Your heart is both literal and figurative. Protecting your heart is incredibly important – it is the center of two very important parts of your life. We don’t protect things that aren’t important. You wouldn’t leave your prized possession on the curb, but you do the garbage. Your heart health must be protected.
It is the literal center of your circulatory system.
It pushes about 1 ½ gallons of blood through your entire body. Every minute it makes your blood go through your entire system about three times! It pushes all that blood about 12,000 miles every day! Without a healthy heart, your body doesn’t have oxygen, nutrients, and hormones that keep it strong and healthy. It also carries the waste to your other systems to eliminate. The enormity of the importance of your heart to your physical body is hard to understand.
It is the figurative center of your emotional life.
Your heart is where you place experience the greatest joys and pain of your life. They call it heartbreak because sometimes it literally hurts. Joy will make it skip a beat. It flutters with expectation of peak experiences. I often talk about being heart-centered where you are able to act in alignment with your values.
Your heart in either meaning is incredibly important for your life. For your wellness, happiness, and longevity. Protecting your heart means intentional choices and actions. Here are five great ways to protect your heart for a better happier life.
- Manage Stress – This is important for BOTH your physical and emotional life. High stress puts you in higher risk for cardiovascular disease and is a top cause for relationship distress. Stress seeps into all aspects of your life; you must protect yourself against it.
- Eat Like You Love Yourself – Feed your body what it needs. This means a colorful, varied diet. Include fruits and vegetables. (Taylor, no matter what you say, pork is NOT a vegetable) Try not to eat a lot of things that are more likely from a science lab, than from a garden or farm.
- Get Moving – The results of movement are both physical and emotional. When you make time for physical movement you are not only building a strong pumping heart to keep all that amazing blood moving, but you are working against depression and boosting mood-lifting
- Sleep – Improved sleep lets you make better decisions. With proper rest, you are in a better equipped to protect your heart. Sleep is linked to both cardiovascular disease emotional wellness. Like gas in a car, you can’t perform without it.
- Get A Great Support System – People that support you and love you are important for both your literal and figurative heart. People that will support your healthy lifestyle, diet changes, exercise routine… but also those people that support your emotional growth, resiliency, self-care, and give you what you need.
