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February is American Heart Month, and today we are going to talk about four things we can do every day to improve the health of our hearts. What healthy habits should you focus on every day? 

It's American Heart Month. Do you have a good grasp of your cardiovascular health? To do so, you should know and monitor a few key health metrics that provide a clearer picture of your heart health — blood pressure, blood sugar, LDL cholesterol, triglycerides, and waist circumference. 

Prolonged stress can be dangerous to your long-term health and happiness. When your body feels stress, it naturally knows to release a chemical from the adrenal medulla called catecholamines. Catecholamines include epinephrine (adrenaline), norepinephrine (noradrenaline), and dopamine.

When we're stressed, what happens in our bodies? What are the physical symptoms? How does our behavior change? Greenville health coach Aaron Benator explains.

How does light affect how we sleep? It is one of the most important factors that affect how well we sleep. It regulates our circadian rhythm, which is the rhythm throughout the day where sometimes we feel like we have more energy, sometimes there might be a lull, sometimes we might get tired, sometimes we might be very alert (when we wake up ideally).

When you're feeling stressed, you are not able to get into your parasympathetic nervous system, which is rest and digest. You're actually activating your sympathetic nervous system, which is trying to protect you, so it's taking all of that energy that would go to help you calm down and go to sleep and keeping you in a state of fight or flight.

If you feel tired throughout the day, it’s possible that you aren’t getting enough sleep or, more importantly, enough of the right kind of sleep. Not only does inadequate sleep leave you exhausted but it also affects your overall mood, productivity, and health.

Sleep is your body’s opportunity for restoration. As you snooze through the night, many of your body’s organs are hard at work preparing the body for the next day.