Heart and Blood Vessel adaptation to Chronic Stress

Reading time: 6 minutes

Remember Janice from the previous chapter? Her buttons are being pushed relentlessly because of the situation in her work-environment. Effectively that means she’s on high alert for most of the day because her stress response is almost continuously triggered, and that harbours the potential for cardiovascular diseases to emerge.

When a crazy person comes running at you while waving a knife, your stress response will increase your heartrate and blood pressure. That way more blood, glucose (i.e. fuel), and oxygen is pumped throughout your body and on its way to the places that need it the most: your leg muscles and lungs.

An increased heartrate means that the heart will pump faster and harder than usual. Subsequently, blood pressure increases also, which means that the blood slams harder against the inside walls of the blood vessels (the arteries more than the veins).[1]

These adaptations are desirable when we need to get out of an actual life threatening situation, which usually doesn’t last all that long. Afterwards, homeostasis can return as both the heartrate and blood pressure decrease to base level.

But what happens with the heart and blood vessels when, like Janice, the stress response is incessantly triggered, without there being an actual situation to flee from, or fight against?

When there’s a chronic increase of heart rate and blood pressure, at some point the blood vessels grow thicker with muscle tissue to withstand the ongoing assault. However, the result thereof is that those walls become more rigid, so that with every new stress reaction, evermore pressure is needed to pump the blood through the vessels (like trying to blow a tennis ball through a garden hose). That can create a vicious circle resulting in hypertension (chronic increased blood pressure) if the walls keep growing thicker. Moreover, since the heart is after all a muscle, at some point it can become worn out.[2]

A second problem that can arise, is that the incessant hard slamming of the blood against the walls can cause little tears and scars that wind up inflamed. Unfortunately, those inflammations act like a magnet to glucose, cholesterol, and fat particles, which are likely to stick to what then becomes a plaque; a growing bump on the inside of the blood vessel. It thus becomes dammed up and hence we now have increased risk for clogging (plus more blood pressure is needed to pump the blood through that narrowing in the vessel).[3]

But wait, there’s more! If we have prolonged hypertension, and we combine that with a high-fat diet, we can cause even more damage to our blood vessels than with either of them alone. After all, high-fat means that an enormous amount of fat and cholesterol particles are floating around in our blood, ready to stick to any inflammation they find in our blood vessels. Moreover, we have now also increased the risk of damaging our coronary vessels, which are the blood vessels that supply our heart with blood.[4]

In healthy circumstances, when our buttons are pushed and a stress response is triggered in order to flee or fight ourselves out of a dangerous situation, the coronary vessels vasodilitate, or widen, because in order to sustain an increased heartrate the heart also needs more fuel, oxygen, and energy. However, when the coronary vessels get damaged, instead of widening when our buttons get pushed, they begin to do the opposite: they constrict, or narrow.[5]

Effectively that means that when the heart needs more blood to sustain an increased heartrate, it actually receives less blood. Thus in the same way as we will be struggling to breathe if our airways are constricted or blocked, so the heart is struggling to ‘breathe’ due to narrowed or blocked coronary vessels. This can result in multiple symptoms, of which a heart attack is the most severe.[6]

Yet another possibility is that we wake up in the middle of the night, bathing in sweat, because our heart jumps up and down like an frightened horse. In other words, we experience palpitations while being in the safety of our own bedroom. However, if medical examination in the hospital reveals that from a purely biological standpoint, our heart seems fine, whence do those palpitations come from? Because such a diagnosis doesn’t make them magically disappear. Let’s return to Janice to elaborate on that.

Suppose her workplace has become such a big stressor, that merely thinking about it pushes her buttons and triggers her stress response. In that stadium, there is a good chance that she’ll also be having dreams, probably nightmares, about the office. And those kinds of dreams can equally push her buttons as being physically there, with the feeling of palpitations as a possible result.

That can get even worse if she does not consciously make the connection between her nightmares and the palpitations while the medical examination says that ‘her heart is fine’. Because not only does she clearly experience her racing heart, but now anxiety can arise about not knowing the cause of it. Moreover, she can feel mishandled my the medical personnel for not being taken seriously.

All these circumstances can become stressors which only increases the amount of times that her buttons are pushed daily. You see the possibility of a malicious vicious circle arising here.

The cover of the Anthrax album ***State Of Euphoria*** is an apt illustration of a vicious circle of increasing stress.

There are a couple of distinct symptoms that can reveal an underlying problem with our heart or blood vessels. What they have in common, though, is that their intensity doesn’t change, regardless of whether or not we change our position (e.g. from sitting to lying down).

Therefore, when you experience severe chest pain or chest pain that won’t go away, make sure to get emergency help right away.

When experiencing lingering neck or jaw pain, shoulder or arm pain, lingering fast heartbeat, shortness of breath, nausea and vomiting, sweating, and fatigue, make sure to get medical examination and treatment when necessary.

However, if you experience any of the above symptoms, but all your medical examinations come back negative, then it might be a good idea to make an examination of all your current life-aspects by means of this questionnaire. It provides a method to investigate how you feel about every aspect of your life at this moment, by attributing either nourishing or pathogenic feelings to it. If any life-aspect predominantly evokes pathogenic feelings in you, there’s a good chance you’re dealing with a long-term stressor. Once you know that, you have at least created the possibility to make a change in that particular life-aspect.

Finally, it goes without saying that problems with heart and blood vessels often go hand in hand with those of us who aren’t all that fortunate when it comes to life situations, and are more likely to experience chronic stress as a result. Therefore, don’t be harsh on others, or yourself, when so called unhealthy decisions are made (like eating or smoking to fill an emotional void).

People are complex beings and if we wish to help in getting out of unhealthy behaviour, the best thing to do is to show the way by means of our own example. Forcing someone into any kind of behaviour change or therapy, usually only backfires. Let us first learn to look without judgment, both at ourselves and at others, so that we can begin to treat each other as human beings. That is a greater guarantee for a more pleasant life than any form of coercion.

The next chapter will deal with the lungs as we’ll discuss respiratory system adaptations to chronic stress. Until then,

Jolly greetings,
Erik Stout

References:

[1] Dr. Robert M. Sapolsky - Why Zebras Don’t Have Ulcers (chapter 3)

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Mayo Clinic website on Myocardial Ischemia (reduced blood flow to the heart).

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Fun With Stress 2.9

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