Stress symptoms are usually easily recognized.
Everyone knows how it feels to be under emotional stress.
Stress makes the heart beat faster and harder and puts the body under extra strain.
Stress is a normal human condition.
However, it has long been known that, in large dosages, it is not good for your health.
In fact, there has long been an association between stress and hypertension.
When you become nervous, physical changes take place in your body.
The main cause of these physical changes is the fact nervousness makes adrenaline flow heavily through the veins.
Adrenaline has a purpose.
Its purpose is to prepare you to fight an enemy or to run away to safety.
This is the way we humans were designed to function.
When you think about it, we probably would not have made it through the Neanderthal stage of development had we not been built this way.
Running From Hypertension Doesn't Work The problem is, today our enemies are not ones we can very often run from.
When we have a problem we cannot beat it over the head with a club or run safely from it into a cave.
Therefore, the adrenaline our body prepares us with to overcome our enemy is counterproductive.
Another thing adrenaline does to us is it raises our blood pressure.
Of course, having our blood pressure rise from time to time is not harmful.
It is when we are constantly under stress our blood pressure remains above normal for long periods of time.
The longer stress is with us, the longer the effects of adrenaline lingers.
After a while, it gets to the point extra adrenaline pumps through the veins even when we are not under immediate stress.
In other words, nervousness becomes a habit.
So, before too much time passes, elevated blood pressure will start to become the norm for us.
So, the end result is, we are likely to develop hypertension.
Break the Stress Pattern Naturally, the way to combat this would be to live under less stress.
Of course, this is not always possible.
So, another effective way to combat a constant onslaught of nervousness is to take time away from the situations that makes adrenaline flow steadily throughout your body.
Though you may not be able to physically get away from life's problems very often, you can practice getting away mentally.
Take time throughout the day to imagine calming, peaceful scenes.
These can be scenes of places you've been that have been relaxing to you, or you can simply make such a scene up in your mind.
Either way, taking mental reprieves from stressful situations at least five or six times a day will break the steady stream of adrenaline flow and your body will develop the habit of returning to healthy blood pressure levels.
As this becomes a habit, development of hypertension will become much less likely.