The high blood pressure series continues.

We are talking about complications from hypertension. There is wear and tear on the body, and there’s an injury to the body.

This is part of life. This is who we are. We’re not indestructible, and we’re not superhuman, quite, yet. Maybe soon.

Hypertension is called the silent killer. It’s a very slow progressing disease, and if we take the functional medicine view, and we look at what is the actual cause of hypertension, it doesn’t just appear out of nowhere, and rarely will a medical doctor ask and try to figure out what is the cause. They will tell you to lose weight, eat less, stop smoking, and don’t drink too much. Those are the standard, what we call lifestyle therapies, and we call first-line therapy, as a means of what is supposed to be done first, is to correct lifestyles, if possible.

Medical doctors really don’t know very much about lifestyle therapy, because they are very, very busy people. They’re under a lot of stress. They work very hard, and they may not be practicing what they’re preaching to their patients, which is pretty understandable. There are doctors of course, that go above and beyond the medical school training of treating the symptoms. Our Western medicine has evolved to a point of treating symptoms and maintaining the disease.

If your idea about health is to achieve wellness and push disease, and MORE disease, and these lifestyle issues; if we want to get a handle on that, then we want to conquer that then we’ve got to look at where does hypertension comes from? It can come from many different sources, and more than likely, it’s a lot of different things coming together to cause high blood pressure.

I’m going to tell you the number one issue is living in a very stressful latent society. We’re very, very busy people. We have to run in the rat way race to make it, and to pay bills, and it starts very early in life. It starts in childhood, learning to get up and get ready for that school bus, and rush through breakfast, and jump on the school bus. Then, I’ve got a kindergartner granddaughter who’s going to six hours a day of school as a five-year-old. There’s no let up. Kindergarten, now, apparently is like first grade used to be.

But in any event, stress starts early in life, and dealing with stress is part of the autonomic nervous system, that balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic mode.

If you haven’t heard those words before, it’s simply the ability to handle the stresses of life, and cross back over to the parasympathetic mode, where we’re going to learn how to rest and digest. It’s fight or flight, saber-tooth tigers, and all.

Once the danger has been alleviated and inverted, then you switch back to a resting state where you can digest the whole idea of going through a drive-through, grabbing a burger, and some fries, and a Coke, and rushing off down the road, trying to eat the burger, and drive to arrive at the next appointment on time, to try to make that sale. That if you don’t make that sale you’re not going to get the commission, and your paycheck’s going to be less. That kind of stress prevents good digestion. It really prevents digestion altogether, and that food is going to sit in your stomach for a very long time until you can find time to relax.

In the normal cycle of life, it’s preferable that you take half an hour, or an hour for yourself, for your self-care, and sit down and enjoy that meal, eat slowly, think about the things that you’re grateful for in life, and then when the meals over, and you’ve completed that period of time, you can go ahead and get back into the workspace, and into the flow of everyday life. But it is a challenge between those two states to stay balanced.

We were balancing the 3 million red blood cells that are lost every second with the creation of 3 million new blood cells in the bone marrow of our body in that balance that’s required. The same is true of our general life state, and having those coping mechanisms for dealing with stress. Most of our stress in modern society comes from the bombardment of stimuli from the television, from the radio, from work, from all of life’s events, raising a family, all those things lead us to very difficult situations that we have to find a way to center ourselves and remain in a peaceful state as we are working towards the bigger goals of life.

With that thought, I’m going to just lay the foundation that stress is the number one instigator of high blood pressure. We’re going to talk a little bit more about it when I come back.