How to Keep Your Heart Healthy & Happy
We often hear about our guts as our second brains, so where do our hearts fit in?
What’s beautiful about medicine today is that we are beginning to acknowledge and understand ourselves as small, interconnected universes, rather than seeing ourselves through the patriarchal lens that compartmentalised each organ system from the next one.
Your heart is a pivotal, energetic system originating in your chest. It's where you feel nerves, excitement, and a firm embrace. It's where we intuitively draw those we love closer to us; where our neonates sleep on our chests. So much of our sympathetic nervous system activity is derived from this heart centre sending out messages to increase heart rate and blood pressure or slow heart rate and lower blood pressure for sleep, digestion, and calm.
Do your thoughts affect your heart? Of course they do. Do your food choices affect your heart? Another sure yes. Think about how you feel after too much coffee, too little water, or too much sugar. We know our hearts to be a muscle in the energetic and the anatomical sense. So what’s best for your gut and your brain is certainly best for your heart, too.
All of nature’s organisms strive for equilibrium, and so all natural systems have accelerators and brakes. Walking the fine balance between stimulation and rest, excitement and calm, alertness and sleep is a constant aspiration in a modern life. Our fight or flight systems and our rest and digest systems have a tangible impact on our experience of our heart’s activity.
Doing things that fill your cup, lift your spirits, and inspire you means sending chemical messengers to your heart to elicit a biochemical and physiological response. It’s ironic that anxiety and excitement are experienced in the body as vectors of similar hormones. Adrenaline can be experienced positively or negatively. Which so aptly ties into your heart hearing your thoughts and responding to them.
Try this short exercise: close your eyes and think of somebody you love - somebody who makes you feel safe. Feel the feeling in your body. Then think of somebody who you might be having conflict with - somebody who makes you fearful - and feel that sensation in your body. It’s likely that you felt your heart rate increase and your breath shallow with the negative association.
Fitness has an inverse relationship with heart rate. The more fit and healthy a person is, the slower their heart rate (with the exception of medical reasons for heart rates that are too slow - bradycardias - like heart blocks). When we are stimulating our parasympathetic systems, we are sending chemical messengers to our cardiovascular systems to slow down and relax. Choosing positive, loving thoughts, being physically active every day, and avoiding a diet of refined sugars and stimulants results in better cardiac health.
The only way to strengthen a muscle is to exercise it. Everybody is after love, and the best way to attract it is to give more love. So love more.
Get physically active. When you get your heart rate up, you release endorphins. Endorphins counter the effects of adrenaline by slowing heart rate and lowering blood pressure. Practising this with high intensity, interval training, dancing on tables, or just jumping up and down positions you to be more calm during times of psychological stress.
Do activities that give you pleasure. Low doses of dopamine, one of our reward neurotransmitters - have a heart rate slowing effect, while higher doses do the opposite.
It always comes down to waxing and waning - turning it up must be met with turning it down. A pendulum always swings back. Set your pace today mindfully.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr Skye Scott is a family GP, and co-owner of Health with Heart - a holistic wellness solution that includes a warm-hearted practice in Sandton; bespoke corporate wellness programmes; unique retreats and medical travel experiences; an educational podcast and portal; and a community outreach initiative. For more information or to get in touch, follow @drskyescott or @health_w_heart on Instagram or @HealthwithHeartDoctors on Facebook, or visit www.healthwithheart.co.za.