Stress is a feeling of physical or emotional tension and is often a response to change. It is part of everyday life, and individuals reacts to stress in their own way.

Significant emotional stress can cause a specific “fight or flight” response from the body. As part of this response, energy is taken from the immune system, digestive system and other body systems and used to prepare the body for dealing with a threat by speeding up the heart rate, raising blood pressure and metabolic rate.

People can experience either temporary, intense periods of stress (acute stress) or longer, “nagging” periods of stress (chronic stress). The body is designed to deal with acute stress and then return to normal. It is not designed to deal with chronic stress, such as dreading going to work every single day. Overwhelming the body’s natural defenses, chronic stress can increase the risk of a variety of heart-related conditions such as high blood pressure (hypertension), or cardiac events such as heart attack or stroke. Frequent or lasting periods of significant emotional stress have also been associated with an increased risk of abnormal heart rhythms (arrhythmias) and higher levels of cholesterol.

Heart patients are especially encouraged to learn stress management techniques. Stress management refers to a strategy of controlling stress and reducing its impact. Adopting appropriate coping mechanisms can relieve stress in a healthy, productive way. The American Heart Association emphasizes that outside events are less important than how individuals react to them.  Studies show that heart patients can reduce their risk of a cardiac event by up to 75 percent by using healthy stress management techniques, including learning to:

1. Relax in a healthy way. Healthy strategies include relaxation, meditation or breathing exercises. Unhealthy strategies include excessive alcohol use, drug use (e.g., smoking cigarettes or marijuana) and verbal/physical abuse.
   
   
2. Identify the problem. Many people are often not aware of the reason for their feeling tense or stressed. Identifying the problem is essential to keep it from happening over and over again in the future.
   
   
3. Address the problem. Sometimes addressing a problem means making a change, and sometimes it means accepting the situation as out of one’s control without stressing about it any further.

With practice, these stress management techniques help people to gain control over stress, instead of allowing stress to gain control over them. Most physicians are reluctant to prescribe medications to treat stress (unless the person has been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder), because many of these medications tend to be addictive. Therefore, people are urged to take the time to learn and practice healthy stress management strategies to improve their physical and emotional health.

Stress management includes all aspects of your life: physical, emotional and behavioral well-being, nutrition, exercise, the amount and quality of sleep you get, leisure activities, coping skills, communication skills, relationship management and so on. More and more research is showing that stress management can help prevent heart disease and help heart patients recover.  

Stress management also includes changing the perception of stress. A large amount of the stress people encounter is self-generated; that is, the way individuals perceive or think about a situation or event affects how much stress they feel.