Is stress the leading psychological cause of hypertension? How can resolving emotions help patients with high blood pressure?
It’s a common belief that stress causes high blood pressure, but Samuel J. Mann doesn’t think that’s the case. In fact, he says repressed emotions are the culprit at play here.
Read below to learn more about what Mann believes is the true psychological cause of high blood pressure.
Is High Blood Pressure a Mindbody Disorder?
Samuel J. Mann teaches clinical medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and treats patients at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. He specializes in treating hypertension, and is particularly interested in the connection between repressed emotions and hypertension.
Most people believe that stress causes high blood pressure. However, Mann argues that research and treatments focusing on feelings of stress have failed to support this theory; the link between stress and hypertension remains tenuous, and stress-reduction techniques don’t reliably reduce blood pressure.
(Shortform note: There is a known connection between stress and high blood pressure, but Mann is correct that it’s tenuous; the American Heart Association (AHA) says that the direct link between stress and hypertension is still being studied. However, the AHA also notes that there’s a clear indirect link, because stress often leads people to do things that contribute to high blood pressure. For instance, people who are feeling stressed tend to neglect their physical health, eat unhealthy foods, and overuse alcohol and other drugs.)
In contrast to that common belief, Mann says that repressed emotions—the stresses people don’t feel—are the real link between stress and high blood pressure.
He writes that keeping upsetting feelings at bay requires the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) to stay constantly active. The SNS controls the body’s threat response, part of which is to increase heart rate and blood pressure. In the short term, this ensures that the body’s muscles are well-supplied with oxygen, so they’re ready to fight or to run at a moment’s notice. However, if the SNS is always engaged, then the person’s blood pressure is constantly elevated; in other words, they have hypertension.
Therefore, uncovering repressed emotions and helping the patient to resolve them is an effective way to treat high blood pressure; much more so than stress-reduction techniques like muscle relaxation and deep breathing exercises. Alternatively, drugs that interfere with the SNS’s ability to affect blood pressure also show promising results in treating this type of hypertension.
| Treating Hypertension With Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Recent research suggests Mann is correct that psychological therapy—helping people to find and deal with the root causes of their stress—is an effective way to reduce blood pressure, though it’s not clear exactly how much of a role repressed emotions play in this process. For example, a 2021 study examining the results from different reports suggests that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which is a type of talk therapy, often helps people with high blood pressure improve their health. The researchers didn’t directly link CBT with lower blood pressure but noted that it helped treat many different conditions that can cause high blood pressure, such as anxiety and depression. The talk therapy also helped patients on blood pressure medications to follow their treatment plans more closely, which naturally made the drugs work more effectively. Interestingly, the study also found that CBT patients saw improvements in their cholesterol levels, which the researchers did not link to a secondary cause. Instead, they believe this is because CBT helps to calm the SNS, which controls the body’s threat response—an overactive SNS leads to high cholesterol along with many other harmful conditions. |
