Some days, you can almost feel your blood pressure climbing. Your spouse is giving you a detailed play-by-play of their day, the kids have turned the living room into the final battleground of an epic showdown, and your inbox has doubled while you were not looking.
The old version of this article had a cure for that. Send the spouse to the moon, tell the kids you've moved to a spa, and pour yourself a generous glass of red wine. It was all meant in fun, and the monitors turned it upside down. When blood pressure has been measured around the clock, the spouse and the kids come out looking surprisingly good. The wine does not. Sorry, Merlot.
So here are eight steps, each still a little silly, and each with the numbers behind it.
Keep the spouse
Before you book that one-way trip to the moon, look at what marriage does to your numbers. In one test, 204 married and 99 single adults wore a blood pressure monitor for a full day and night. The married people's pressure dipped further at night, which is what healthy blood pressure does during sleep. A good marriage went with lower blood pressure, less stress and less depression.
That night dip is worth having. Among 17,312 people with high blood pressure on three continents, those whose pressure fell too little at night had 27% more heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular events than those with a normal dip, even after allowing for their average over the whole day and night. Those whose pressure rose at night carried a higher risk still.
The marriage finding had a catch, and it was a big one. The single people had lower blood pressure than the unhappily married ones. So the ring alone does nothing. The kind of marriage does the work.
Warmth shows up on the monitor. Among 59 women, those who said their partner hugged them more often had lower blood pressure at rest. And when 38 couples spent ten minutes in warm contact, the women who felt most supported by their partner had a lower top number afterwards. Hug the spouse before the day's report begins.
It works for men too. In 183 adults living as couples, ten minutes of holding hands over a romantic film and a 20-second hug before giving a speech meant smaller rises in both numbers and in heart rate than ten minutes of resting alone.
Still, the spouse has one rival. How Stress Spreads Through Families has the 240 married couples who did mental arithmetic and held a hand in ice water: the pet owners' heart rate and blood pressure rose least with their pet in the room, which beat having only their spouse there. The dog, after all, never gives a play-by-play.
The marriage hardest on the heart is not the openly bad one. In 94 couples, a spouse who was warm one moment and hard work the next went with a higher top number through the day. 10 Powerful Tips for Choosing the Right People to Surround Yourself With has the same thing in friendship: 104 young adults gave speeches with a friend in the room, and those who brought a friend they had mixed feelings about had higher blood pressure before the first speech began and after the last one ended.
So the spouse can stay on Earth. The play-by-play is the price of a good thing. If it is the mixed signals that wear you down, that is worth a calm conversation, not a rocket.
Keep the kids
The kids can stay too, and they may be doing you more good than it seems. When 198 married adults wore the same day-and-night monitors, couples without children had higher blood pressure than couples with them. The mothers had the lowest blood pressure of all, and women without children had the highest. The Lego under your bare foot may be earning its keep.
That is one group, measured once, so it shows a link and not a cause. Still, it is a lovely thing to remember when the battleground is at its loudest. The noise may come with lower numbers than the silence would.
You can still have the five-star spa. Take it in your head for ten minutes, with the door closed, and come back to the circus.
Leave the wine in the bottle
This is where the old article went wrong, and it was in good company. In 1991, the American programme 60 Minutes told viewers that the French ate rich food and had less heart disease, and pointed at the red wine. Within a year, red wine drinking in the United States went up by 40%, and some sellers began to call their bottles health food.
The story has been coming apart ever since. The chemical meant to explain it, resveratrol, is absorbed in such small amounts from a glass of wine that it is unlikely to explain anything. One of its busiest champions, the head of a heart centre at the University of Connecticut, was found guilty in 2012 of 145 counts of falsifying or fabricating data, and 24 of his papers have since been retracted. The miracle, it turned out, was in the paperwork, not the bottle.
The moderate drinker's healthy heart had a simpler explanation. When 87 long-term follow-ups covering nearly four million people were pooled, light drinkers seemed to live longer than people who did not drink. But the non-drinkers they were compared with included former drinkers, who carried a higher risk of dying. Once that and other flaws were allowed for, the advantage disappeared.
Your genes have tested it more neatly still. Some people carry a variant that makes alcohol unpleasant, so they drink less, through no choice of their own. Among 261,991 people, those carriers drank about 17% less, had lower blood pressure and about 10% lower odds of heart disease. That held for light drinkers as well as heavy ones.
And the pressure itself rises with every glass. When 19,548 adults were followed for about five years, there was no level below which alcohol stopped raising the pressure. About one drink a day went with a top number 1.25 points higher than none, and four a day with 4.9 points higher. The glass that was supposed to relax your arteries pushes the other way.
The man who first measured blood pressure was no friend of the bottle either. Stephen Hales, an English clergyman, described in 1733 how he had put fine tubes into the arteries of animals, a horse among them, and watched how high the blood rose. He also campaigned against the gin trade and wrote a popular tract against drinking.
7 Ways to Lower Blood Pressure the Usual Advice Misses, linked below, has the 94 people who drank about 32 units a week and stopped for a month: their blood pressure fell by about 6%. Pour a glass of water, kick off your shoes, put your feet up and take a deep breath. Keep everything from the old cure except the wine.
Nap with the TV off
The first version of this article called a nap "necessary" for your blood pressure. A large count points the other way. Among 358,451 adults in the UK, those who usually napped during the day were 12% more likely to develop high blood pressure, and 24% more likely to have a stroke, than those who never napped. A genetic analysis of the same people agreed.
Napping is not always a bad sign. Redefining Aging: What We Can Learn from the World's Longest-Lived People describes 23,681 healthy Greek adults in whom a regular siesta went with a 37% lower risk of dying of heart disease. A planned siesta in a country built around it is one thing. Needing to nap because the night was poor is another, and a nap cannot fix the night.
As for Netflix and nap, the Netflix is the problem. Why You Haven't Slept Your Best Night Yet (And How to Change That Tonight) tells of healthy adults who slept one night with a moderate light on: their heart rate stayed higher all night, and their bodies handled sugar worse the next morning. Keep the ocean sounds if you love them. Turn the screen off, nap in the dark if you nap at all, and give the night the care it deserves.
Laugh on purpose
The old article said laughter helps your blood vessels relax, and on this one it was right. 10 Ways Laughter Is Good for Your Health and Happiness, linked below, has the 17 healthy adults who watched a comedy one day and a documentary another. After the comedy, the ability of the main artery in the arm to widen went up by 17%. After the documentary, it went down by 15%.
It also has a surprise. Laughing on purpose, with nothing funny going on, did better as a treatment than laughing at a joke. So you do not have to wait for the day to become funny. And it is a lot more fun than popping a pill.
Dance, then sit for Mozart
Dancing has a strange history as medicine. In July 1518, in Strasbourg, a woman known as Frau Troffea began to dance in the street and did not stop. By August, somewhere between 50 and 400 people had joined her, dancing for weeks.
The cure prescribed was more dancing. Halls were reportedly opened and musicians hired so the afflicted could dance themselves free of it. It made things worse, and the city ended up banning public dancing and music altogether. Strasbourg found out the hard way that a party can go on too long.
The dancing that helps is a little gentler. When 11 controlled tests in 983 people with high blood pressure were pooled, dance brought the top number down by about 7.5 points and the bottom by about 3. Dancing more than three times a week did best. So crank up the playlist, and who cares if your moves are a little offbeat.
Then sit down for the music, and choose it carefully. Mozart has been oversold before. In 1993, a test found that listening to a Mozart sonata gave a boost in spatial reasoning, the kind used to fold paper and solve mazes, that lasted about 15 minutes. In the retelling it became "Mozart makes you smart". In 1998, the governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, budgeted $105,000 a year to give every newborn in the state a tape or CD of classical music, played legislators Beethoven's "Ode to Joy", and asked, "Now, don't you feel smarter already?" When 39 tests were pooled in 2010, there was little evidence for the effect.
Mozart may not make you smarter, but he does seem to lower blood pressure. In one test, 60 people listened to 25 minutes of music and 60 more rested in silence. Mozart brought the top number down by 4.7 points and Strauss by 3.7. ABBA did nothing that counted, and neither did the silence. It made no difference which kind of music people liked.
With a at home, you can run the test on yourself, before and after the music. Rest your arm on a table while you do. When 133 adults were measured three ways, a hand resting in the lap read the top number 3.9 points higher than an arm on a desk, and an arm hanging at the side 6.5 points higher. 7 Ways to Lower Blood Pressure the Usual Advice Misses has the rest of the steps.
Leave a little silence at the end, too. When 24 people, half of them musicians, listened to six styles of music, the faster tempos raised their blood pressure, breathing and heart rate. A two-minute pause between tracks brought all three down below where they had started. Silence on its own did nothing in the Mozart test. Silence after the music did.
The piece that worked best in the Mozart test was his Symphony No. 40 in G minor. Dance to ABBA, by all means. Recover to Mozart.
Huff and puff
This one sounds like a joke and is not. In a test of 36 adults aged 50 to 79 whose blood pressure was above normal, half breathed in hard against a small handheld resistance trainer, 30 breaths a day, six days a week, for six weeks. The other half did the same on a light setting.
The hard breathers' top number fell from 135 to 126. Six weeks after they stopped, about three quarters of that drop was still there. The easy breathers' pressure did not budge. Huffing and puffing has finally found a better use than blowing houses down. Thirty breaths take less time than finding something to watch. The loads your breath the same way, with a spring that keeps the valve shut until you breathe in hard enough.
A me day, with company
The old article ended on a "Me Day", and it was right that self-care is not selfish. The question is what goes into the day.
A hot bath is a good start. Among 30,076 Japanese adults aged 40 to 59, followed for about twenty years, those who took a hot bath in the tub almost every day had 28% less heart disease and stroke than those who bathed twice a week or less. Strokes alone were 26% lower. It is only a link, but a warm one.
Japan also knows the bath's risks. Sudden deaths in the tub there strike older people above all, and above all in winter. Undressing in a cold room pushes blood pressure up, a long hot soak brings it down, and standing up drops it further, sometimes enough to faint in the water. So warm the bathroom first, keep the water comfortably warm, and stand up slowly when you get out.
Just do not spend every day alone. When four national samples of Americans, from teenagers to old age, were followed over time, social isolation in old age raised the risk of high blood pressure by more than diabetes did.
Helping out counts too. Among Americans over 50 followed for four years, those who had volunteered at least 200 hours in the year, about four hours a week, had 40% lower odds of developing high blood pressure than those who had not volunteered. Less than that showed no link. So keep the me day, and fill some of the other days with people. Book the spa for two.
Peace in the chaos
The play-by-play, the battleground and the inbox will all be back tomorrow. You still cannot send your spouse to the moon or move into a kid-free spa, and it turns out you do not need to. The people making all the noise may be good for your blood pressure. The wine was never on your side. And the rest of the cure is wonderfully ordinary: a hug, a laugh, a dance, a little Mozart, a little silence, thirty hard breaths, a warm bath and a friend.
Tonight, put on Mozart's Symphony No. 40 for 25 minutes, and leave the wine in the bottle.
Laughing at nothing? 10 Ways Laughter Is Good for Your Health and Happiness — the comedy that widened arteries, the laughing epidemic of 1962, and why laughing on purpose works best.
Still watching the numbers? 7 Ways to Lower Blood Pressure the Usual Advice Misses — the hand grip, the pet, the sauna and the month without alcohol.
Know someone who unwinds with a glass of red? Send them this, and Mozart's Symphony No. 40 to go with it.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health or blood pressure, talk to a qualified health professional.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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