If blood pressure is up in the doctor's office, chances are it's also up when a person is late for a meeting, under pressure from a deadline, mad at an employee or cut off in traffic. Entrepreneurs and small business owners are in positions of control, and that's a good thing when it comes to health. And it can run amok quite easily because hypertension is asymptomatic, says Roberta de Jong, a clinical nurse specialist at the Hypertension and Cholesterol Centre of Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary. There are rarely symptoms so it is almost impossible for someone to know when their blood pressure is up. The Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario reports that one in five adults in Canada has hypertension, and almost half of them don't know it.
Blood pressure is the force of the flowing blood against the walls of the arteries.
The systolic reading is the pressure when the heart is contracting, and diastolic is the pressure when the heart is relaxed. In 90 to 95 per cent of cases, the cause is unknown. Not if you're in an unhappy marriage, says Dr. Brian Baker, a psychiatrist specializing in treating patients with heart disease at the University of Toronto. Baker studied 205 married people in a three-year study and said people who reported problems in their marriages were more likely to have consistently elevated blood pressure. I'm sure that marital strain is just as significant as work strain.