Most people go through the entire day without one thought about how their heart is functioning.
When your heart is healthy and pumping away as intended, you don’t even know how hard it’s working. You don’t feel a thing.
It’s not always easy to tell when your risk for heart disease is increasing, either. For example, high blood pressure, a primary risk factor for heart disease, has no physical symptoms.
This means it’s easy to make choices that don’t have this powerhouse organ’s best interest at heart.
Smoking, for example. A sedentary lifestyle. Unchecked emotional stress. When they happen regularly over time, these activities and states of being can weaken your heart.
In a 2023 survey, the American Heart Association (AHA) reported that more than half of adults in the U.S. didn’t know heart disease is the leading cause of death in the country.
In fact, heart disease and stroke, the fifth leading cause of death, claimed more lives in 2021 in the U.S. than all forms of cancer and chronic lower respiratory disease combined, the association reports.
The same report noted 46.7 percent of American adults have high blood pressure, a top risk factor for heart disease and stroke, yet only about 8 percent of those people were aware of the problem.
The fact that heart disease is so common shows how easy it is to become complacent when it comes to a healthy lifestyle.
The damage doesn’t happen overnight, of course. And, like damage, the benefits of a healthy lifestyle emerge over time.
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