Can good mental health help your heart?
Can our head have a direct impact on our heart?
When it comes to overall health, evidence is increasingly pointing to a link. Taking care of our emotional well-being is important on its own, but prioritizing good mental health can also be good for heart health.
Research shows possible physiological connections and increasing evidence that biological and chemical factors that trigger mental health issues may also influence heart disease.
“When you think about it, it seems like a very obvious thing, even though it hasn’t really been considered for a long time,” says Dr. Amish Mehta, director of Noninvasive Cardiology with Allegheny Health Network (AHN). “When patients are anxious or depressed, they also have indirect consequences on the heart, which are behaviors that aren’t good for our heart health. That can be drinking alcohol or smoking. Sometimes a lot of people get stress relief or feel better when they’re doing those kinds of activities, which ultimately aren’t good for the heart.”
An American Heart Association report links loneliness and social isolation to an increased risk of having – or even dying from — a heart attack or stroke due to inflammation and cardiovascular disease that can be triggered by stress. Depression and anxiety can also lead us to be more sedentary and not active or cause us to stress eat and gain weight, which can lead to diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. This link between mental health and heart health is gaining more traction in the medical community, and the American College of Cardiology is developing a specialized area of focus called the cardiovascular psychology work group. “They’re going to try to do research in this area,” says Mehta. “They have a couple of large registries of younger individuals talking about whether they have any anxiety or depression and will follow these patients down the road and see, do these patients have an increased utilization of health? Do they have more cardiac issues, complaints down the road or various cardiac issues like palpitations, chest pain or shortness of breath?”
Mehta is quick to emphasize that when patients do have some of these very common cardiac symptoms, they should always seek medical care first and not assume it is due to a condition such as anxiety or depression.
“Make sure you get a checkup and investigate whether there are certain medical or heart- related conditions that could be causing symptoms,” Mehta advises. “Once you’ve had an evaluation, and if everything turns out normal, then you know, we always kind of lean on the mental health issues after the fact and after we’ve ruled out any medical conditions that could be causing symptoms.”
He encourages his patients to engage in healthy behaviors that will benefit not only mental health but also heart and overall health, as the two go hand-in-hand. “Find some activity they like, whether it’s walking, biking, swimming, playing with friends, taking their dog for a walk, whatever they can find that they think does relieve their stress and then certainly activities like exercise and yoga,” he said. “Those are also being found to be heart healthy and good for our health by reducing stress.”
Eating a healthy diet and staying active are both good for the heart and can also help to improve mood. Managing blood pressure, glucose levels and cholesterol along with good nutrition, weight management, regular exercise and social activity help to improve not only overall physical health but mental health as well.
It’s important to note that if you are experiencing any cardiac symptoms such as palpitations, shortness of breath, numbness or tightness in the chest, don’t just dismiss it by blaming it on stress, depression or anxiety. There could be underlying medical reasons for those symptoms. “It’s best to have a true health care professional as well as a mental health professional look into these things to try to sort it out because it’s a very complex area, and there’s a lot of overlap between medical and mental health, the psychosocial, all these different areas,” says Mehta. “Stress is something that’s very hard to measure and what stresses me out might not be something at all that you worry about. We’re all different, and how we handle stress and what we consider stressful is very individualized.”