pump blood.
These ganglia respond to signals from many
sources – such as your heart chambers and
your brain. Different types of neurons sense
the mechanical and fluid demands on the heart
and adjust its motion accordingly.
Such control allows your body to deal
with everyday demands, from sleeping to
exercising. But it’s a two-way street: The heart
can talk to the brain too. “In some cases, we
feel things in our heart first, and then the brain
reacts,” says Dr Guarneri.
fKeep the beat To take advantage of this
symbiotic relationship, tame your mind via
your heart: Do daily calm-down breathing
sessions of five to 10 minutes, says Dr Guarneri.
Inhale deeply on a count of four, then exhale
for a count of seven. “You’ll put your nervous
system into a state of relaxation,” she says.
That calms your mind and soothes your heart.
IT LISTENS
Your heart is more than purely mechanical: Its
“brain” responds to the world around you and
appears to be sensitive to music. Dr Peter
Sleight, a retired Oxford University researcher,
has studied the effect of music on cardiac
rhythms. He and his colleagues discovered that
blood pressure and heart rate rise and fall to
match the volume and pace of music.
Other research reveals that rhythmic
chanting (like in a yoga class) has a similar
calming effect. In any case, the magic number
is 10: Musical phrases or chants lasting about
10 seconds seem to sync with the Meyer wave,
which is the natural ebb and flow of heart
rate and blood pressure. Dr Sleight found that
some of Verdi’s compositions hit this 10-beat
rhythm, as does Ave Maria.
fKeep the beat After a stressful day, listening
to classical or mellow music can help lower
your blood pressure. A study review published
last year suggests that if you are hypertensive,
listening to music could drop your systolic BP
by seven points. Focusing on your breathing
can enhance the benefit, because measured
breathing tends to bring down blood pressure.
IT CONNECTS
Your heart flutters when you see your beloved,
thanks to adrenalin. But some evidence
professor of psychiatry at the University of
Pittsburgh. An angry outburst increases your
risk of heart attack in the following hour by 2½
times, according to research in Canada.
fKeep the beat If you feel like you’re about
to blow up, meditate instead. In a University
of Kansas study, people who meditated for
20 minutes reduced their anger and blood
pressure. Men who meditate regularly are
calmer, but even first-timers feel more
peaceful after meditating. Meditation tamps
down the autonomic nervous system, creating
soothing benefits.IT RECOVERS
The heart is a uniquely durable organ because
it has to be. It also seems to have the ability to
heal and protect itself.
Because heart cells don’t divide and
reproduce after infancy, they are less
susceptible to developing tumours. And when
bloodflow to the heart becomes restricted –
as Conrad’s did – the heart can still beat.
“My doctor said I had basically preselected
myself to survive this,” he says. “By being fit
and having spent so much time at altitude,
my heart understood the duress it was under,
and other parts [of the muscle] were able to
take over.”
Research from Germany suggests that
people who exercise regularly may heal faster
after a heart attack than those who don’t –
in part because working out reduces heart
attack-induced scarring, thinning and
inflammation. That was the case for Conrad:
Two months after the incident, his ejection
fraction – a measure of pumping efficiency –
had recovered to 54 percent, which is within
the normal range.
fKeep the beat Some studies suggest that
incorporating mindfulness into your life can
reduce the risk of a secondary event, while a
larger body of research links stress and anger
to increased risk.
Conrad has been tracking his heart rate with
a Fitbit, trying to avoid situations and stimuli
that cause stress and quicken his heartbeat. “I
saw something in the news the other day that
spiked it up to 128,” he says. “So last Tuesday, I
took a day off from media, and just cleaned up
around the house, and it was great.”suggests that the heart is also in on the action.
In 2012, psychologist Emilio Ferrer performed a
novel experiment: He took 32 couples and sat
each couple alone in a room, hooked up to an
EKG and a machine to measure respiration.
He and his team had them perform three
tasks for five minutes each: doing nothing
(as a baseline), gazing at each other, and trying
to imitate each other without touching or
speaking. During each task, he discovered that
the partners’ heart rates became synchronized,
beat to beat.
That result was interesting, but so was what
happened next: He had each partner keep an
“emotional journal” for 90 days. There, too, the
partners tracked each other’s ups and downs- but in most cases, it was the women who
shifted their emotions and heart rates to
match those of their men. “Women who were
changing their daily emotions as a function of
their partners’ emotions were also changing
their physiological signals,” he says. “That
wasn’t the case with the men.”
fKeep the beat Pay more attention to your
girl’s emotional and physical state, so she’s not
always adapting to you. The study took place
in a lab, but you can try it at home, spending
five minutes sitting quietly in close proximity to
each other, not talking or touching.
IT BREAKS
The broken heart may actually be a thing,
research suggests. Scientists have long
observed that people who suffer sudden,
severe trauma sometimes exhibit physical
wounds on their pericardium (the outer
layer of heart muscle) caused by extreme
levels of stress neurotransmitters called
catecholamines.
But there’s also something called takotsubo
cardiomyopathy, where the left ventricle
becomes temporarily deformed and weakened
because of emotional stress. (Researchers
decided that it looked like a takotsubo, a type
of pot used in Japan to trap octopuses.) It’s
been observed mostly in older women who
suffered emotional trauma, but men are also at
risk from another set of emotions: anger.
Studies find that men who control their
anger are at less cardiac risk than those
who blow up easily, says Karen Matthews, aEarly Adulthood
You should get your first lipid profile by age 20 to
establish baseline cholesterol numbers. Your heart
muscle stiffens with time: A healthy 20-year-old will
have a max heart rate of 200 beats per minute. That
declines five to 10 beats per minute per decade.
Later Adulthood
If you have risk factors, such as uncontrolled high
blood pressure, your heart muscles thicken faster.
Then, about age 50, your heart becomes less
relaxed. How to prevent it? You guessed it: regular
exercise to improve and maintain heart flexibility.Elderly
By your 70s, cholesterol build-up, inflammation,
valve abnormalities and irregular rhythms may
compromise your heart’s pumping efficiency. After
around three billion beats, its oxygen supply can
deplete, and your heart will finally stop.JUNE 2017 37