***Are You Stressed, Anxious and at Risk for Heart Disease?

Did you know that in the 1920’s heart disease accounted for only 10% of deaths a year in America, but today heart disease is America’s #1 killer? Up ahead we’ll see exactly why, but for now consider this.

Heart disease sneaks up on people, it doesn’t knock first—it just breaks down the door. People don’t see it coming and, at first, they actually have trouble believing that it has happened to them. If you don’t want to become one of these people, then you must have the real skinny on your heart health.

Here’s what’s behind the rise in heart disease and it points to what you need to know and do to keep your heart healthy. Psychology and medicine have pulled back the curtain on what’s driving so much heart disease and heart attacks, including “sudden death".

Here’s What’s Behind the Curtain

What’s behind the curtain is—STRESS.

And we now know how stress drives heart disease, heart attacks and what’s called “sudden death.” Sudden death is just that. With no warning, the heart dies. It’s so unexpected, so devastating and so final.

Stress is not just feeling tired, wired and on edge. Stress is also about the release of dangerous chemicals into your body, chemicals that put your heart at serious risk. You have a hard-wired mechanism built into your body, called the “Fight or Flight Response.” This response prepares you to fight or flee from life threatening danger by releasing chemicals or stress hormones into your blood.

Anxiety is the emotional side of stress. No wonder. Fight or Flight hormones running around in our blood leave us at survival—we may be fighting for our lives.

So Much Stress—So Many Chemicals

Unfortunately your “Fight or Flight Response” is obsolete. It was designed for a simpler time, a time when life was much less chaotic and hectic. The pace and style of life today leaves you prone to a lot of stress, stress at work, stress at home, stress in your relationships, and stress in your financial life. As a consequence, what I call your Stress Faucet gets turned on too frequently and it stays on too long.

Two Senior National Institute of Health Scientists, Drs. Chrousos and Gold, put it this way:

“In our modern society, stress…hormones continue to wash through the system in high levels, never leaving…and so the stress response that once gave ancient people the speed and endurance to escape life-threatening dangers runs constantly in many modern people and never shuts down.”

And this often happens in error, triggered by your fears, worries and other negative states of mind. Then stress chemicals seep into your blood and heart tissues and linger there. This causes strain and damage to your heart and can even “kill” it.

Stress Hormones Can Paralyze Your Heart

In a worst case scenario, research shows that a stream of stress hormones can paralyze the heart muscle and prevent blood from reaching areas that must have it to stay alive, and so it dies.

As my colleague Dr. Paul Rosch noted in this February’s American Institute of Stress newsletter, the secretion of a stress hormone at the nerve endings of the heart muscle can cause heart attack even in people with low cholesterol, healthy arteries and no blood clots. And he notes further that anxiety and depression, two stress hormone driven problems—can also increase risk for heart attacks and sudden death.

The studies are clear on stress and heart disease, but vested interests prevent the knowledge from being commonly known. To give you a feel for how much the public is misinformed, the idea that high cholesterol is the prime driver of heart disease is false.

“The Worst Fraud Perpetrated on the American Public”

Dr. George Mann a highly respected science researcher calls this idea “the worst fraud perpetrated on the American public”. This week you will see an array of drug company ads for cholesterol drugs, but you’ll hear nothing of the prize awarded to Dr. Uffe Ravnskov.

Dr. Ravnskov won the prestigious 2007 LEO Prize for his research and criticisms of the alleged and advertised relationship between cholesterol and heart disease, especially as a basis for prescribing expensive and often dangerous medications.

Stress actually raises cholesterol levels more than fatty foods. Moreover, in a 26 year follow up of the Framingham Heart study, 50% of people who developed coronary heart disease had below average cholesterol levels.

These Two Things Will Protect Your Heart

Here’s what you need to do to protect your heart from stress.

Learn how to

1. keep your Stress Faucet from getting turned on unnecessarily, and
2. flush stress hormones from your blood and tissues

The good news is that with the right knowledge and tools you can do this easily. Visit my site at www.MesicsTraining.com and for a limited time you can download my new book: “The Little Black Book of Stress Relief Secrets” Free of charge. It will give you what you need to know and do to bust stress, reduce anxiety and feel more in control again.

Manganiello/MESICS LLC ©--All Rights Reserved 2009