When you feel rage burning, your body is going through other reactions that you can’t feel, and this is where trouble brews. When you overreact, so do your stress hormones, causing fat levels in the blood to shoot up. It heightens your physical reactions across the board. The flow of hormones slows the removal of fat from the blood and crowds it with a surplus of red cells.
Just how bad can a bad attitude be? Really bad. When it comes to endangering a woman’s heart, research indicates that anger and its explosive fallout rank as high as and possibility even higher than smoking. For a woman with heart disease, a fit of anger more than doubles her risk of having a heart attack over the next 2 hours.
This process is called sludging, and it can block off hundreds of tiny blood vessels for as long as 12 hours. This is why researchers warn that eating a high-fat meal when you are angry can trigger a heart attack.
Though most studies on hostility have been conducted on men, research shows, there are consequences for women with hot tempers. One 4-year study conducted at the University of California San Francisco Mount Zion Women’s Health Clinical Research Center monitored 800 menopause-age women with known heart disease for signs of hostility. Hostility was defined as signs of cynicism, anger, mistrust, and aggression. Researchers found that the women who showed the most signs of hostility were twice as likely to have a heart attack or die from heart-related problems than their more mild-tempered peers.
This does not mean anger is a risk only for older women. In fact, researchers analyzed the risk factors of 500 men and women under the age of 50 who had been hospitalized for a heart attack. All of them scored higher than average for signs of hostility.
