his wife was planning to leave him. Most responses expressed deep distress over relationships, children, or jobs. Crichton wrote, “What I was seeing was that their explanations made sense from the standpoint of the whole organism, as a kind of physical acting-out. These patients were telling me stories of events that had affected their hearts in a metaphysical sense. They were telling me sad love stories, which had pained their hearts. Their wives and families and bosses didn’t care for them. Their hearts were attacked. And pretty soon, their hearts were literally attacked.”

Each person’s heart tells the story of his or her life. A healthy heart requires you to relinquish beliefs, feelings, and behaviors that are not nourishing and bring into your life food and relationships that deeply nurture your body and mind. We encourage you to create love stories that will serve you physically, emotionally, and spiritually. As a result, you will be able to spend more time enjoying your precious human heart.

Get more great tips: Try a free issue of Natural Solutions Magazine.

Information presented is of a general nature for educational and informational purposes only. Statements about products and health conditions have not been evaluated by the US Food and Drug Administration. Products and information presented herein are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent disease. If you have any concerns about your own health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional.

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