Hypertension

High BP or Blood Pressure, the most significant risk factor for premature death. There are simple things you can do right now to lower your blood pressure! 

There are simple things you can do to lower your BP or blood pressure right now

1. Stay hydrated. When you wake in the morning drink 8-16 oz of water right away & aim for at least 8 total cups of water or around 60-100 oz per day, more in high weather if your very active.

2. Do mindfulness deep slow 5 second breathing in through your nose, then slowly exhale for 15 seconds & do this for about a minute a few times per day. This will lower your pulse rate & blood pressure. 

3. Go to bed earlier & avoid bright screens & artificial lights near bedtime. Wake early, the same time every day. Floss & brush before bed to prevent tooth & gum decay. Cool darker silent or white, pink, red or brown noise environments are better for sleep. Think ocean waves, fan noises, a gentle breeze or quiet forest area in nature. 

4. Talk to your doctor about an anti-hypertensive drug. My physician & I arrived at lisinopril, a 3rd generation derivative chemical analog of the an isolate from the pit viper snake venom that is well tolerated with fewer side effects & better efficacy or effectiveness than other ACE inhibitors in the same or similar drug class. 

5. Stop smoking. The number one way to reduce your risk of stroke, clotting, and embolism, not sitting too much or too often. Rest important too, don't drive yourself restless, but sitting around all day at home, in the car, at work, too much sitting more toxic than smoking tobacco. Consider smoking less often, less of the time. I knew a Japanese man who only smoked 4 cigarettes per day. He eventually cut back to 3 then 2 then 1 then none. Stopping smoking a great way to reduce hypertension, its also keeps your skin looking better longer! Cadmium & other toxins in tobacco smoke cause polymer cross linking in the skin that makes it dry out, crack & wrinkle strongly with fine lines & creases. Avoid too much sunlight UV or wear sun screen for the same reason, the UV gives skin photoaging, like a radiation burn. 

6. Cut back on alcohol consumption. If your an adult man, no more than 2 drinks per night on average. If your an adult woman, no more than one. Alcohol is a dehydrating dose dependent toxin, since ethanol metabolite acetaldehyde a carcinogen & pancreatic & liver cancers are associated with excess ethanol intake or drinking too much, too often. Besides, when you drink less, you get a buzz easier when you do have a drink or two. 

7. Let go of unforgiving thoughts. Forgive yourself & others who have wronged you. Let go of any fear, uncertainty or doubt & consider trusting in the Lord God. Inner healing can come through Faith in Christ Jesus & becoming a doer of the Word of God, i.e. showing all other people love & kindness, helping other people at all times, being a good, decent, honest, helpful, loving, respectful, honorable person with good positive personality characteristics. Take captive all your thoughts & improve your thought life and say positive things about yourself. Your were beautifully wonderfully made no matter how you look at it or what you believe. Your cells are full of amazing molecular machinery, some 75,000 enzymes going 1000 mph making more than 100 chemical reactions happen every second in every cell. Life is a miracle in many ways * try to hold an appreciative & thankful perspective understanding these amazing awe inspiring uplifting & interesting facts about cell science. The cell the basic unit of all life & the biomolecular machines inside the bodies cells are amazing. Consider the interplaying factors involves in the function of the eye, eye lids, retina, lens & vision processing in your brain. Consider the clotting factors in your blood, where dozens of finely balances systems have to precisely interact to automatically seal up heal & repair cuts & wounds or tissue damage. The fact that you & I are even alive & able to communicate is astonishing if you think about it! 

When blood pressure persistently elevated, it increases the risk for heart disease (ischemic) stokes that debilitate people, vascular disease that degrades physical endurance, heart failures, aneurisms, atherosclerosis, fibrillation or heart fluttering, some cancers of the blood & embolisms. Incredibly, cognitive impairment such a dementia & degradation of the retina can occur from constantly evaluated blood pressure. 

I have been suffering from hypertension for some time after getting sick with an unknown virus that attacked my ACE receptors, of unknown origin. I stay hydrated, exercise for physical healthy regularly, fast periodically, eat a healthier diet, do not smoke or drink alcohol much. I do drink coffee, which is known to raise blood pressure some for those with risk factors for hypertension. 

My physician thinks my personal high BP caused by idiopathic unknown genetic factors & prescribed me 40 mg of lisinopril daily in two spaced out doses of 20mg. I only take one 20 mg pill every morning & was able to reduce my BP from 320 over 240 to around 140 over 80 but have to be deliberately focused in deep breathing & staying chill & calm daily. I have a natural propensity towards being high strung, high energy, driven, passionate and highly motivated, but this desire to be everything to everyone, to understand everything, to be as strong & physically fit as I am able; I do it, but its absolutely exhausting. I went to the Be In Health Ministries for their spiritual healing seminar this summer & learned that perhaps a component of this overly ambition driven state of mind could be behind my high BP. 

I was able to drop my A1C from 8.4 to 4.5 by cutting out excess carbohydrates from my diet, skipping breakfast every day to interval fast, and to regularly engage physical activities to burn any blood glucose & limit glucose oxidation of my red blood cells. 

Sadly, I am an American & have been bombarded with unhealthy lifestyle & diet concepts throughout my life, something that hurts many people because of the nutritional excesses & deficiencies emblematic of the SAD or standard American diet, something also known colloquially as diseases of civilization. 

So pre-diabetes and high blood sugar, a combination related to metabolic syndrome disorders. I know how I got there originally, back in 2017. In part because I abused salted caramels by the thousand for years, ate pasta and rice & drank soda pop in excess & consumed beer regularly, all of which contain excess simple sugars that stress the bodies endocrine system, giving rise to insulin resistance, hyperinsulinism, high blood pressure & other problems like glucose toxicity in brain cells that causes brain fog, a causal driver of ADD & ADHD in children & dementia & Alzheimers in older people. Yes, abusing sugar & simple carbs that turn into blood sugars, with a sedentary lifestyle often a receipt for metabolic diseases, namely hypertension & type II diabetes. 

In order to safely donate my Type O blood to Bloodworks Northwest, my blood pressure has to be 140-80 or lower, something I have been fortunate to achieve with lifestyle & diet changes & medication, namely going to bed earlier, waking up early every day, drinking coffee, getting enough physical activity to spin the wheels on my Apple Watch SE lately // mostly hiking steep hills nearby & HIIT burst exercises & certainly the 20mg of Lisinopril an ACE inhibitor, worked as a combo to lower my blood pressure, while metformin helps to drag down my resting fasting blood glucose levels, and thankfully metformin also an anti aging drug via a whole cascade of metabolic benefits as illustrated in Dr. David A Sinclair's book "Lifespan" Why We Age & Why We Don't Have To / so I will keep taking Metformin, even if for no other reason than the age reversal properties of it & recently added 250mg of NMN to my daily multivitamin mixture, inspired by Dr. Sinclair & his "Lifespan" book. 

So you can do like me, move more & eat less carbohydrate & sugar. You can water fast for 4-7 days & start by watching the YouTube movie "The Science of Fasting" / Fastiq the smartphone App can help you learn to interval fast, but its easy, just skip a meal every day, breakfast or lunch or dinner. Eating less very important if you are overweight. I have a healthy body weight, but tend to develop visceral fat around my organs if I eat too many carbs. My body weight stays around 165 lbs, but I feel worse when I consume sugars regularly. I do better with more healthy fats & fiber & healthy protein & water to stay well hydrated. I add lemon slices to my water too, since that seems to work wonders on my digestive system & makes me feel better. 

From Wikipedia on Hypertension / please read if you have high blood pressure, so you can expand your understanding & knowledge of how to address it! 

"Modern understanding of the cardiovascular system began with the work of physician William Harvey (1578–1657), who described the circulation of blood in his book "De motu cordis". The English clergyman Stephen Hales made the first published measurement of blood pressure in 1733.^[171][172] However, hypertension as a clinical entity came into its own with the invention of the cuff-based sphygmomanometer by Scipione Riva-Rocci in 1896.^[173] This allowed easy measurement of systolic pressure in the clinic. In 1905, Nikolai Korotkoff improved the technique by describing the Korotkoff sounds that are heard when the artery is ausculted with a stethoscope while the sphygmomanometer cuff is deflated.^[172] This permitted systolic and diastolic pressure to be measured." 

"The symptoms similar to symptoms of patients with hypertensive crisis are discussed in medieval Persian medical texts in the chapter of "fullness disease".^[174] The symptoms include headache, heaviness in the head, sluggish movements, general redness and warm to touch feel of the body, prominent, distended and tense vessels, fullness of the pulse, distension of the skin, coloured and dense urine, loss of appetite, weak eyesight, impairment of thinking, yawning, drowsiness, vascular rupture, and hemorrhagic stroke.^[175] Fullness disease was presumed to be due to an excessive amount of blood within the blood vessels.

Descriptions of hypertension as a disease came among others from Thomas Young in 1808 and especially Richard Bright in 1836.^[171] The first report of elevated blood pressure in a person without evidence of kidney disease was made by Frederick Akbar Mahomed (1849–1884)"

Historically the treatment for what was called the "hard pulse disease" consisted in reducing the quantity of blood by bloodletting or the application of leeches.^[171] This was advocated by The Yellow Emperor of China, Cornelius Celsus, Galen, and Hippocrates.^[171] The therapeutic approach for the treatment of hard pulse disease included changes in lifestyle (staying away from anger and sexual intercourse) and dietary program for patients (avoiding the consumption of wine, meat, and pastries, reducing the volume of food in a meal, maintaining a low-energy diet and the dietary usage of spinach and vinegar).

In the 19th and 20th centuries, before effective pharmacological treatment for hypertension became possible, three treatment modalities were used, all with numerous side-effects: strict sodium restriction (for example the rice diet^[171]), sympathectomy (surgical ablation of parts of the sympathetic nervous system), and pyrogen therapy (injection of substances that caused a fever, indirectly reducing blood pressure).^[171][177]

The first chemical for hypertension, sodium thiocyanate, was used in 1900 but had many side effects and was unpopular.^[171] Several other agents were developed after the Second World War, the most popular and reasonably effective of which were tetramethylammonium chloride, hexamethonium, hydralazine, and reserpine(derived from the medicinal plant Rauvolfia serpentina). None of these were well tolerated.^[178][179] A major breakthrough was achieved with the discovery of the first well-tolerated orally available agents. The first was chlorothiazide, the first thiazide diuretic and developed from the antibiotic sulfanilamide, which became available in 1958.^[171][180] Subsequently, beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, angiotensin receptor blockers, and renin inhibitors were developed as antihypertensive agents.

"High blood pressure is the most common chronic medical problem prompting visits to primary health care providers in USA. The American Heart Association estimated the direct and indirect costs of high blood pressure in 2010 as $76.6 billion.^[163] In the US 80% of people with hypertension are aware of their condition, 71% take some antihypertensive medication, but only 48% of people aware that they have hypertension adequately control it.^[163] Adequate management of hypertension can be hampered by inadequacies in the diagnosis, treatment, or control of high blood pressure.^[183] Health care providers face many obstacles to achieving blood pressure control, including resistance to taking multiple medications to reach blood pressure goals. People also face the challenges of adhering to medicine schedules and making lifestyle changes. Nonetheless, the achievement of blood pressure goals is possible, and most importantly, lowering blood pressure significantly reduces the risk of death due to heart disease and stroke, the development of other debilitating conditions, and the cost associated with advanced medical care."