““I’ve done amazing experiments with Holocaust survivors, and the situation is the same. I would ask them to think for about five minutes about the worst things that happened in the camps. There is no change in blood pressure. I then asked them to tell me what they were thinking about. Boom. Their pressure would double.””
t what they want to say next.”
“You also may know many people, who perhaps never felt heard in their young lives, and who never stop talking when they got older. They become “chatterboxes!” Whenever I encountered hypertensive talkers in my practice I would always insist on verbal restraint. To me, “chatterbox-related hypertension” was a real entity.
Public speaking has been studied as a form of stress that can cause blood pressure to rise. We know that when you talk and are stressed, you instantly constrict your peripheral blood supply. A healthy heart pumping out a lot of blood against a constricted periphery can create huge pressure surges that go right up into the coronary arteries and could even damage the sensitive endothelial lining of arteries. This is an unheralded mechanism that can contribute to arterial disease.
The Sinatra Solution: Become a Better Listener
As a youngster I used to stutter. The biggest challenge, or fear, for me was talking in any kind of a public setting, such as school. Yet I obviously grew out of the stuttering and the fear. Nowadays when I speak to audiences, sometimes as big as 2-3,000 people, I am fearless. The words flow. I think that comes from speaking from the heart. If we just speak from our hearts, we are speaking for what is for us the truth. Our hearts and bodies are in sync.
The notion of speaking in public, whether in front of audiences or friends, is stressful only to the degree that you feel you can communicate. If you speak the truth, and you feel heard, it is not that stressful, and so less blood pressure-altering.
If you do have high blood pressure, think about what I just said. Try to become a better listener.
How my heart sings 