Have you started worrying about your blood pressure? The answer from most students would be  “no” mainly because high blood pressure, most of the time, does not interfere with a person’s body until the person is older, but the earlier a person starts taking better care of themselves the more the chances of having high blood pressure or other conditions related to blood pressure will highly decrease.

High pressure puts extra pressure in parts of your body where the blood flows and in necessary organs like the heart, kidneys and the brain. Having high blood pressure highly increases the risk for heart attacks, strokes, kidney dieses and dementia. These health problems develop over long periods of time, that’s why it’s better to start having precautions earlier on then later.

School nurse Peggy Geoghegan has many helpful tips to help students start taking care of their blood pressure.

“Follow a healthy eating plan.  This includes eating less red meat, limiting sweets and sugar containing beverages.  Limit salt.

Control your weight.  Lose weight if you are overweight or obese.

Do enough physical activity.  30 minutes five times a week is a good goal if you are not active.  For some 30 minutes feels overwhelming.  You can break the 30 minutes down into three 10 minute blocks which might feel more manageable.

Manage your stress and learn how to cope with your stress.

If you smoke, quit,” Geoghegan said.

An easy way to start would be to make a exercise calendar and as for the eating plan you can start little by little even changing your chips at lunch for a fruit would overall in the long term make a big difference.

“Making lifestyle changes can be hard.  Start by making one healthy lifestyle change at a time then adopt the others.” Geoghegan said.

Reading your blood pressure number may seem difficult but is actually quite simple. When you get your blood pressure reading it will give you two numbers the systolic number is the number that’s on top and a larger than the other number , it measures pressure in the arteries when the heart beats. Diastolic is the bottom number and it measures pressure in the arteries between heartbeats

A normal blood pressure will be a systolic that’s less than 120 and a diastolic that’s less than 80. Blood pressure for a healthy student should be checked every 5 years, but once you get older you should get it checked more often about once a year.

So the earlier you start taking precautions of your health the less you will have to worry about it in the future, for your blood pressure reading you can go to your local doctor.