Hypertension: Shifting From Prescribed Medications To Natural Remedies

You have hypertension when the blood pressure within your arteries gets higher than normal. This condition can lead to heart attacks, strokes and even leg pains while walking. Because it doesn’t manifest any symptoms until it has done much damage, having your blood pressure checked from time to time is one of the best health investments that you can make.

Although the use of prescription medication may be necessary to manage hypertension, there are also natural ways to control it. You can use prescribed medications to lower your blood pressure initially. When it reaches its normal level, natural remedies can be used to keep pressure at a healthy level and enable you to taper off the medicines.

Regrettably, most doctors only cure the symptoms of the disease but are not really able to identify the deep-seated cause of hypertension. In each visit, the average patient-doctor consultation takes less than seven minutes. Pharmaceutical giants who manufacture blood pressure lowering drugs invest a lot of money in educating doctors about their latest medications, and virtually nothing on teaching alternative natural cures. Sadly, doctors have been reduced to somebody who simply writes medical prescriptions.

Unlike medications that are passed as a cure for anxiety, but can cause more harm than good for most sufferers, hypertension medications really do help a lot of people. For hypertensive conditions, be sure to take first the medicines that lower blood pressure, and follow up with the natural remedies described below. In a few months, you can gradually reduce your intake of prescription medications and still stay within normal pressure levels.

Natural therapy that can bring down high blood pressure

Obesity can cause blood pressure to soar. If you are obese or overweight, exercise and the right diet can help shed off excess pounds and control your hypertension. A change in the foods you eat will also be beneficial. You should start including low sugar, low fat and high fiber foods in your diet. Quitting smoking and consuming alcohol in moderation must also be considered. Also, salt is one of the silent demons in your diet and should be avoided if possible. If you must use salt, then consume very moderate amounts.

By shifting to less fattening and more nutritious foods, you can eat your way to a trimmer and healthier you. You can also lower your blood pressure and be less prone to heart diseases if you take the following nutritional supplements.

• A healthy supply of vitamins A, C, and D with magnesium is available in powder supplement form.

• 500 to 1,000 mg of calcium can be taken partly during a meal, with the rest taken at bed time.

• Eating a banana and a cup of tomato has enough daily dose of potassium which can help lower blood pressure.

• Coenzyme Q10 is the rising star as far as lowering high blood pressure is concerned. 200 mg is the required daily dose. There were serious cases where pressure was lowered by up to 40 points. The supply of Coenzyme Q10 in the body gets depleted of cholesterol-lowering drugs are taken regularly.

• While dark chocolate only reduces blood pressure by 3 to 4 points, it makes up for its rich supply of antioxidants.

You should also consider the role of emotion in hypertension. Some people are like pressure cookers when they get angry. They keep all that pent-up anger inside until the pressure builds up. People may seem calm from their outside appearance but they are actually almost ready to keel over due to blood pressure that has gone through the roof. The best way to deal with anger is not to allow it to build up inside but to blow off some steam and let all that anger out. This way, you get to lower your blood pressure and reduce the risk of a stroke. Know more about panic attacks, depression, stress and anxiety.

Mindfulness Therapy For Stress Reduction

We all have stress in our lives on a day to day basis. We inevitably all experience pain or worry to a certain degree as a result of this stress. Sometimes the cause of this worry is something small and manageable and other times there are life situations that cause us as individuals to experience pain and worry that is significant enough that it seemingly takes over who we are. In either case when left unchecked these worries can have a negative overall effect on our well-being. Mindfulness therapy can help us deal with these problems weather the stress you may be experiencing is large or small in nature.

The key to mindfulness therapy is learning how to become aware of the present moment in life. All too often we tend to focus our attention on the pain of the past and the worry of the future. When this happens we spend a significant amount of time and energy dealing with our own self talk or mental chatter. Self talk is the internal silent dialogue of thoughts that we have with ourselves throughout the day. When this internal self talk causes us to suffer by strongly resisting pain, sadly it can cause us to miss out on the experiences of the present moment. Sometimes people go through their entire lives in this manner being constantly stuck in the past or worried about the future. This can lead to problems with both depression and anxiety.

Mindfulness therapy can help in both of these situations. Mindfulness practice is best achieved through daily meditation. This practice has been in existence for thousands of years. Many people, particularly in western culture are somewhat skeptical of mindfulness meditation. There are preconceived notions that mindfulness meditation is an unorthodox far eastern religious practice. In fact this practice has nothing to do with religion and has been well adapted to fit the Western Culture. Additionally some are intimidated by the idea of mindfulness therapy meditation because of the misconception that only highly spiritual individuals can practice meditation in an effort to achieve enlightenment or that it is difficult. These ideas simply are not true.

Mindfulness meditation is easy to do and can be practiced by anyone. For beginners guided meditation is very effective at reducing stress, and anxiety. With guided meditation you simply find a comfortable chair to sit in, close your eyes and listen to an audio recording of a meditation instructor. There is usually an emphasis placed on noticing your breathing to help the practitioner become more acutely aware of the present moment.

Additionally there are usually some words that you will be instructed to focus on, also with the goal of decreasing your mental chatter and increasing your awareness of the present. Guided meditation recordings are usually 20 minutes long, and it is recommended that you make time for yourself to do this 2 times a day in order for the practice to be effective.

I have personally found it very rewarding to make it a priority to devote at least 40 minutes a day to my own personal well being. I recommend the guided meditations by Christopher Germer or Tara Brach. They both offer free guided meditations that you can download to your computer or an MP3 device. Christopher Germer also has a book that I found helpful in explaining the principles and benefits of this practice. You can read more such type of health articles on www.newsmicks.com