10 High Blood Pressure Signs You Should NEVER Ignore!
hello all Champions today we're going to talk about the top 10 signs and symptoms of high
blood pressure and what's really important here is that we don't just try to memorize a list but that
we understand which ones might be early signs which ones are emergencies and which signs are
most likely due to something other than high blood pressure symptom number one is severe headaches
and this would be if your blood pressure goes up so high that it increases the intracranial
pressure and it feels like your head is going to explode now this would probably be a very severe
pain and most likely not relieved by aspirin or the usual headache medications and it's also not
going to be brought on by just a little bit of increase in blood pressure it's going to be due
to something called a hypertensive crisis and what is that so there's not an exact deaf definition of
the classifications but here's kind of how I look at it so optimal is often said to be where you're
systolic is less than 120 and where your diastolic is less than 80. so systolic is when your heart
contracts that's when the heart muscle squeezes and pushes the blood into the blood vessels then
when the heart relaxes and fills back up with blood now there's still some pressure there's
still some base tone of that artery and that's called the vascular resistance so that's like
your Baseline and that's the diastolic then when the heart squeezes that's the difference between
diastolic and when it goes up to systolic for a moment and the reason I put a question mark
on optimal here is that very often in the health field in the traditional way of looking at things
the bottom range of things are open-ended they figured that a high blood pressure is a bad thing
so lower must always be better and therefore they say less than is optimal well it's not
really true because if it goes too low then that also indicates problems and we'll touch on that
a little bit but I would say that optimal is right around 120 over 80 plus minus 10 points
or so so a normal range would be 120 to 129 over 80 over 84 and don't get too hung up on just a
couple of points back and forth because these are things that fluctuate high normal would be
130 to 139 over 85 to 89. so to me as long as it doesn't get too low all of these are totally okay
because people are different and there's no real Health detriment to any of these levels next is a
grade one hypertension and this is where we want to start watching we don't want to freak out we
don't want to jump on medication because there is no evidence that this is truly harmful now I don't
believe it's a good thing to be in this range chronically but there's also no evidence that it's
very harmful so we have some time to work on it so this is where you make some lifestyle changes
you learn what high blood pressure is caused by which we're going to talk about you address
those things you manage some stress control and relaxation techniques and so forth and more often
than not you're going to be able to bring it down and control it to where it doesn't get out of hand
grade 2 hypertension however this is where the blood pressure is too high once we get over 160
over 100 now there are Health consequences this is where you really start increasing your risk
of vascular accidents of cardiovascular disease of strokes and aneurysms and really really bad
stuff so if you get into this range this is where you definitely want to get on some medication if
you are unable to control it now if it only gets up into here a few minutes here and there when
you get stressed out and most of the time you can keep it in the high normal then that would
still be all right you still want to figure out why this is happening and bring it down but this
is definitely too high and this is is a concern and then when the blood pressure gets over 180
over 110 this is what we're talking about is a hypertensive crisis this is an emergency and if
you can't bring it down if it doesn't come down either by itself or with some breathing exercises
in just a few minutes then this is an emergency and you want to get some medical help to get it
under control because this is something that is out of control and if it escalates then that could
be a really bad thing sine and symptom number two is nosebleeds and this can happen from high blood
pressure but it is kind of rare and it would have to be pretty high blood pressure again more than
likely you're looking at a vitamin C deficiency where you have some micro vessel damage because
your connective tissue isn't strong enough it's basically scurvy that can affect things like
gums you could get bleeding gums and also much more likely to get nosebleeds but again this
is not going to happen from just raising your blood pressure a few points this is most likely
going to be a hypertensive crisis it's going to be massively elevated blood pressure and this is an
emergency so if you feel like your nose bleed is because of high blood pressure then you definitely
want to seek some help number three is blurry vision and it's the same mechanism here it's small
vessel damage that high blood pressure can damage small blood vessels can destroy them so that they
leak and the organs where we have these tiny blood vessels they don't function normally anymore so
high blood pressure can cause this but we want to understand that most likely the number one cause
by far is type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance so for a lot of these signs and symptoms we don't
want to jump to conclusions we want to understand what the most likely causes are and address those
number four could be blood in the urine but if you find that realize that the most likely cause
is going to be a urinary tract infection don't jump to conclusions and if high blood pressure
causes blood in the urine now you're going to have severe kidney damage you're going to be at the end
stage of kidney disease where not just proteins and minerals are leaking out but whole blood
cells are leaking out through the kidneys and this would be an emergency of course and the kidneys is
another organ where you have these small vessels that can be damaged the eyes and the kidneys are
the primary organs that can get damaged that way and while it can be high blood pressure again it's
most likely type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance that's going to cause this and if you have type
2 diabetes and insulin resistance then that's the primary cause but this also is the primary
cause of high blood pressure there are two basic mechanisms that cause high blood pressure and
the first one is metabolic when we have metabolic problems when we're metabolically unhealthy then
it causes all sorts of damage it causes mineral imbalances hormone imbalances swelling bloating
Etc and type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance causes chronically high levels of insulin and when
we have these high levels of insulin that causes exaggerated sodium retention it causes the kidneys
to recycle more sodium than they would otherwise and sodium binds water water follows sodium so if
we keep more sodium we keep more water now we have an exaggerated fluid volume volume in the vascular
system that puts pressure that basically expands the blood vessels extra above the Baseline and
the second cause is neurological because we have a brain and a nervous system that can respond to
things in our environment and whenever we have stress now the nervous system perceives that
there is an emergency that whenever we're being chased whenever we're being attacked when there's
a danger we're going to need more fuel delivery when you need more oxygen more glucose more
blood delivered so the body is going to raise the blood pressure this happens on purpose and we'll
talk a little bit more about that but it's your sympathetic nervous system the partial nervous
system that you don't think about that gets things done anyway it's called the autonomic it has two
branches called the sympathetic which is your fight flight your parasympathetic which is your
feed breed and if you have a lot of stress if you develop a chronic stress then you're going
to have what's called a sympathetic dominance that's going to drive that blood pressure up
a little bit chronically so most likely if you don't have insulin resistance and you have high
blood pressure then it's very very likely that it is caused by stress and it is something that
you could reverse with things like meditation and breathing exercises number five is fatigue
and shortness of breath and this is very often listed as a symptom of hypertension of high blood
pressure but is that really true well it's kind of a very very loose connection we kind of really
have to stretch so what they're often saying is that if you have a myocardial infarction or a
heart attack then one of the symptoms is fatigue and shortness of breath but we have to realize
that this is not caused by high blood pressure there's an association between people who have
cardiovascular disease and people who have high blood pressure so they're their figure if you have
a heart attack then you probably had high blood pressure but if you have a heart attack you're not
going to be worrying about your blood pressure in that moment so it's not really the blood pressure
causing this it is an association cardiovascular disease is simply correlated with high blood
pressure another thing that can cause fatigue and shortness of breath is something called pulmonary
edema or pulmonary hypertension but again there's not a direct cause from the hypertension from the
high blood pressure and here's how that works so right in the middle of your chest pretty
much you have a heart we hope and it has a right and a left side too and if you're looking at the
person then this would be the left side of the heart and this would be the right side of the
heart and then when blood comes into the heart it comes into the right side and then the right side
it pumps the blood out and it goes to the lungs and the purpose of the lungs obviously is to put
oxygen into the blood and then we can return the blood to the left side of the heart and the left
side pumps it out into the wider circulation into the systemic circulation your arms and
legs and your body and then it uses up the oxygen and then it comes back into the right side of the
heart again now if we have pulmonary edema if we have metabolic disease if we have heart failure
if we have different things that don't work so well and we get some fluid accumulation in the
lungs now first of all the lungs can't oxygenate the blood as well anymore but also it becomes much
more difficult for the right side of the heart to pump the blood through the lungs there's more
resistance so now the right side of the heart has has to work much much harder and this is
called pulmonary hypertension so now if your circulation suffers and if there's less oxygen
in the blood obviously you can get shortness of breath and you can have fatigue because you can't
make energy as well so you could indeed get some shortness of breath from this but realize this
may or may not have anything to do this pulmonary hypertension can occur with or without peripheral
hypertension so to say that hypertension high blood pressure causes shortness of breath is
again pretty far-fetched that it's really caused by the pulmonary edema and it may or may not be
associated with high blood pressure symptom number six is tinnitus which is another word for ringing
in the ears and it's not pronounced tinnitus because then it would be spelled itis and and
it would mean inflammation of the tin or something but tinnitus is pretty common it could happen if
there was very high blood pressure and the blood pressure was causing friction in the blood vessels
and then that could be causing a noise but if that was to happen you would probably have a noise that
would be more like a humming or a rumble or a roar it'd be a pretty low frequency like a murmur kind
of noise and that type of tinnitus does occur and it's usually due to something vascular but
not necessarily however most tinnitus by far is a high pitched it's more like a hiss more like white
noise and that type is not due to any vascular problems that's a neurological issue and most like
likely it's because of stress it's what we talked about before with stress when we have an elevated
sympathetic response when we have a chronic sympathetic response that is typically what's
going to cause that hissing tinnitus but what's the purpose of blood pressure usually when people
talk about it it's because it's too high and we talk about it as if it's something bad just
like cholesterol high cholesterol that's bad and therefore we assume that lower is always
better but blood pressure just like cholesterol the body has it there for a reason and it's
regulated and it needs to be the right amount for the circumstances at the time so the purpose of
blood pressure is obviously to circulate the blood we have the blood sitting in the blood vessels and
it's not going to move until we put some force on it some pressure and there are two things that
that pressure has to overcome the first first is friction we have to push all this Blood against
friction we have 60 000 miles of blood vessels even though most of them are super super tiny
where these blood cells walk through one by one it's still going to take a lot of pressure to
get this job done the second thing is we have to overcome gravity so if you have someone lying down
then their head their brain and their heart is at approximately the same level so now there's very
little gravity to overcome we're mostly just overcoming friction and we're putting enough
pressure on it to keep it circulating at a certain speed but if we are standing up what happens is
the heart is several inches typically about a foot foot and a half below the brain and gravity tends
to pull all of the blood into your feet and now we need a pressure to get it not just back up to the
heart but from the heart up to the brain so now we have both the friction to overcome and the gravity
so this is the primary reason to we have blood pressure at all but then we also need to be able
to adapt to changing demand sometimes we need more blood delivered and sometimes we need less and
whenever we have higher blood pressure that means two things it means that we're moving more blood
but we're also moving it faster and whenever we have higher blood pressure we have more
vasoconstriction your stress system your stress response the sympathetic nervous system system it
causes vasoconstriction and some people think that would cause less blood to go through but
that's not true when you reduce the diameter of the blood vessel yes you have to use a little more
pressure to get the blood through but what happens if you cut the diameter in half you increase the
speed four-fold because you have to push but much much faster to get it through and that
is what happens when we have exercise or stress when we have to get the blood there super quick
that's why we reduce that diameter and anytime we have that happen when we have vasoconstriction
that dramatically increases the workload on the heart it has to work much much harder now if this
is temporary like exercise that's a good thing because now your heart gets to work hard for a
while and then it gets back to Baseline it gets to recover that means that you train your heart
to perform you train your whole vascular system for high performance and that's very very healthy
however if we have chronically high blood pressure now it's elevated a little bit but all the time
that is really really bad just like chronic stress is really really bad we wear out the body
the organ the body parts and we never give it the proper time to recover and rebuild number seven
is nausea and vomiting and this is pretty serious if your blood pressure goes so high that you start
putting pressure on the brain you increase the intracranial pressure like we talked about with
a headache to the point where your brain function is compromised now you could get that nausea and
vomiting and you could also get this from a stroke and a stroke is where a portion of your brain dies
because it's not getting oxygen it could be that there's a clot there's a little plug that travels
in the vascular system and it gets stuck and it blocks off everything Downstream from that clot
or you could have a bleeding stroke where a blood vessel bursts and you have a bleed into the brain
either way the brain tissue Downstream from that accident is going to have no oxygen and it dies
so this would be pretty serious obviously and it could cause nausea and vomiting now this of course
is a very loose Association to high blood pressure so what they're thinking is that
if you had a stroke and high blood pressure is a contributing reason for a stroke then maybe
if you had a stroke you had high blood pressure but in the moment of the stroke you're not going
to worry about your high blood pressure it's completely irrelevant right so again it's a
loose Association and you don't want to think high blood pressure if you have nausea and vomiting you
want to worry about the stroke at the time and of course that is a medical emergency and you
want to be in an ambulance as soon as possible number eight is localized weakness so here we're
talking about something like a paralyzed limb if you become paralyzed in an arm or a leg or
in your face if you lose the ability to speak or if your mouth drops on one side
again these are signs and symptoms of stroke very very serious these are emergencies and
even if high blood pressure is a contributing cause for strokes that's not what you worry
about when there is an emergency like that number nine is chest pain and also known as angina and
this can happen if you have a blockage in your coronary arteries where you're not pumping blood
so whenever you have an exertion you get chest pain this is called heart disease heart failure it
can also happen with this pulmonary hypertension that we talked about if you have that high blood
pressure between the heart and the lungs and that right side is working really really hard this can
cause that as well but just like on the previous slide even if there's an association between high
blood pressure and cardiovascular disease causing angina the high blood pressure is not the direct
cause and it's not what we're concerned with when you have angina or a heart attack again
these are medical emergencies and you want to get an ambulance right away number 10 dizziness
confusion and anxiety this typically would happen from a lack of oxygen if we lose or if the supply
of oxygen is decreased then we can experience things like this it could be again as severe as
a stroke or it could also be a transient ischemic attack so this could be sort of it's like a mini
stroke where you could have a plug that's just a partial obstruction or one that dissolves within
seconds to minutes where the body kind of resolves it you could also have a partially blocked blood
vessel and something causes a vasospasm so you get a transient a temporary blockage or lack of
oxygen that the body should recover from but it's still a really important sign because these tias
are usually kind of a forerunner to a full-blown stroke so that's if you have the tias that's a
really good time to take your health seriously and start looking into improving your health
this obviously is an emergency whether it's a stroke or a TIA you want to get that checked
out but most of the time where you experience dizziness confusion or anxiety is going to be
much less severe than a stroke or a TIA if you have a temporary dizziness or light-headedness
especially if you go from lying down to standing up or even sitting to standing up quickly now
most of the time that's going to be because of low blood pressure not high blood pressure
so if you have low blood pressure then that is also a form of not enough oxygen because
the higher blood pressure delivers more oxygen so if it's too low then this could be a problem
with not getting enough and most of the time that you experience lightheadedness when you stand up
quickly then it's going to be because of adrenal fatigue you remember the guy that was lying down
versus standing up whenever you go from sitting or lying to standing you have your gravity is going
to pull the blood toward the feet and there won't be any blood left for the brain unless you create
very fast instantaneous vasoconstriction and it's the adrenal glands that make the hormones
to create that vasoconstriction as soon as you stand up we need those blood vessels to tighten
up to keep the blood in the head otherwise gravity is going to pull it down so it's like this little
miracle every time you stand up and you don't get lightheaded then there's all these things that
have to work in your favor at precisely the right time and number 11 is your bonus so this would be
the absolute first the number one earliest sign of high blood pressure and I hope that you learned a
good bit so far through the video but rather than memorizing a bunch of stuff then why don't we
just measure the blood pressure that would be the best and the earliest way to figure it out and as
cheap and as available as this is for 25 bucks you can buy a little blood pressure monitor and check
it once in a while or if you have a problem then you check it every day to see what it is
so if it's above 160 over 100 now that's not good so what I would suggest then is that you do some
breathing exercises you sit down you take a few minutes you take some slow calming breaths and you
see if it changes if you can bring it down under 130 under 135 in a few minutes then it's no big
deal it's nothing to freak out about you want to keep measuring it and understand it and you want
to learn how to monitor so it doesn't get worse and it doesn't stay chronically in this range
or if it's even higher over 180 over 110 now this is way more serious like we talked about now again
you could sit down and do some breathing exercises and if you can't bring this down in just a few
minutes now this is an emergency and you want to get some help some medication to intervene
to bring it down until you can learn how to manage this on your own but the key to understand is that
the number one cause of high blood pressure is metabolic disease it's insulin resistance it's
things that we can measure and understand and change so I created a blood work course because
the most common question people ask me is how do I know if I'm insulin resistant how do I know how my
kidneys are working how do I know what my stress level are and not all but most of these answers we
can get from blood work so I've ran a beta test as a course we've done some live streams we've
recorded them I've gotten lots of good feedback they're over 15 hours of video now posted where
you can go and learn this stuff and I'm going to build it out I'm going to add more cases
more examples as people ask questions I'm going to make videos that illustrate that in the form
of cases and it will all be posted in addition to or replacing some maybe of these 15 hours now
because this was kind of a beta test we launched it at the lowest price ever so as soon as we have
this solidified and built out that price will go up substantially so if you are interested you can
check out the link down below and if you get on the course we have one more call we're going to
do a ton of cases and answer a bunch of questions and then you will have lifetime access to all of
the these videos so you can start understanding more about your body and take charge of your
health and make some changes if you enjoyed this video you're going to love that one and if you
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