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How you react to stress decides your overall health, especially your heart
| While depression and major stressful events are known to be harmful for health, health consequences of frustrations and hassles in everyday life are far reaching too. |
| How you perceive and react to stressful events in life is more important to your health than how frequently you encounter stress, says a study. |
| According to the researchers, the more negatively an individual reacts to a situation, the more he/she may be at risk of developing heart disease. The team wanted to find out whether daily stress and heart rate variability — a measure of autonomic regulation of the heart — are linked. A potential pathway that links stress to future heart disease is a dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) — a case of a person’s normally self-regulated nervous system getting off track. |
| The team analysed the data collected from 909 participants between the aged 35-85 — including daily telephone interviews — over eight consecutive days and the results from an electro-cardiogram (ECG). During daily phone interviews, participants were asked to report the stressful events as well as negative emotions they had experienced that day. |
| The researchers found that participants who reported a lot of stressful events in their lives were not necessarily those who had lower heart rate variability. No matter how many or how few stressful events a person faces, it was those who perceived the events as more stressful — or who experienced a greater spike in negative emotions — had lower heart rate variability. These people may be at a higher risk for heart disease, the authors noted. |