How Your Mental Health Affects Heart Health

Research shows a clear connection between your mind, heart, and total health. In this Healthy article, Mindpath Health’s Leela Magavi, MD, explains how nurturing your mental health may help you live longer and prevent heart-related illnesses.

Feel like you need a mental health day? World events and pandemic life, added to our usual work tasks and to-do lists, have many of us feeling stressed out and weighed down with concern.

You may have a very valid reason to take that day to yourself to restore your spirit. Recent research shows heart health is inextricably linked to your mental health; in a relationship the American Heart Association has termed the “mind-heart-body connection.”

Ready to discover how incorporating more heart-healthy behaviors into your routine could possibly reduce your risk of chronic disease and even heart attack?

Does mental health cause heart problems?

Stress-related mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and PTSD actually place a significant amount of strain on your heart. Dietitian Enright says that as they impact your mental well-being, these disorders can also increase blood pressure, reduce blood flow, cause irregular heartbeats, and increase cortisol levels—leading to chronic inflammation, which can harm the heart.

Research suggested that psychological well-being has been repeatedly associated with lower rates of both cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality. This research also nodded to multiple past studies which found that patients who already had been diagnosed with heart disease, but who reported more optimistic traits, saw lower rates of rehospitalization and mortality.

How, exactly, does this connection between mental health and your heart play out? “Takotsubo cardiomyopathy” is one condition that arguably demonstrates the connection. Also referred to as “broken-heart syndrome,” Takotsubo cardiomyopathy was first described in Japan in 1990. Since then, it has become regarded among some parts of the medical community as an acute form of heart failure that’s directly caused by severe emotional distress resulting from the loss of a loved one or the trauma associated with the end of a relationship. Astonishingly, over 90% of broken-heart syndrome cases occur in women.

Psychiatrist Leela Magavi, MD, Regional Medical Director for Mindpath Health, says the heart-mind connection is such a legitimate consideration that she “regularly” evaluates individuals with cardiac conditions—broken-heart syndrome being one of them. “Individuals with depression and anxiety are more likely to develop coronary artery disease and have an increased risk of cardiac mortality,” Dr. Magavi says.

Signs your mental health needs a lift

Your mental health could be damaging your heart because of the ways you try to cope. For example, some people dealing with depression or anxiety engage in negative coping mechanisms, such as binge eating, drinking too much alcohol, smoking, poor sleep quality, substance abuse, and not exercising.

These patterns can exacerbate mental health issues and increase your risk of heart disease. As Joan Salge Blake, EdD, RDN, says when an individual is depressed, they may lose their appetite and therefore not eat, or experience an accelerated appetite and eat uncontrollably due to their emotions. “If the situation is chronic, this unhealthy diet could be high in saturated fat, unhealthy fat, and added sugars, or low in adequate nutrients that the body and heart need for good health,” Dr. Blake says.

How to improve your mood for better heart health

It’s important to recognize that when you feel blue or unwell over a period of time, getting “healthy” means being treated as a whole person.

These actions may have a significant impact on heart health by reducing inflammation, lowering cholesterol, and decreasing blood pressure:

• Do yoga
• Eat heart-healthy whole foods and less processed junk foods
• Exercise daily
• Express gratitude
• Meditate
• Practice mindfulness-based stress reduction
• Reduce or eliminate alcohol intake
• Speak with a therapist you trust
• Stop smoking
• Express gratitude

Read the full Healthy article with sources here.