Health Center

Natural Solutions for Healthy Blood Pressure

Monitor your blood pressure every day at home: This step is crucial, yet often overlooked. Keeping a daily tab of your blood pressure gives you a warning of possible problems, plus shows progress when you're doing the right things. Daily monitoring gives you an accurate picture of your blood pressure.

Get a handle on stress
The link between blood pressure and stress has been addressed in hundreds of studies. Continual stress can lead to hormonal imbalances and nutritional losses that impair your body's natural blood-pressure-regulating mechanisms. Related emotions, such as anxiety, anger—particularly repressed anger—and feelings of lack of control have also been demonstrated to affect blood pressure health. Here are several stress relief tools you can use to help manage stress:

Deep relaxation refers to the process of systematically relaxing the various parts of your body and freeing your mind from busy thoughts. You should sit or lie quietly and peacefully, preferably in a room alone. Deeply relax all of your muscles, concentrating on one after the other, beginning with your feet and progressing upwards toward your face.

Then begin to still your mind and reduce the busy thoughts that tend to dominate your consciousness. If you can't seem to quiet the rush of ideas, don't fight it. Just make a mental note of the thoughts you may want to return to later, and your mind will eventually grow still. Breathe naturally.

Continue for 10 to 20 minutes. What's going to help you is not so much the one-time act of lying on your back and "thinking about nothing." It's your commitment to the process and the progress you will make toward deeper and deeper relaxation.

Deep breathing is another powerful stress-reducing—and blood-pressure-lowering—tool. Quick, shallow breathing increases blood pressure, while slow, deep, rhythmic breathing is a quick way to reduce internal stress and naturally bring down your blood pressure. You can do a simple deep breathing exercise anytime, anywhere. Here's how:

1. Make yourself comfortable.
2. Begin breathing to the count: Inhale, two three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Exhale, two, three, four.
3. Repeat the breathing exercise two or three times.

You'll find this simple breathing exercise particularly helpful during stressful situations, as it helps to quickly relax your body and quiet your mind.

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