Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: From Riverside Health System. This is the Healthy youy podcast where we talk about a range of health related topics focused on improving your physical and mental health. We chat with our providers, team members, patients and caregivers to learn more about how to maintain a healthy lifestyle and improve overall physical and mental health. So let's dive in to learn more about becoming a healthier you.
If you've ever felt your heart race during an argument. Yes, I have felt physically drained by a stressful relationship or noticed that the tension in your life doesn't just stay emotional. This episode is definitely for you. Most people think heart health is about diet, exercise and genetics. But more and more research and real life experience shows that our relationships, stress levels and emotional connections play a major role in how health our hearts really feel.
I'm Frankie Myers and this is Healthy U. Where we break down everyday health topics and introduce you to the experts helping keep our communities well.
Joining me today is Dr. Brittany Thompson, a vascular surgeon with Riverside vascular specialists.
Welcome, Dr. Thompson.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: You're welcome. Dr. Thompson treats conditions that affect circulation and cardiovascular health.
And she sees firsthand how stress, emotional strain and life experiences show up physically in the body.
All right, to start us off, walk me through, Dr. Thompson, what what you do at Riverside Vascular Specialist, how your work connects to today's conversation about relationships and heart health and how you ended up in this field of medicine.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Yes, ma'. Am. So I'm a vascular surgeon with Riverside Vascular Specialists. This is one of the many specialties within cardiovascular health.
Specifically in vascular surgery, we treat the arteries and the veins outside of the brain and outside of the heart.
And when we talk about relationships, mental and psychological health, all of them are intertwined. So they definitely influence outcomes with what we treat in the body as well.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Okay, within the first few minutes, I want us to really get into why this topic matters so much to everyday life.
So walk me through the bigger picture.
What are you seeing that concerns that connect stress, relationships and cardiovascular health.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: So with a lot of the disease that we treat, so we talk about it in terms of treating life and limb.
We talk about modifiable and non modifiable risk factors and we often think of the physical risk factors such as smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise.
However, with psychological and mental health, those stressors play an important role too.
There's actually been some data that shows that they can be just as impactful, if not more impactful than some of our physical risk factors, which is important, I think. One of the recent studies I looked at estimated that loneliness and stressors can impact mortality, your risk of stroke, your risk of heart attack, and up to 30%, which is. It's pretty impactful.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: Yeah, that is pretty impactful.
Why do you think people often separate emotional stress from heart health, even though the body doesn't make the distinction?
[00:03:51] Speaker B: So I think it's easier to see the impact of the physical on what happens in the body.
So we can more easily see that if we smoke and if we have lack of diet, lack of appropriate exercise, we gain weight. And that can have physical effects. A lot of the things with our emotional and physical and mental well being, you don't necessarily see the direct effects, but they happen on the inside.
So there's lots of studies that we learn about through our training on how stress and poor emotional health that influences hormonal pathways, stress pathways within the body that have effects all over the body and influence the very same outcomes with the physical.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: And I know we're going to talk a little bit more about this, but even for myself, sometimes you don't even know that you're stressed.
Let's break down.
Let's break this down in a way people can really understand.
Walk me through what happens in the body when someone is living with chronic stress, whether that's from relationships, work or emotional strain.
[00:05:00] Speaker B: Again, similar to the stress that happens with genetics and poor diet and poor exercise. Whenever you have chronic low stress, you end up with elevated cortisol levels in the body.
Those cortisol levels influence all sorts of biological processes.
With that, you may see effects such as elevated blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, and with that, you can also see increased inflammation, development of plaque in our arteries whenever we develop plaque in our arteries. Depending on which arterial bed is affected, you can see increased risk of heart attack if it's in the heart, stroke if it's in the arteries in the neck, or potentially limb loss if it's arteries in the legs.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: Some people may still be thinking stress cannot actually hurt your heart that much, but there's actually a condition people sometimes call broken heart syndrome.
Walk me through what that is.
I know what I thought that was in my youth, but it's definitely not what they're talking about here.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: Yeah. So broken heart syndrome, it's not something that I directly treat as a vascular surgeon, but it's one of the things that we've learned about in medical school where such a huge emotional stimulus, such as the passing of a loved one, can have a huge effect on the body. Where you do see evidence of a weakened heart, where the heart doesn't pump as well as it used to, and subsequently affects across the body strictly from that emotional stimulus.
Fortunately, a lot of those effects can be reversible, but it's absolutely a situation where we see how the emotional directly ties with the physical and the body.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: Okay.
And on the flip side, what happens when people have strong emotional support or healthy relationships?
[00:06:55] Speaker B: Right. So having strong emotional support and healthy relationships helps to decrease those harmful stress levels in the body, helps to lead to decreased inflammation, and I think importantly, it also helps put the patient in a place where they can develop healthy habits which, which it ends up being a positive feedback cycle.
You are less depressed, you're more likely to eat healthy, to become more active and doing those things increase the overall physical well being in addition to the mental and the psychological.
[00:07:29] Speaker A: Okay, all right.
So relationships can either put extra strain on the heart or help protect it.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:07:39] Speaker A: Wow.
I would have to agree with that.
Now let's make this real for our listeners without sharing anything identifying walk me through a moment or a type of moment where you realized a patient's emotional stress or relationships were directly affecting their health, their heart health.
[00:08:03] Speaker B: So without naming a specific patient with identifiers, I think as specific patient population that we see affected are patients with what we call vasculitis and vascular surgery.
That is a condition where strictly by some stressor which may be smoking for what have you, they will have clamping down of their arteries to the extent that they can develop non healing wounds and need amputation of their fingers and toes.
So it's a huge deal. And, and we don't have a lot that we can do to treat it other than to treat the stimulus which is smoking. And so we find that for a lot of those patients, whether it's stress from jobs, stress from things going on in a family or in a marriage, once they are able to find some supporting relationship to decrease the stress levels in their life, they're able to lean on something else other than smoking. And as soon as they decrease those smoking habits, they see an increase in their positive outcomes and they'll see wound healing, they'll see less of the ischemia, the digits and toes that lead to limb loss in that case.
So sort of just one example where we commonly see how decreasing the stress, improving your mental and psychological well being improves the physical and greatly leads to a completely different outcome.
[00:09:26] Speaker A: Wow, that's good stuff.
This is where people may be quietly asking themselves is this something I should be worried about? Walk me through how someone can tell the difference between everyday stress and stress that may be affecting their heart.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: Right.
A normal amount of stress is usually transient.
It may be related to if you have an assignment or a project that you're a little anxious about.
But whenever you have stress that doesn't go away, stress that you wake up and you're dealing with, stress that keeps you up at night, stress that is affecting you having healthy eating habits, it starts to affect you enjoying your normal day to day activities.
That's when you can recognize that it's starting to become a problem.
So I would say that once you start to see a chronicity and those symptoms, then you should start working on improving those because at that point you may start to see even more physical, harmful physical effects.
[00:10:32] Speaker A: Okay, very good.
What would you want someone to hear if they felt guilty or embarrassed admitting that stress or relationships might be impacting their health?
[00:10:46] Speaker B: It's absolutely nothing to be guilty about. It's something that we all deal with in our day to day lives. And a lot of my patient visits in the clinic are spent talking about the social aspects and the mental aspects of a patient's life. Because it's all intertwined in medicine. We're taught to evaluate the whole patient, obtain a gestalt medicine. And that's really important because even with the perfect medicine, the perfect procedure, if you don't improve the social, the mental, the psychological well being, that patient unfortunately may still see poor outcomes.
So again, nothing to be guilty or ashamed about.
[00:11:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Just to have to have people that you can trust.
[00:11:26] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:11:28] Speaker A: And that's the big thing. And not isolate.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:11:30] Speaker A: Isolate yourself. Which there's this new term called moving in silence that I hear people say. And if you're moving in silence, then you don't have that social interaction to process through things when.
[00:11:42] Speaker B: Right.
[00:11:42] Speaker A: Which dealing with them.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: It's important there, there have been studies where they'll follow some of our elderly patients that may have had a spouse pass away or maybe unmarried. And those patients see higher negative outcomes of cardiovascular health in terms of mortality, heart attack and peripheral arterial disease. So it's important having healthy relationships, it improves everything across the board.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: Absolutely.
We talk a lot about food and movement, but not as much about emotional health.
How people can start protecting their hearts by addressing stress boundaries and emotional well being.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: I think you should absolutely focus on the physical. Again we call those the modifiable risk factors and vascular surgery.
But equally focusing on having strong relationships, having supporting relationships, that's going to help you build the physical and build healthy habits and support those healthy habits.
One of those examples is if you decide that I'm going to make exercising more a goal of the year.
Finding a buddy, daily goal, finding a buddy or an accountability partner to help you with that, that is only gonna help create sort of a positive feedback cycle to continue doing that and to continue having sort of the motivation to keep going.
So, again, recognizing the importance of it, I think is a good place to start. Yes.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: And being realistic about your exercise goal. Absolutely. You're not gonna run out, go run a marathon. I can do that sometimes having these large delusions, but it's okay to start small for sure.
For someone listening who's realizing, wow, my stress levels are higher.
Then I thought, what's one small step you'd recommend starting today? I know I use breathing. I'm interested in what you would say.
[00:13:45] Speaker B: You know, honestly, I would say talking to someone about it. Talking is therapeutic.
[00:13:51] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:13:51] Speaker B: Instead of bottling it, in expressing what's going on with a trusted friend, a trusted family member, a neighbor.
[00:14:00] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: It's therapeutic to just get it out. And you'd be surprised how therapeutic it will be just to have a listening ear or encouraging words and returning. Absolutely.
[00:14:11] Speaker A: I know for me, in my daily practice, sometimes it. It can be overstimulation. I have to just sit back, take deep breaths and relax and pace myself.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: So you don't get overwhelmed. But that's great feedback.
And when is it really important that someone bring these concerns to a healthcare professional? Like, what is that trigger point again?
[00:14:36] Speaker B: I think if you start to notice that the stress is no longer transient, that it's something that is affecting you every day.
[00:14:45] Speaker A: When you say transient, talk a little bit for our viewers about what that means.
[00:14:49] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So if you notice that every single day, the same stressor is on your mind.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:55] Speaker B: Every single night, it's waking you up in the middle of your sleep. You no longer enjoy the activities that you enjoy.
And despite trying some techniques yourself with speaking with trusted friends and family, or trying your best to engage in healthy habits, it's not helping. Then it's time to talk with the healthcare provider, because sometimes we need a medication or extra guidance to help get over that hump.
[00:15:21] Speaker A: Yes, yes. Good, good, good feedback. Before we wrap up, I want to look ahead. How do you see the conversation around emotional health and cardiovascular care evolving?
[00:15:35] Speaker B: Well, I think there's an overall trend in medicine to focus on prevention.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:15:42] Speaker B: And I think with the recent trend to do more research in the effects of loneliness and chronic stress on the body, we're already seeing that importance.
I think one of the studies I looked at mentioned that chronic loneliness can have an effect on the body equivalent to smoking almost 15 cigarettes a day, which is super impactful.
I think with the research more so clarifying that connection and focusing on prevention, we're going to see more of an emphasis on healthy habits, healthy relationships, and a more improved mental well being to overall help improve our outcomes.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: Okay, okay.
If you could leave our listeners with one sentence about protecting their heart beyond diet and exercise, what would that be?
[00:16:36] Speaker B: Protect your mental and your physical well being.
Both are vitally important and will help to support each other.
[00:16:44] Speaker A: They go hand in hand.
[00:16:45] Speaker B: They go hand in hand.
[00:16:46] Speaker A: All right, Dr. Thompson, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to come and sit down and talk with me. Today was very insightful and eye opening for our viewers and also for me.
This really changes how we think about our heart.
Do you, do you have anything to say before we wrap up today?
[00:17:08] Speaker B: I don't think so.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: You think so? Well, thank you so much to our listeners. If this episode made you think, know that awareness is a powerful first step. If you found this helpful, share it with someone you care about. And as always, take care of your health inside and out is a powerful step toward a healthier you. Until next time, stay healthy.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Healthy youy.
We're so glad you were able to join us today and learn more about this topic. If you would like to explore more, go to riversideonline.com.
