Reducing Hypertension, Can Meditation Be An Answer?

The rate of hypertension within the US is incredibly widespread affecting 1 out of 2 Americans according to the National Center of Health Statistics. This means that nearly 108 million Americans alone are experiencing hypertension.

With meditation being a natural, completely affordable, and non-invasive treatment it is something we should integrate into our daily lives to overcome this prevalent condition. Learn more about the health benefits of meditation here.

How Meditation Affects Hypertension

For those of you who do not know hypertension is when the blood pressure rises too high. The blood pressure is basically the force or pressure of the blood that is circulating throughout the body against the walls of the blood vessels and arteries.

This force is mostly produced from the heart which, of course, is pumping the blood throughout the circulatory system, but it can also be due to having high cholesterol which plaques the arteries the blood is flowing through.

There are many risks hypertension can make you susceptible to which is most likely why you have come to this article. Meditation has been found throughout numerous studies to reduce hypertension in a multitude of ways.

Lower Cholesterol

One way to help treat hypertension is to lower cholesterol. The stress hormone cortisol which is produced when the body is in fight-flight-or-freeze mode will act in the body as free radicals.

These are important for some biological functions, but can also damage the cells which the body will need to produce cholesterol to patch it up. Meditation can be used to decrease cortisol directly.

The Effect of Meditation On Heart Rate

You may have heard of the fight-flight-or-freeze mode which is our biological defense for what our body detects as a threat. This may be a car running at us or a wild animal encounter where we need to think and act quickly to stay alive.

As we have adapted as humans the body now registers work deadlines and relationship stress as these same life or death stressors. This means the part of the autonomic nervous system responsible for flooding our body with stress hormones, pausing non-essential autonomic functions (such as digestion), and speeding up the heart rate is active.

If you have ever noticed how your heart starts pounding fast and loudly when you feel under pressure or stressed this is the sympathetic nervous system in action. In hypertension, the sympathetic nervous system is chronically active.

Luckily for us, meditation is proven to rewire the flight-fight-or-freeze response. Through rewiring our autonomic nervous system the body is able to end being inappropriately triggered to slip into our stress response.

This means the effect of meditation on heart rate is incredibly beneficial for those dealing with hypertension due to the reduction within chronic sympathetic nervous system triggering.

How To Get Started Meditating?

As you begin your meditation practice and becoming introduced to the nature of your mind questions can come up. This is why we created our 30-day meditation course to guide beginners through start their meditation practice finding the necessary guidance and tools to do so.