Blood pressure is all about balance. You need to balance the amount of fluid and solute (minerals, amino acids, proteins, fats, vitamins, and more) coming into and going out of your system. If you don't do that, you will wind up with either high or low blood pressure.
It's really as simple as that. There are rare cases where high blood pressure is related to diseases in vital organs, but the vast, vast majority of people with high blood pressure just have some combination of mismatches between what's coming in, and what's going out.
So let's focus on high blood pressure from that perspective.
What goes in?
Matter and energy. Your body absorbs matter (food), light, sound, and electromagnetic energy.
People who live close to nature do not know what high blood pressure is. High blood pressure is a disease of modern societies, where people are inundated with light, sound, and electromagnetic pollution. Mitigating these things in modern life is what I help patients to do, and you can schedule a consult with us via my website. The power of energy is why I recommend things like red and infrared light therapy, sauna therapy, EMF-detection and mitigation, UV-B therapy, fixing your light environment, and blue blockers.
I cover all of this in more detail in my book, Dying to Be Free.
What about matter? Matter is of course where most people focus most of their effort when it comes to blood pressure. They talk about salt, water, intermittent fasting, calorie restriction, ketogenic diets, and more.
Let's just cut to the chase.
Here's only two answers to high blood pressure. First, you can relax the heart and blood vessels to reduce the pressure in the system, and second, you can reduce the volume of blood circulating within the system.
How do we reduce the heart and blood vessels?
You activate the parasympathetic nervous system. This is why in my last post, I recommended relaxing for at least 5 minutes before measuring blood pressure. Most people today are chronically stressed. They need things like meditation, sauna, massage, craniosacral therapy, breathwork, and acupuncture to relax. Chronic stress alone will drive your blood pressure up.
You also need the right mix of nutrients within your body to properly activate the parasympathetic nervous system. This can only be achieved by comprehensively testing your nutritional status. This is why testing nutritional status is the backbone of my practice. You can apply for consultation to learn more about what testing we offer at my website.
Proper nutritional testing can save you years of misery and confusion over what to eat and why. When we properly nourish the body, health problems have a way of just fading into the background. It's remarkable, and it's why I do what I do, the way that I do it.
Last, but not least, you have to realize that you can't properly activate the parasympathetic nervous system WITHOUT the right nutritional balance. You can drive someone into sympathetic over-drive and knock out their parasympathetic nervous system, just by adjusting their supplement protocol and diet.
This is one reason why high blood pressure is so common. People are unwittingly supplementing and dieting their way into high blood pressure, without even realizing it. They are using breathwork in a way that DRIVES high blood pressure, rather than reducing it.
This is why I do not recommend do-it-yourself wellness.
That’s the first thing you need to know about blood pressure - the neurological component.
Second, how do you reduce your circulating volume?
Before we dive into that, we have to talk about autoregulation.
Autoregulation is the concept that the body will do what it is supposed to do, without you having to tell it to do it, or manipulate it into doing it, so long as you give it the right conditions. For example, if you are running away from a bear or a criminal, you NEED to have a high blood pressure. If a heavy object falls on your friend or loved one, you NEED a high blood pressure to lift if off of them.
Lifting a heavy weight will create a blood pressure over 200 in a healthy adult. That's very, very important to understand. Occasionally stressing your body with a high blood pressure during exercise actually helps your body to adapt to that high of a pressure, so that when you DO need to do something that creates that much pressure, you don't pop a blood vessel.
Many different biochemical pathways regulate how much blood you have at any given time. In the end, you need healthy kidneys, lungs, and a healthy liver and heart in order for normal autoregulation to take place.
If autoregulation is working properly, then there are only three ways to reduce your circulating blood volume.
They are sweat, urination, and bleeding.
This post is running a little long, and each of these three processes deserves its own post, given how complex and interesting they each are.
Until next time, be well,
Dr. Stillman