Amazing to me that the most basic biological system for survival - stress - is no where mentioned. And we've known for 40 years that relaxation techniques are as effective at treating hypertension as prescription medications.
It's a weakness of empiricism that scientists remain reluctant to consider the role of (unmeasurable) psychological states, such as pleasure or stress, in the context of a (measurable) physiological response, such as raised blood pressure.
My guess is that, together with stress, it is visceral pleasures (arising from our relationship to food, sex, drugs, alcohol, or other substances/habits) that are responsible for high blood pressure. Eating food with salt is just one of the ways it can be made more tasty, and thus more pleasurable, since salt heightens the response of our taste buds.
If excessive pleasure is unhealthy or bad, why do people seek it? We can use folk psychology as starting point, e.g. consumption of Ben and Jerry's in response to relationship difficulties.
Right! I’m quite convinced many people with high blood pressure have a lot of stress.
That’s one thing. And for some this stress naturally goes together with larger alcohol consumption and/or less sleep and/or bad food choices and so on.
