How Can I Lower My Blood Pressure?

High blood pressure is hazardous to your health because if left unchecked, it can lead to severe damage to your heart. Chronic high blood pressure can potentially lead to heart disease, stroke, and even death. But thankfully, there are many natural ways or lifestyle changes that you can make to improve your blood pressure and get your health back on track. So, see below for the top 5 ways to lower your blood pressure and improve your health today!

Get Regular Exercise

Exercise is one of the best ways to lower your blood pressure because it can increase your strength and help you lose weight as well. Excess weight can put additional strain on your heart and raise your blood pressure. Additionally, exercise strengthens the muscles in your heart, helping to protect your arteries against heart disease and improve your health. Doctors recommend at least 30 minutes of exercise every day, but if this is too much, just try to start with 10 minutes and work your way up every day.

Eat Healthy Foods

Processed and fried foods are harmful to your physical health because they can clog up your arteries and raise your blood pressure to a dangerous degree. But by making a few diet changes, you can start to improve your physical health and lower your blood pressure. The best foods to eat to help lower your blood pressure are potassium-rich foods, calcium-rich foods, and plenty of fruits and vegetables.

Decrease Your Sodium

High salt or sodium intake is also harmful to your blood pressure and can decrease your heart health. Many processed and fried foods are often loaded with salt as well, making these food types double as dangerous. To start reducing your blood pressure, lowering your sodium intake is a simple and highly effective way to start improving your health.

Reduce Caffeine

Caffeine is a natural stimulant that automatically raises your blood pressure when it is consumed. Clearly, if you want to lower your blood pressure, then caffeine is not going to help you with this. Regular caffeine consumption can also have other adverse effects on your health by disrupting your body's natural sleep-wake cycle and leeching essential nutrients from your bones. To start cutting back on caffeine, you can try to initially switch to green tea, which has a much lower caffeine level and then hopefully wean yourself down to no caffeine at all!

Quit Smoking

Smoking is another substance that has a direct effect on raising your blood pressure in addition to the cancer risks that it poses. Smoking also puts you at high risk for heart disease and can make it much harder for you to reach your exercise or fitness goals. By cutting out smoking, you can significantly improve your physical health and get your blood pressure back down to a healthy level.

Practice Meditation

Stress and anxiety have a direct impact on raising your blood pressure and can have a variety of other adverse health effects as well. Regular meditation practice is a wonderful way to improve your physical health and your mental health at the same time. Deep breathing practices and mindfulness meditation are particularly beneficial at lowering your blood pressure because they directly target the vagus nerve, which controls the body's blood pressure.