Small Lifestyle Changes to Improve Your Heart Health

If you have a serious medical condition involving your heart, it may take a great deal of 
effort to improve your heart health. If you do not already have a serious condition, 
however, a few small steps can go a long way towards improving your overall heart 
health and help prevent against a number of more serious conditions. Heart health has 
also been proven to have a strong link to cognitive function as well, so many of the 
same things that protect your heart also protect your brain. Here are 3 small lifestyle 
changes you can make to help improve your heart health - and maybe help protect your 
brain in the process. 

1. Get Plenty of Rest

One early sign of heart disease is a buildup of calcium in your arteries. In one study go 
younger to middle-aged adults, those who got approximately 7 hours of good-quality 
sleep per night showed significantly less calcium build-up in their arteries than those 
who slept less than 6 hours or more than 9. There was also a marked difference 
between those who step soundly and those who didn't. If you don't sleep well or wake 
up feeling refreshed after a night's sleep, you may want to talk to your doctor about 
some remedies. 

2. Keep it Moving

As little as 30 minutes a day of moderate exercise, such as a brisk walk, can go a long 
way towards improving and maintaining overall heart health. This is particularly 
important for people that have sedentary jobs or spend most of their time seated. While 
30 minutes of brisk movement can have offer a serous improvement to overall heart 
health, it doesn't have as much of an impact if you spend the other 23.5 hours just 
sitting. Try and break up long periods of sitting by standing, moving or walking. 

3. Mind Your Emotional Health

While we all know that the heart is not actually the place in which emotions reside, the 
truth is your emotions play a significant role in overall heart health. Stress in particular 
has a particularly detrimental effect on heart health. There are a number of ways to help 
out your heart by managing your emotions. These range from minimizing the causes of 
stress in your life to volunteering to spending more time with the ones you love and 
doing things that you love. In a strange twist of irony, the more you enjoy your life, the 
better the effect it has on your heart. 

While there are a number of genetic and biological factors that affect hearth health that 
may not be so easy to overcome, protecting your heart doesn't have to be as difficult as 
it may seem. Getting plenty of rest and moderate exercise and living your life to the 
fullest can all go a long way towards keeping your ticker in good working order over the 
long haul.

