High blood pressure is often referred to as “The Silent Killer” and for good reason. Your blood pressure can be elevated (hypertension) and in most cases, there won’t be any outward signs of trouble. You can feel perfectly fine and you won’t look any different. It’s not like your face will turn beet red and look like your head is going to explode at any moment. However, the toll hypertension is taking on your internal organs such as your kidneys and heart can be enormous.

High blood pressure often goes hand in hand with elevated cholesterol and ultimately heart disease.

I’ve been stuck in the “pre-hypertensive” phase of high blood pressure for as long as I can remember. My diastolic pressure has always be at or slightly below normal (80 mmg), but my systolic pressure has stubbornly been stuck in the 130 mmg something range. For a brief period several years ago, I experimented with various blood pressure medications under my doctor’s prescription of course, but either didn’t see much effect in lowering my systolic pressure enough to warrant both the risk and expense or could not tolerate the very unpleasant side effects or the medicaitons.

As a general rule, mild hyptertension or the “pre-hypertensive” phase is typically not treated with medication, but rather diet and life style changes such as stress reduction and regular exercise. This is the course of treatment I’ve elected to undertake with varying degrees of success.

Perhaps the change that has had the largest impact on my hypertension is lowering my weight.

I recently dropped 22 pounds and noticed an immediate reduction in my systolic blood pressure. The other lifestyle change that may have helped is lowering my stress level. I think it has helped in how I choose to deal with stressful situations.

In the past I would typically get pretty bent out of shape when things didn’t go as I had planned. It’s a struggle, but now I take a more calm approach and decide if it’s really worth getting too upset over relatively minor annoyances.

I just read in the June 22 issue of “Parade Magazine” that a recent study of about 4000 hypertensive patients age 80 and above revealed that normalizing blood pressure reduced the death rate by 20%, heart failure by 64%, heart attacks by 34%, and deaths from stroke by 39%.

Those are some pretty dramatic numbers and again hammer home the importance of keeping your blood pressure in the normal range.

One thing that has helped me get a better appreciation of the dangers of hypertension has been to educate myself more about it.

In much the same way that teenagers used to be shown grisly car accident films back in drivers’ ed classes back when driving instruction used to be part of the curriculum (remember those days?).

Similarly, learning how high blood pressure can damage the tiny blood vessels in your eyes or ravage your kidneys has really made me sit up and take notice.

A really great book on the topic of high blood pressure that explains the subject in layman’s terms is the book: “Mayo Clinic On High Blood Pressure“. I thought I knew quite a bit about hypertension, but this book opened my eyes to other nasty effects of the disease. It also presents a frank discussion about high blood pressure medications, which I wasn’t expecting from a book published by a medical institution. In addition, there is some very sound advice for diet and life style changes that can help lower your blood pressure.