Why is it healthy to strain your heart through exercise, but unhealthy to strain it through stress, caffeine, nicotine etc? What is the difference between these kinds of cardiac strain?
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Exercise causes natural vascular dialation allowing the increase in heart rate to provide your circulatory system with more oxygen.
Caffeine and nicotine cause vascular constriction along with the increase in heart rate. This puts more stress on your heart since it has to work even harder to achieve the same level of blood oxygenation.
Exercise causes temporary stress damage, the body repairs stronger.
An unhealthy lifestyle causes constant, continuous stress and the body does not have a chance to heal or improve.
AFAIK, exercise leads to increased oxygen demand in your muscles, and can induce a relative lack of oxygen. The body will adapt: it will grow more small blood vessels to the muscles for oxygen delivery, it will increase your body’s capacity of taking up oxygen, it will increase the effectiveness of oxygen use in the muscle by increasing the number of mitochondria in muscle cells, it will increase the number of muscle fibers, etc…
Drugs like the ones you mentioned will likely stress the heart to some extent, similar to exercise, but will probably not lead to this degree of physical adaptation. In addition, chronic stress or cocaine use, for example, can lead to hypertension, which will lead to damage of the blood vessels, which could lead to stroke, heart attack, peripheral artery disease, renal disease, etc…
Cafeïne (coffee) is not bad for your heart. It heightens blood pressure a bit but just temporary and it has tons of health benefits.
Stress, caffeine and nicotine basically cause your heart to work harder, but without the rest of the body helping it. YOu can imagine your body like a car: you started it with a cold engine and floored the accelerator while standing still. The oil pump barely works yet, there isn’t enough cooling, and the turbocharger can’t collect as much air: just the pistons working very hard.
While exercising, it is a car to be operated as it is designed: getting enough air to cool itself, the oil pump making sure everything is well lubricated, and the engine gets enough air so it can fully burn the gasoline. Everything working in tandem.
Same with your body. When you exercise, hormones flood your blood, making sure to get enough oxygen, your storage releases sugar to help your heart and muscles get enough energy. The blood flow speeds up, and your kidneys and livers switch to a higher gear to filter out waste. Your lungs are expanding, making sure the generated extra CO2 can leave the blood. Muscles in your body works in tandem with your heart helping to pump blood around your body.
Our body is evolved for this. The whole system is built around to move and excercise (to escape, fight and hunt, but still) Stress and chemicals only works your heart which is not really designed to handle this kind of pressure alone.
Theres many ways you can strain your heart:
– natural exercise. Exercises usually start from something easy and stretches. For example a lot of people i know walk on the spot for a moment. This causes your heart to gradually increase its rate, and the rest of the body also adapts. Most notable immediate effect: your blood vessels increase a bit in diameter to allow more bloodflow. Doing this over and over with spaces in between makes it clear for your body it needs to buildup muscles, and so your heart gradually grows stronger (along with the other muscles ofc)
– immediate stress. I cant think of a better term rn. What i mean for example is panic. Things like this have the same effect on your heartrate, but you didnt have that warmup face, so your heart pumps harder but the arteries didnt adept yet. This usually isnt too big of a problem, since its only a temporary situation, but can cause heart failure.
– drugs: im not sure about nicotine and caffeine in particular, but the problem is usually that they increase the heartrate while at the same time decreasing the diameter of the blood vessels, causing an increase in blood pressure and strains your heart. The heart didnt have any time to adapt to the new stress, and if you have a particularly weak heart it could fail from the pressure
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Natural exertion is temporary and you usually get tired before heart stresses itself, your whole body works as it supposed to…
Stress and chemical induced heart rate is artificial and “not needed” your body is not behaving the same as if you do excercise.
Like fans or pumps, if they can operate normally moving the designed volume without any restrictions it is normal, but if a pump is forced to work with it able to push trough what it supposed, that puts stress on the pumps mechanics or vent bearings
When you are stressed, you are not running, your blood vessels are not dialated, your heart fights against the pressure… It is a good idea to do excercise when you are stressed, so you use the excess “energy”
It is a small difference but it is cummulative over a long time
I don’t think there is evidence that caffeine causes any heart damage. In fact, the opposite. Up to about 6 cups of coffee a day is shown to have positive CV health effects.
Edit: as a few have pointed out, there are rare cases of overdosing, which may be due to other factors or perhaps a predisposition or susceptibility to caffeine.
https://www.jacc.org/doi/abs/10.1016/j.jacc.2013.06.035
Exercise is like stretching a balloon prior to blowing into it. You’re maintaining its elasticity. Chronic stress on the heart is like inflating the balloon fully for a month then deflating it back down – it’ll deflate down to twice the size it started, with all the elasticity gone. That is heart failure.
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