Stress Isn’t Killing You—Your Reaction To It Is

Stress has been linked to heart disease and early death. But new research suggests that how you deal with stressful events has a bigger impact on your health than how many stressful things happen to you.

About 900 people were interviewed every day for a week about how many routine stressors—like arguments or work challenges—occurred that day, as well as how they felt in response to those events. The scientists also assessed the subjects’ heart rate variability at rest in a lab.

Heart rate variability is a measure of how much your heart rate fluctuates from beat to beat. (Your heart doesn’t pump steadily, like a metronome. The time between beats ranges widely, even as you sit still.) Higher variability has been linked to a lower risk of heart disease.

The researchers discovered that how much stress each person experienced had zero effect on their heart rate variability at rest.

But people who had more dramatic emotional reactions to stress—like feeling angry, nervous, irritable, afraid, or sad—were more likely to have lower heart rate variability.

It could be that your emotional reaction prolongs and intensifies your physical response to stress.

Stressful events suppress your parasympathetic nervous system, which regulates your body at rest, and activate your sympathetic nervous system, which puts you into a state of fight or flight.

Your cortisol levels spike, you breathe faster, and your heart rate and blood pressure go through the roof. Your heart rate variability is lowered.

If you shrug off a stressor—for instance, your boss criticizing your most recent project in front of your peers—your parasympathetic nervous system will kick back in and return your body to a state of rest. Yourheart rate and blood pressure will fall and your heart rate variability will increase. No harm done.

But if you spend the next two hours fuming, your body will stay in that amped-up state, which may take a toll on your health over time.

The upshot: An active-duty soldier with good emotional control could be less at risk for stress-induced health problems than a florist with a tendency to fly off the handle.

Maintaining your composure in the face of a shouting boss (or enemy gunfire) is easier said than done, but there’s a scientific trick that can help.

Exhaling kickstarts your parasympathetic nervous system, which lowers your heart rate and blood pressure and increases your heart rate variability.

So when you’re stressed, breathing slowly and focusing on the exhale really can help you unwind—and protect your heart.

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