February is Heart Health Month! 5 Easy Ways to Take Care of Your Heart

Happy February! February is a very special month because not only do we take the next 28 days to celebrate black history, but we are also focusing on our heart health. Both are extremely important, and I’ll be taking time to highlight folks from the black community who have made important contributions to the world of women’s health, sport, and fitness.

Fun fact about me: When I was studying to become a personal trainer, I decided to volunteer with the Heart and Stroke Foundation and was asked to present a heart health presentation to various retirement and assisted living homes in the Barrie area.

As a 22-year-old who may not have come to terms with the true importance of taking care of my own heart health, it was such a wonderful experience to get out into the community and talk about the little changes required to maintain a healthy heart for as long as possible.

Almost 10 years later, I’ve had to reconcile with the fact that those little changes are slowly being phased out of society, and I’ve had to face the fact that cardiovascular issues run in my family.

So with this blog, I’d like to kick off heart health month by sharing 5 of those little changes that you can incorporate into your life to take better health of your heart.

What is Cardiovascular Disease?

Before jumping into the 5 tips, I want to quickly share what we are all working to prevent when we put into practice these tips.

Cardiovascular disease is a collection of maladies concerning the heart and blood vessels. To me, this includes things like pulmonary embolisms because these are caused by blood clots in the vessels that exchange oxygen from the blood to the lungs.

This can include, but is not limited to:

• Cardiac arrest
• Cardiomyopathy
• Carotid artery disease
• Catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (CPVT)
• Coarctation of the aorta
• Congenital heart disease
• Coronary artery spasm
• Strokes

All of these are caused by a dysfunction of the blood vessels and the heart, leading to major organs not receiving the blood and nutrients that they need to work. It can lead to loss of independence, being on medications for life, and in some tragic cases, death.

But I don’t want to be too doom and gloom here. Your heart is such an important organ to take care of, and I hope that after reading these tips and implementing them into your daily routine, you’ll feel more confident in your cardiovascular health.

Of course, if you are ever worried about your heart health, please speak with your doctor about your options.

Heart Health Tip #1: Move More

I want to refrain from saying to “get your steps” because for some people, that’s not an option, or there aren’t safe places to walk nearby. So my first tip is to simply move more.

Sedentary lifestyle is cited as the cause for 35% of cardiovascular-related disease. After the pandemic, which kept everyone indoors for months, and a world that is becoming increasingly about convenience and being glued to a screen for hours upon hours of the day, I can understand if your life has become a little more sedentary lately.

But with knowledge comes power, and if you recognize that you could mix in a little more movement into your day, it could make a big difference over time.

Heart Month Challenge 1: Add 20 more minutes of movement to your day, every day, for the whole month.

Use a fitness tracker, or your phone, to see how much physical activity you have in your day. Settle on an average amount of time, and look to improve it by 20 minutes.

Using me as an example: I start my day with lots of movement. I walk to the gym, work out for one hour to 90 minutes, and then walk home. And then I plop my butt on my work chair and only get up to go to the bathroom or get food.

To add 20 minutes of physical activity to my day, I could:

• Do a 20-minute bodyweight workout guided by a YouTube channel or one of my favourite training apps
• Do a deep clean of one of the rooms in my apartment. The bathroom is small, but I bet I could easily hit 20 minutes of cleaning
• Put on a podcast and do 20 minutes of stairs in the stairwells of my apartment. It’s cold up here in Canada, so I don’t always want to walk outside!
• Build an EMOM workout (every minute on the minute). Pick 5 of my favourite bodyweight exercises, and do 10 reps of each, switching to the next exercise every minute on the minute until I reach 20 minutes
• Put on my favourite music and have a kitchen dance party. Dancing also supports one of the other tips I’ll mention later on.

However you see yourself moving, 20 extra minutes a day will be easier to fit into your lifestyle than you think. The added benefit, at 20 minutes per day for 7 days, you’ll be just 10 minutes away from hitting the recommended 150 minutes of light to moderate physical activity that is recommended by cardiologists.

After 1 month, you’ll be well into the habit of finding moments for movement in your day. It won’t feel like a chore because you’ll have realized that moving a little more every day can be fun, productive, and ultimately support a healthier heart.

Heart Health Tip #2: Do a Stress Audit

This second tip is one of the most important tips, but I also know it can be one of the hardest ones to implement. There is a lot going on in the world right now and as women, it can feel like we’re being relied on to care for everyone and be sensitive to everything and to be a nurture person anyone in need.

These are all noble, and I have a personal sense of pride because I am a woman and I can take that stuff on while also keeping my life on track. With that said, sometimes it feels like too much.

I often tell people that I love that even when everything feels like its falling apart, I know that I can put myself back together again because I’ve been doing it my whole adult life. However, sometimes I don’t want to pick up all the pieces, and it would be great if someone else were there to help.

On those days when it all feels like too much, that’s when I realize I need to do a stress audit on my life. I’ll ask myself questions like:

• What am I not addressing that needs to be addressed?
• How’s my sleep?
• Am I holding onto anger or resentment for something or someone?
• Have I been consuming negative media too often?
• Have I been putting things off, and is that starting to cause anxiety?
• What’s the state of my apartment? When was the last time I made my bed? Is the laundry piling up?
• When was the last time I got fresh air or sunshine?
• When was the last time I slowed down long enough to enjoy the moment?

If you ask yourself any of these and realize that you may be more stressed than you let yourself believe, then it’s time to do a little reset. Set some time in your calendar where you start to build new ones or revisit some of your stress-reducing habits.

Chronic stress, or the stress that isn’t managed with daily stress-reducing practices, is another factor that can increase your chances for cardiovascular disease.

Heart Month Challenge 2: Practice 1 stress-reducing habits every day for the month of February

Once again, knowledge is power, and if you can begin to build in daily stress-reducing habits and mindsets into your routine, you’ll find that you are more resilient to life’s inevitable stressors.

Here’s what that looks like for me:

• Using the Opal app to block social media: I love checking social media to see what my friends are up to, but doom scrolling can impact my dopamine levels and put my into a pretty negative place. The Opal app allows me to set a schedule so that I really only have access to social media for a couple of hours of the day.
• Finding moments of gratitude during the day: Sometimes I am just grateful that I did a big costco shop a few weeks back so my freezer is always stocked with food. Sometimes I am grateful for a quiet day at work so I can get all of my tasks done uninterrupted. And sometimes I am grateful that I pushed through my excuses and got to the gym, because I always feel better afterwards. They can be mundane things, but there’s a lot to be grateful for if you make a habit of being grateful.
• Using a meditation app for a couple minutes every morning: My work provides us with access to the Headspace app and I’ve found a routine that actually works for me and has been a grounding force on the really bad/scatter-brain days. I start with 1 minute of box breathing, 5-10 minutes of “The Wake Up”, and 3-5 minutes of the daily meditation. Once I’ve done my box breathing, I’ll typically listen to the Wake-Up and the daily meditation while stretching. It’s taken me a while to really make this one a habit, but it is now the best way to slow down my racing thoughts and get back into my body.
• Find your “happy” and make more time for it: this is something I’ve been doing for over 10 years now. When I went through a period in my life where it felt like I lost a regular sense of joy, I decided one day that I would find my happy and make more time for whatever that was. 10 years on and many things qualify as my “happy” including seeing friends, watching The Dish podcast while I cook, sitting in the sun, spending time with my sisters, spending time with dogs, colouring, painting, etc. etc. Finding your “happy” also ties in nicely to the gratitude tip from above.
• Living the “not my circus, not my monkeys” mantra: This may have been a trending audio a few years back, but it’s a great mantra for reducing stress in your life. It basically gives you permission to assess a situation and if actions and reactions are out of your control, then move on. It’s kind of the now infamous “let them” theory, but with a little more consideration for the situation and recognition that you’ve done your best and now you have to move on.

These are the things that work for me, alongside regular physical activity every day. I am not exempt from stress because I practice these every day. I have my stressed days and weeks, even. But I know that when things get crazy, I have a set of habits and activities that I know will bring me back down to earth and put out the mental dumpster fire.

Heart Health Tip #3: Eat the Rainbow

Now this may make you think of a certain red/purple/blue bag of sweets, but for this tip, I want you to go analog! The rainbow I want you to eat comes from the fresh food aisles and only contains ingredients you can pronounce.

Dietary recommendations are tricky to make. As someone who is not a registered dietitian, I am not allowed to make specific dietary prescriptions, however, I can share the science related to heart healthy diets – and the best way to boil it down into easy, actionable advice is to eat the rainbow.

Research suggests that by eating at least 30 varieties of plants can improve your gut health immensely and, in turn, support a healthy cardiovascular system. I’ve talked about this in many blogs, but your gut microbiome is connected to everything. So if you are eating in a way that supports a healthy gut, you’ll be supporting not only a healthy heart, but a healthy immune system, digestive system, and hormonal system.

Heart Month Challenge 3: Eat 15 different plant sources every day

You may be looking at that and thinking, “15?! You can’t even buy 15 plants from the grocery aisle!”

Oh contraire – it is actually easier than you think.

That’s because this includes things like fruits, veggies, legumes, beans, spices like garlic and cayenne, and nuts and seeds, including their nut butters. In one day, this would look like:

Breakfast: Egg omelette with sauteed spinach (1), seasoned with garlic (2) and paprika (3) and enjoyed with a grilled tomato (4) and half an avocado on the side (5)

Mid-Morning Snack: yogurt and blueberries (6) with a dash of cinnamon (7)

Lunch: Butternut squash soup (8) with carrots (9) and celery (10) on the side (likely more accumulated here if you make the soup yourself)

Afternoon Snack: handful of mixed nuts (11, 12, 13, 14, 15)

Dinner: Salmon with a side salad made with mixed greens (16, 17, 18) and cucumber (19). The salad dressing of choice may also have lemon juice and dill, which would bring you up to 21.

You see it may sound like a lot, but you can get creative and if you get your mind into the habit of thinking about variety and enhancing flavour with spices and interesting ingredients, you’ll reach your 15 plants sources every day and likely surpass it.

As you may have read in a recent post, I am following a ketogenic lifestyle as part of preparations for my sister’s wedding in the summer, to reduce inflammation in my body, and to improve mental clarity to support my career aspirations.

This lifestyle focuses on high-fat food sources, so I can easily get some of my 15 plant foods from mixed nuts and things like olive oil and avocados, but I also have to be mindful about seasoning my food well and incorporating high-fiber foods like broccoli and dark leafy greens to make sure my body has what it needs to really perform at its best.

Heart Health Tip #4: Check Your Sleep Hygiene

This is probably my favourite tip because I am a certified sleepy girl. I have created the ultimate sleeping palace in my apartment, to the point where I am now outfitting the spare room at my sister’s place so that when I visit her, I don’t have to sacrifice my excellent sleep quality.

I am probably not the first person to tell you to get better sleep. It feels elusive and vague, and recent science has come to say that previous recommendations only apply to men and that women may need more sleep.

Here’s a great intro from a study out of Current Sleep Medicine Reports:

Women sleep differently than men due to physiological, psychological, and social reasons. From estrogen receptor modulation of sleep in the brain, to an increased risk of experiencing the correlated disorders of depression and insomnia, to the impact of poverty and relationship satisfaction on sleep – both biological sex and the construct of female gender affect the timing, quantity, and quality of women’s sleep.

Girl, we really need our sleep so we can keep being the smart, capable, strong, inspiring, wonderful, nurturing, leading women that we are in the waking hours.

Not only does good sleep support the lifestyle of a modern woman, but good sleep is also correlated with a healthy heart. Chronic bad sleep, on the other hand, can be major risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

Heart Month Challenge 4: Get an average of 8 hours of sleep per night this month

Now I want to emphasize that this is an average. Sometimes I sleep 10 hours because my body needs it, and sometimes I only get 4 because I was out the night before and I can’t sleep in.

We want to aim for an average of 8 hours of sleep every night, or 192 total hours of sleep between February 3rd (when this is published) and February 28th.

So much happens when we sleep, and you know that sleep is important because every major, multicellular organism on the planet needs to sleep. We know we need sleep because when people are deprived of sleep for too long, they can die.

Sleep is essential, and I think with more screens making their way into the bedrooms, noisier cities, and greater demands to make the most of every hour of the day, we are neglecting the power of a good night’s rest.

I mentioned before that I have created a bit of sleeping palace; a temple of sweet dreams, if you will. I’ve had to invest in a few things because I live in an apartment that isn’t perfectly sound-proof or dark at night, but it is all worth it if it means I get on average 2 hours of REM sleep and 2 hours of deep sleep every night (iykyk).

Fair warning – this is the only section of this article that will include affiliate links. Please know that I actually use all of these products every single night to support good sleep, and that I reached out to many of the brands because I use them so frequently for my sleep. Anyways – back to the recommendations:

1. Genuine Health Deep Sleep supplement: This has natural ingredients, including reishi, magnesium and GABA, that support a healthy sleep and a very small amount of melatonin so I don’t get weird melatonin dreams. I take this about 30-45 minutes before I want to be asleep.
2. A Cooling Memory Foam Mattress: You can decide what firmness you prefer when you sleep, but I love this mattress because of the cooling effect, and because it is ridiculously comfortable without me feeling like I’ve sunken into my mattress by morning. Cooling is important as well, as our bodies get their best sleep at about 16 – 20 degrees Celsius, or 65 – 68 degrees Fahrenheit.
3. Quiet Oscillating fan with a dark mode: This one is great because not only can I control the speed and oscillation, but I can also turn off the light completely. There are so many little lights that can disrupt your sleep without you realizing it, and I find the little light on fans can be so bright. So I made sure I got one that could be completely dark at night while it keeps my room just the right temperature.
4. Large, noise-reducing, blackout curtains: Again, crucial that these block out light at night, but also noise. I live in an apartment with old, drafty windows, and they aren’t doing much to soundproof my room from the outdoor noises. Curtains can work wonders for muffling sounds from outside, while also making your room pitch black and perfect for sleeping.
5. Smart Bulbs or a Sunrise Alarm Clock: These are helpful in the morning to help you gently wake up and reduce your reliance on having your phone beside you at night. To mimic a sunrise and work with your circadian rhythm to wake you up gently, you can set the bulbs to gradually increase brightness or use the sunrise alarm clock. I have mine set to increase for 20 minutes, culminating in a gentle, warm glow and a relaxing alarm clock (so I don’t wake up annoyed at my noisy alarm).
6. A good book, colouring, or journaling: If I have any of these by my bedside, I am less likely to get into a late-night doom scroll session. Putting away all electronics and reducing my exposure to blue light an hour before bed makes a huge difference in the quality of my sleep.

A couple nice-to-haves, but things that aren’t necessary are nose strips to improve oxygen levels while you sleep, mouth tape to reduce snoring, a diffuser with lavender to support sleep (I use this one from Aera), and Loop Dream earplugs, which are designed to be comfortable enough to sleep in while blocking out most noise.

Related Content: Why Rest is Important

Heart Health Tip #5: Reduce Toxins As Much As Possible

The final tip is actually what spurred the idea to write this article. I was listening to the radio morning show, and they had a guest on who was sharing their experience of having a heart attack in their early 40s.

A heart attack occurs when the blood vessels leading to the heart become obstructed by plaque, resulting in the heart not being able to pump properly. The body signals that it isn’t getting enough blood, so it pumps faster in a frantic panic to get blood to the body – but to no avail because the blood vessels are too blocked to pump blood properly.

I explain the process because having enough plaque in your blood vessels is not common at that age. Or at least it used to not be.

Nowadays, so much of our food is processed and packaged, smoking and vaping are on the rise again, and people are more stressed and sedentary than ever. Which is why I’ve outlined tips 1-4 as important steps to improve your heart health.

This final step is the most crucial, however, as toxins like tobacco and nicotine can increase your chances of experiencing a heart attack by 100%. Put in other words, you are 2X more likely to suffer a heart attack or cardiovascular-related event if you regularly consume tobacco and nicotine.

Heart Month Challenge #5: Remove at least 3 toxins from your life.

If you’re a smoker, this can mean a pretty intense but valuable journey that you are about to embark on. I know it is not easy, but there’s a ton of support out there to help you kick the habit and give your heart a better chance.

If you don’t smoke, you can use an app like Think Dirty to learn more about the everyday toxins in your home and at the grocery store. Prioritize removing toxins from your life that make their way into your body through inhalation (ex. cheap candles) or through consumption (highly processed foods).

Now, no one is perfect. I still buy vegetables in plastic wrap and don’t know if my hair or body care products are perfectly toxin-free, but I’ve made a concerted effort to avoid smoking or areas where there’s a high chance of second-hand smoke, and I do what I can to buy as many products as possible that are low-toxicity.

To wrap this up, I want to just reiterate the importance of taking care of your heart health. February is heart health month, and a great time to start building, or nurturing the kinds of habits that support the long-term health of one of your most vital organs. Changes you make today mean more freedom, independence, and longevity, and that’s a wonderful thing.