Stress, travel and long working hours: What cardiologists want executives to know

In the last few years, people have increasingly attached a strange badge of honour to the idea of just being busy: hustling away day and night, catching early flights, attending back-to-back meetings, skipping lunches, replying to late emails late at night. All of this is now considered a good thing by many.

Not that it’s wrong to be ambitious, but your heart doesn’t see it that way. All it sees is the repeated stress, disrupted sleep, and rising blood pressure it experiences every day. The worst part is that you’ll never really hear a peep about it, as most heart conditions live a silent life for years until it finally shows itself, loudly and even irreversibly at times. So if you’ve been living this sort of life for some time now, here are a few things that cardiologists want executives like you to be aware of to take care of your heart health better.

What are the hidden dangers of having a hectic work life?

The core problem with leading a life as described earlier is how it stacks many small stressors on top of one another until it becomes a skyscraper. Working long hours, for one, has been repeatedly linked with a higher risk of hypertension and cardiovascular problems. People who work 49 to 55 hours or even more each week are quite likely to develop sustained or masked high blood pressure (readings appear normal in the clinic but stay elevated during daily life). Now add frequent travel into this mix – when you cross time zones, you’re essentially disrupting your body’s internal clock, meaning your sleep quality will suffer, your meals will become irregular, your alcohol intake might increase, and your exercise routine will likely be the first thing sacrificed. Enough domestic travel can also leave your body in a similar, near-constant state of recovery.

Let’s not forget that with enough continuous meetings and constant deadlines spiking your adrenaline and cortisol, your body will end up staying in a constant state of fight-or-flight. Your blood pressure will stay high, your inflammation will increase, your sleep will deteriorate, and unhealthy habits will become normal. Another thing that a lot of people don’t realise is just how much the constant sitting involved in this work life affects them. You sit in meetings, you sit waiting for your flights, you sit in taxis, or you sit behind a laptop for most of the day. This kind of prolonged sitting will not only affect your joints but also your heart in more ways than you can imagine.

To be fair here, none of these factors alone will guarantee heart disease. When all of them are happening simultaneously, as they almost always do, cardiovascular health will start to take a hit with each passing day.

What do cardiologists want to do?

The first thing you want to focus on is your sleep. You want to consistently get a minimum of 7 to 9 hours of sleep every day to give your cardiovascular system enough time to recover. It will help regulate your blood pressure, improve your appetite, and reduce stress hormones far better than just living for the weekends. Bring some movement and exercise back into your life, too. You don’t need to go for a marathon per se; a brisk walk between meetings, taking the stairs, taking breaks between long work hours, or scheduling workouts in your calendar will make a world of difference to your heart health.

You should also start monitoring your health instead of waiting for symptoms to strike. Blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, and weight can all be tracked very easily, and you can do it long before some heart condition starts brewing underneath. If you are already dealing with some condition like high blood pressure, diabetes, or even have a family history of heart disease, you need to take this even more seriously and start getting regular reviews with a cardiologist in London. Stop treating stress management as a buzzword if you do it. This is something that works differently for everyone. For you, it could be mindfulness, breathing exercises, or simply switching your phone off. For others, it could be developing hobbies or spending time with family. Whatever works for you, remember that your heart needs small pockets where it isn’t constantly required to do work at 100%.

When should you seek help?

Look, heart disease is not going to start with some intense pain as you clutch your chest and fall to your knees. It will be subtle, surprisingly so. When you look back on what caused it, you may not even be able to find a single reason to point to. That said, persistent fatigue, chest discomfort, random shortness of breath, palpitations, dizziness, or a drop in exercise capacity are all signs that you need to get yourself checked as soon as possible. More specifically, high blood pressure is something you should keep a close eye on. After all, hypertension is a condition that develops silently and causes damage not just to your heart, but also to your brain, kidneys, and blood vessels for years until it’s too late. Like any other work assignment, you should seriously consider getting help without fail. While these signs don’t automatically mean heart disease, there always exists a possibility that must not be ignored.

Stay healthy enough to enjoy success

It’s quite easy to fall on the wrong side of productivity, as you tell yourself that you’ll slow down once you achieve the next milestone, close the next deal, or wrap up the next big project. But let’s be real, you’re always going to be moving your goalposts – the thing after which you decide to take care of yourself. There will always be another flight to catch, another big project right on the horizon, another deadline to meet, and another email that cannot wait until tomorrow.

Frankly, your heart doesn’t care about all that. It only knows what you put it through day after day. A smart executive will never sacrifice everything for work. They realise that taking care of themselves is not some distraction. It’s the core of what makes long-term success possible and enjoyable. So chase your goals and build the career you want, but make sure you don’t turn your health into the price of your success. That success is going to mean very little if you’re too burnt out or too unwell to enjoy it.

The editorial unit