One of the scariest conditions a person can have is high blood pressure. This condition is also known as hypertension and is often called a silent killer. As its name suggests, hypertension works silently as it slowly damages your arteries, which causes a decrease in blood and oxygen flow to your heart.
Unfortunately, there is no definite cure for such conditions. Aside from drinking the medications to help ease the symptoms, patients are encouraged to make significant changes in their lifestyle. As such, there are certain things you’ll need to drop from your routine and find other things to do to promote a healthier lifestyle. To help you get started, here’s a list of harmful habits you should refrain from doing to help restore your blood pressure.
Skipping Your Medications
Some patients with hypertension will need extra help from medications since lifestyle changes alone aren’t enough. As such, their doctors will prescribe them the necessary drugs to ease the symptoms or help relax their blood vessels.
Note that the medications can vary by condition, and what was prescribed to others might differ from yours. So, the duration can also vary. Some might only need to drink them every other day for a month, while others might need them for the rest of their lives.
Nonetheless, medications can be costly. As such, it’s understandable how other patients stop drinking for a while, especially when they don’t experience an attack. However, medicines like lisinopril, usually prescribed to patients to help prevent future strokes and heart attacks, are crucial.
Fortunately, there are available prescription coupons like BuzzRx lisinopril that you can get to help buy the drug at a much lower price. So, you can buy probably more quantity of the prescription than usual, helping you start a healthy habit of not skipping your medications.
Sleeping Too Late
Several studies have already reported how poor sleep is related to hypertension. Getting under six hours of sleep for several hours causes poor sleep quality, increasing your risk of high blood pressure. So, if you’re experiencing sleep problems such as this, then don’t forget to consult your doctor so that they can find better treatments or suggest suitable sleep supplements to help improve your sleep and your condition.
However, if you can do something about sleeping late, you must start taking the initiative. To get you started, you can initially prepare a sleep schedule and stick to it every day. Before you sleep, make your room a sleep-inducing space, which means the lights are off and your gadget is away from you. Prevent from taking naps during the day as much as possible as well.
Neglecting Your Diet
To eat well is to live well, but you must not be negligent of whatever food you consume. Foods high in sodium, carbohydrates, and saturated fats are the primary causes of high blood pressure. So, avoid consuming these foods and start preparing meals with fruits, vegetables rich in whole grains, and low-fat dairy products.
Sodium pulls water into your bloodstream. Too much can be dangerous and lead to increased blood volume in your vessels, hence the blood pressure. Since sodium is an essential mineral to the body, you can limit your intake to fewer than four grams daily. So, avoid eating sodium-rich foods like canned vegetables and soaps, lunch meats, instant meals, frozen dinners, etc.
Being Sedentary
Of course, sleep is essential to your body, but instead of dozing all day, you must start getting enough exercise to help your high blood pressure. If you have hypertension, doing at least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise can help reduce blood pressure. In general, you’ll need to do a minimum of 150-minute moderate-intensity exercise per week, which means at least 20 to 30 minutes every other day would be enough if you’re busy.
Any kind of exercise is better than not doing anything at all. You can jog, play basketball or any sports, swim, hit the gym, or just do home workouts that suit you. If you’re feeling unconfident, you can search for a video guideline that you can follow to help you with exercising.
Again, sleep and rest are essential to the body, but you don’t need more than 10 hours of combined sleep throughout the day. Instead, you can focus your energy on working out,
Ignoring Your Stress
Stress is indeed related to a wide array of diseases, including high blood pressure. Long-term emotional stress only increases high blood pressure, and the surge of hormones under stress will cause the heart to beat faster and narrow your blood vessels. Aside from that, stress is also connected with poor sleep, physical inactivity, and overeating, which are risk factors for hypertension. Reducing stress is also always part of every doctor’s treatment plan.
The best thing you can do is manage your stress rather than ignore it. Regulating your stress will help you determine the cause of your stress and find an effective way to solve it, resulting in more efficient and healthy coping. So your health won’t risk suffering any conditions, such as hypertension.
Final Thoughts
High blood pressure can be terrifying, but there are many things that you can do to prevent your condition from worsening. After learning about the habits you need to forget, it’s time to relearn healthier alternatives to help you. Start assessing your routine now and remember that regularly doing them is only the start of making actions into your habit.