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Daily Heart Healthy Habits
Living with a serious, chronic condition like Heart Failure can add to
the day-to-day stress in your life, making it more difcult to manage
your symptoms and stay on track.
Stress can:
• Make you feel sad, angry, afraid, agitated or helpless
• Cause you to lose sleep
• Make your heart work harder, raise your blood pressure and make
your symptoms worse
• Increase pain in your neck, jaw and/or back and increase the
frequency of headaches
• Lead to overeating, smoking, drinking, or drug abuse
• Sabotage your efforts to stick to a healthy life plan
Positive Self Talk:
The way you talk to yourself can be a powerful tool in managing stress.
Work toward changing negative thoughts into positive thoughts, such
as:
Negative: Positive:
I can’t do this. I will do my best.
Everything is going wrong. I can handle this, one thing at a time.
Practice concentrating on positive thoughts when you are sitting
quietly or before going to bed:
“I’ve got this.” | “I’m not going to let this get me down.”
“Things could be worse.” | “Someday I’ll laugh about this.”
3. Manage Your Stress
What can you do to manage stress?