Relieve Stress and Reduce Your Risk
With The Total Heart Health Program
Modern Medicine’s Perspective
on Stress And How It Affects Your Heart Health
A recent study of 30,000 heart patients indicated that stress was responsible for about one third of the risk for of heart attacks. If you have high levels of stress you’re 2.4 times more likely to have a heart attack than those who aren’t stressed. This level of risk is similar to high blood pressure, smoking, diabetes, and high cholesterol. Stress also contributes to high blood pressure, overweight, high cholesterol, and high blood sugar in diabetes.
When you feel threatened, your body prepares for “fight or flight”. For example, your heart rapidly pumps greater volumes of blood and blood vessels constrict to raise blood pressure so that you can move quickly away from danger. A cascade of stress hormones are released, such as adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol. But if these emergency mechanisms are chronically elevated through continual stress, your blood pressure remains high all the time, your blood cholesterol and sugar becomes abnormal, free radicals are produced and hardening of the arteries (atherosclerosis) develops. After years of chronic stress and assault on your cardiovascular system, a heart attack or stroke develops.
Emotional reaction to stress, such as depression, anxiety, anger, and hopelessness takes a toll on health. It also leads to unhealthy habits, such as smoking, alcohol consumption, and poor diet. These also contribute to heart disease.
Conventional medicine doesn’t offer much relief for stress, and drugs used to relieve depression, anxiety and insomnia all have harmful side effects, including permanent damage to the brain.
The Total Heart Health program targets
the basic, causal factors to bring your mind-body system back into balance and relieve stress.
Stress, From The Maharishi Vedic Health Perspective:
When your body loses the connection with it’s own intelligence, the unified field of the laws of nature, stress is the result. When the body accumulates too much stress, all major systems eventually break down and your, heart health suffers.
There are three type of stress—mental, emotional, and physical, and different Total Heart Health approaches for the body’s three governing principles. Vata governs the mind, so mental stress mostly aggravates Vata. Pitta governs the emotions, so emotional stress aggravates Pitta. Kapha governs the structure of the body, so physical stress mainly affects Kapha.
How Stress is Expressed Through Vata,
Pitta and Kapha Principles:
Vata: Mental stress is brought about by an overuse or misuse of the mind. For instance, if you do intense mental work many hours a day, or work long hours on a computer, it can cause a Vata imbalance. The first symptom is a reduced ability to handle stressful situations, followed by diminished mental functions of acquisition, retention, and recall.
Pitta: Emotional stress disturbs Pitta, the body’s operator for the emotions and functioning of the heart. Emotional stress can be caused by relationship problems, loss, or any situation that might hurt your feelings. Emotional stress shows up as irritability, depression, and emotional instability.
Kapha: Physical stress is caused by the misuse or overuse of the body, such as exercising too much or working for extended periods at a job that is physically taxing. Physical fatigue relates to mental fogginess, difficulty in concentrating, and dullness of the mind. Another cause of physical stress is too little exercise.
The Total Heart Health Program Relieves Stress By Restoring Balance
Mind, body and environment are brought into balance through re-establishing their connection with the inner intelligence of nature at that basis of your physiology. This process includes the following:
Mind: Transcendental Meditation® program. Extensive research published in more that 600 scientific studies conducted in 200 universities and research institutes in 30 countries has demonstrated effects of the Transcendental Meditation program for reducing stress and developing mental, physical and social health. Studies have shown reduced anxiety, depression and anger along with improvements in positive psychological health and self-actualization
Body: The Total Heart Health Program helps to determine your specific mind-body imbalance. It also offers diet, herbal supplements, an exercise program, and helpful tips for daily and seasonal routines. All of these measures together relieve stress and improve your health.
Environment: The Total Heart Health Program offers ways to create home and work environments, which naturally support your health and well-being. It offers remedial and preventive measures to bring you into harmony with the natural cycles and rhythms of nature. The use of sound therapy is suggested for chronic imbalance.