Welcome back to another episode of health hacks

as I continue talking about the impact of stress on our health,

and today, I want to talk about the fact that stress can impact

and increase your blood pressure because it causes your blood

vessels to constrict, and that will elevate blood pressure

because the the blood vessels are getting narrower, and so the

heart has to work harder to push the blood through, and that then

increases the blood pressure in those narrower vessels, and that

can increase the risk of heart disease. So in terms of one of

the things that has been correlated with heart attacks as

well, that can help if you get more of it is sleep. So when we

get enough sleep, it allows us to be more stress resilient

through the day, and we all, as human beings, as adults, need

between seven to nine hours of sleep every night, nine hours if

you're feeling like you're getting sick and coming down

with something, and perhaps it's closer to seven hours if you're

feeling healthy and thriving. However, that is ideally what

the human body needs in order to thrive. And many of us aren't

getting that much sleep, so that is an area that I work with a

lot of my clients on is helping to improve their sleep and

giving them tips and tricks in order to start to get more

sleep. And it's really profound, the difference they notice in

themselves when they start sleeping more. And it's really

helps us to be able to manage our stress, because, you know,

as well as I do that, when you're not well rested, you are

more likely to be irritated by smaller things and fly off the

handle and get instantly triggered and into that stress

state, whereas if you've had a good night's sleep, you can

respond in a much more calm fashion. And there's also been

research that actually shows a direct correlation between the

amount of sleep people get and their risk of heart attack. And

we see that every year, when we go on and off daylight savings,

when we go on daylight savings, we lose an hour's sleep at

night, and hospitals show an increase in the number of heart

attacks the following day of 24% and when we go off daylight

savings in the fall, we gain an hour's sleep and hospitals

actually show A decrease in the number of heart attacks by 21%

and that's just from one hour of sleep, and we see that twice a

year. So something that you can start to work on in terms of

lowering your risk of heart disease and blood high blood

pressure is to ensure that you are getting adequate sleep, and

that will allow you to be able to go with the flow more in life

and manage the stresses that are being thrown at you. We all have

stress in our life. Stresses will be thrown at you. It's a

matter of how you handle them, and the more capable you are of

handling them, the less impact, negative impact they have on

your body and on your health. So if sleep is something that you

need support with in terms of improving your sleep, I have a

six steps to better sleep, self guided course that you can take.

I'll drop the link to that. I've recently added to that is sleep

meditation, and I also have many other tools that I can share

with you. If that's something you'd like to know more about,

please feel free to reach out to me. Melissa, at your guided

health journey.com. And happy sleeping.