If you have a serious medical condition involving your heart, it may take a great deal of effort to improve your heart health. If you do not already have a serious condition, however, a few small steps can go a long way towards improving your overall heart health and help prevent a number of more serious conditions.
Heart health has also been proven to have a strong link to cognitive function as well, so many of the same things that protect your heart also protect your brain.
Here are 3 small lifestyle changes you can make to help improve your heart health – and maybe help protect your brain in the process.
Free Download: Reduce The Risk of Heart Disease3 Simple Ways to Improve Your Heart Health
While there are a number of genetic and biological factors that affect heart health that may not be so easy to overcome, protecting your heart doesn’t have to be as difficult as it may seem.
Getting plenty of rest and moderate exercise and living your life to the fullest can all go a long way towards keeping your ticker in good working order over the long haul.
1. Get Plenty of Rest
One early sign of heart disease is a buildup of calcium in your arteries. In one study of younger to middle-aged adults, those who got approximately 7 hours of good-quality sleep per night showed significantly less calcium build-up in their arteries than those who slept less than 6 hours or more than 9.
There was also a marked difference between those who step soundly and those who didn’t. If you don’t sleep well or wake up feeling refreshed after a night’s sleep, you may want to talk to your doctor about some remedies.
2. Keep it Moving
As little as 30 minutes a day of moderate exercise, such as a brisk walk, can go a long way towards improving and maintaining overall heart health. This is particularly important for people that have sedentary jobs or spend most of their time seated.
While 30 minutes of brisk movement can have offer a serious improvement to overall heart health, it doesn’t have as much of an impact if you spend the other 23.5 hours just sitting. Try and break up long periods of sitting by standing, moving or walking.
3. Mind Your Emotional Health
While we all know that the heart is not actually the place in which emotions reside, the truth is your emotions play a significant role in overall heart health. Stress in particular has a particularly detrimental effect on heart health.
There are a number of ways to help out your heart by managing your emotions. These range from minimizing the causes of stress in your life to volunteering to spending more time with the ones you love and doing things that you love. In a strange twist of irony, the more you enjoy your life, the better the effect it has on your heart.
Free Download: 10 Ways To Improve Your Heart Heath
Heart disease is the #1 cause of death in the US for both women and men. But you have some control over certain risk factors that lead up to heart disease. You can even reverse some of the symptoms if they’re caught early on.
It’s never too early to start making smart choices and start investing in a healthier, brighter, longer life. A variety of health challenges can be prevented, reversed, and better managed by simply adding exercise to your lifestyle. If you want to improve your heart health and live a healthier life check out these 10 Health Benefits You’ll Get With Improved Fitness.
