6 Ways to Care for Your Heart Holistically

6 Tips for Holistic Heart Health During Heart Health Month

In the latest podcast episode of the Art of Healing, we take an enlightening journey that interweaves the physical aspects of heart health with the often-neglected mental and spiritual components. As we recognize Heart Health Month, can look at ways to engage in heart health by mindfully approaching our histories, nutrition, and energy.

I’m sharing 6 tips for practicing holistic heart health in honor of Heart Health Month. These are actionable steps you can start right away to have a healthier heart.

Maternal health influences the baby’s health. This connection is often overlooked, with most of heart care focusing on medication, exercise and nutrition. These are important, but being aware of your mother’s health while she was pregnant with you is helpful. 

Pregnancy is a stressful time, and mothers who experience excessive stress may increase the chance of their babies having Congenital Heart Disease. Scientists theorize that high maternal stress hormones may trigger abnormal development of the fetal heart, increasing the chances of being born with abnormalities in the heart.¹

Mothers who endured more than one stressful event or felt unsupported during pregnancy had a slight increase in babies with congenital heart disease.²

What this means for you is that you may have undiagnosed congenital heart disease due to your mother’s stressful experience. 

Naturally, we can’t change the past, but we can mitigate risks from the past in a few ways. Practicing compassion, particularly compassion for our mothers, can help us have more compassion for ourselves. Compassion for ourselves and others is a great way to practice mindfulness.

Energy medicine, particularly Reiki, is an amazing healing tool that can be used to heal trauma from the past.

Read more about Healing Across Time and Space

2. Use Your Pulse to Lower Stress Response

The arterial pulse can be checked on the neck, wrists, and ankles. Physicians check the pulses to confirm a regular heart rate or to compare a manual pulse compared to the pulse measured by a device.

Your pulse can be used as a window into how your body is responding to stress. The Autonomic Nervous System is one of the baseline operating systems in our bodies. The Autonomic Nervous System consists of the Parasympathetic and Sympathetic Systems.

The Sympathetic Nervous System activates the body for action, stress, and to escape a threat. The Sympathetic Nervous system is activated during exercise and is part of how we get increased blood flow to the muscles. When the sympathetic nervous system is activated, the heart beats faster and stronger. The blood vessels dilate to the extremities for increased strength and power during activities. The Sympathetic Nervous System is not meant to be activated for extended periods. When it’s being used too much, such as during times of stress, we start to produce too many stress hormones, which leads to heart conditions such as high blood pressure. Too much activity in the Sympathetic Nervous system can cause the pulse to be high at rest.

The Parasympathetic Nervous system governs blood flow to the organs, aiding in digestion and eliminating rest. The Parasympathetic Nervous system also tones the endocrine glands, stabilizing hormone production. When the endocrine glands work well, inflammation is well controlled, and autoimmune disease is less likely to occur. The Parasympathetic Nervous system also supports an optimized immune system.

There are no direct tests of the Autonomic Nervous System, but you can get an idea of how yours works by measuring your pulse. 

This video guides you through a simple exercise to check your pulse:

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3. Your Blood Pressure and Your Metabolism

Having an optimized blood pressure of 120/70 prevents diseases such as heart attack, stroke, and peripheral arterial disease. It is normal to have variations from normal blood pressure and to be healthy. Blood pressure typically goes up with exercise, stress, or physical illness. It is normal to have low blood pressure during pregnancy.³

Having Hypertension, which is persistently elevated blood pressure, is not only a risk for heart disease. Studies show that “elevated fasting insulin concentrations or insulin resistance…is independently associated with an exacerbated risk of hypertension in the general population³.”

This means that addressing high blood pressure requires addressing the metabolism. Insulin resistance is the same thing as pre-diabetes. A diet that supports metabolic health, such as an Anti-Inflammatory Diet, can help lower insulin and improve blood pressure immediately:

3-Day Anti-Inflammatory Meal Plan

4. Your Cholesterol and Risk of Chronic Inflammation

Knowing your cholesterol is important for knowing your risk of heart attack and stroke. Your cholesterol can indicate problems with being chronically inflamed. 

Inflammatory Marker	What it Means
ESR (Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate)	Elevated levels means there is infection, damage or overall inflammation in the body.
C-RP (C Reactive Protein)	Large cholesterol particles that, when it’s low, can mean overall poor metabolic function and inflammation.
HDL	Large cholesterol particle that when it’s low can mean overall poor metabolic function and inflammation.
Triglycerides	Elevated levels mean metabolic disturbance and inflammation
VLDL	Small, dense cholesterol that may elevated in chronic inflammation
Ferritin	Marker used to check for anemia, can be elevated in chronic inflammation.
Weight	Obesity has been shown to increase risk of death from COVID

It is best to have a high HDL. HDL is a large cholesterol particle that removes waste products from the bloodstream. High LDL and VLDL indicate inflammation that could damage the arteries. 

If your VLDL or LDL are too elevated, this may be a clue that you are developing chronic inflammation and that high cholesterol is just one aspect of this. 

Knowing your cholesterol is easy; you can have it checked every year or check it yourself: Check out my affiliate link (for which I may earn a small commission if you place an order. Any commissions earned go towards supporting the website).

Become Your Own Health Detective with Your Labwork

5. Heal Depression for a Healthier Heart

Thanks to decades of evidence-based medicine, we are all familiar with the primary causes of heart attack and how to lower this risk. According to the American Heart Association, we can reduce our risk of heart attack by making the following changes⁴:

1. Stop Smoking
2. Choose Nutritious Foods
3. Manage High Cholesterol
4. Lower High Blood Pressure
5. Be Physically Active
6. Aim for a healthy weight
7. Manage Diabetes
8. Reduce Stress
9. Limit Alcohol

While these steps are important for overall and heart health, an additional health parameter is strongly tied to risk of heart attack. People suffering from symptoms of depression may be at increased risk of heart attack.⁵

Survivors of a heart attack have a high risk of developing depression. ”Approximately 65 percent of patients with acute myocardial infarction report experiencing symptoms of depression. Major depression is present in 15 to 22 percent of these patients.”⁶

The link between depression and myocardial infarction is strong. This shows the biochemical link between the contents of the thoughts and physical symptoms. My observation during my 20 years of practice is that most patients recovering from a heart attack were not aware of depression symptoms until after the heart attack occurred. Many of these patients would have physical rehabilitation and an emotional reckoning as they started to address depression symptoms.

You can assess your risk of depression by answering these two questions:

1. Have you had little interest or pleasure in doing things?
2. Have you been feeling down, depressed or hopeless?

If you answered yes to either question, you could be at risk of depression. This simple 2-question screening is a powerful tool for shining a light on the potential for depression.

Depression requires medical assessment and treatment, but while you sort out the next steps, you can start working on energetic healing. Depression has a strong association with the heart chakra. Grief, loss, resentment, anger, or any emotion that blocks the heart charka can lead to depression.

Energy healing techniques such as Sound Healing and Reiki are healing tools that can help you start to work with and heal depression, even if you are taking medication and in therapy. 

6. Acknowledge Childhood Trauma to Heal Your Heart

Taking a holistic approach to health means approaching ourselves as a whole. This means assessing where we are and setting health goals to get us where we are and have been. 

Adverse childhood experiences are traumatic events that occur that are outside of normal childhood experiences. Adverse Childhood experiences, or ACE can include⁷:

1. Living in a household with substance abuse or addiction
2. Having a family member with mental health problems
3. Abandonment
4. Having an incarcerated family member

You can assess your own ACE with this popular online quiz from NPR: ACE Quiz

Looking at painful memories of the past can be painful, but taking this step is empowering when taking charge of your health holistically. T

Tools such as therapy can help you process painful childhood memories. Reiki is also a holistic healing tool that can help you come to terms with painful memories of the past and even heal them.

Distance Reiki can help process and heal traumatic childhood memories. Read more about It here.

You can use many healing tools such as Reiki, meditation, nutrition, therapy, and sound healing to holistically care for your heart. Adding these tools to your ongoing medical care give you the power to improve your own health.

1. Lock, M. C., Botting, K. J., Tellam, R. L., Brooks, D., & Morrison, J. L. (2017). Adverse Intrauterine Environment and Cardiac miRNA Expression. International journal of molecular sciences, 18(12), 2628. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms18122628
2. Dolk, H., McCullough, N., Callaghan, S., Casey, F., Craig, B., Given, J., Loane, M., Lagan, B. M., Bunting, B., Boyle, B., & Dabir, T. (2020). Risk factors for congenital heart disease: The Baby Hearts Study, a population-based case-control study. PloS one, 15(2), e0227908. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227908
3. Wang, F., Han, L., & Hu, D. (2017). Fasting insulin, insulin resistance and risk of hypertension in the general population: A meta-analysis. Clinica chimica acta; international journal of clinical chemistry, 464, 57–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cca.2016.11.009
4. Source: American Heart Assocation-Lifestyle Changes to Prevent Heart Attack
5. Gustad, L. T., Laugsand, L. E., Janszky, I., Dalen, H., & Bjerkeset, O. (2014). Symptoms of anxiety and depression and risk of acute myocardial infarction: the HUNT 2 study. European heart journal, 35(21), 1394–1403. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/eht387
6. Guck, T. P., Kavan, M. G., Elsasser, G. N., & Barone, E. J. (2001). Assessment and treatment of depression following myocardial infarction. American family physician, 64(4), 641–648.
7. Source: Fast Faces: Preventing Adverse Childhood Experiences