Sad Heart, Happy Heart. Here's How to Keep it Ticking Happily

It may be an age old symbol of emotion, but everyone knows that the human heart is really nothing more than a pump. Or is it? New research suggests a direct link between your state of mind and the state of your heart. Here's how to keep it ticking happily.

You've seen it on TV. A hospital humming with urgent activity, the echo of footsteps on shiny floors, a roomful of white coated figures, and an unbroken note that pierces the air. A flurry of gloves, a jolt of electrical energy, and the note shifts into a regular, rhythmic pattern. The human heart, pulsing back into life.

But the industrious organ that shepherds your blood and its vital cargo of oxygen through the body is also an age old symbol of emotion. Be it aching or breaking or brimming with love, the heart has always overruled the brain as the supposed wellspring of the way we feel.

As it turns out, this may not be such a fanciful notion. A growing body of clinical research seems to confirm what poets and songwriters have long proclaimed. There's a real and direct link between our hearts and our minds. Or to put it in the language of the white coated figure; psychosocial factors may present stronger risks for acute myocardial infarction than diabetes, smoking, hypertension and obesity. Which means that stress at work or home, along with your perceived ability to cope with life, can significantly increase your risk of heart disease. The mortality rate in heart failure patients with major depression is two and a half times higher than in heart patients without depression.

Yet, depression in heart failure patients often goes undiagnosed. This is partly because of the overlap in the symptoms of the two conditions (among them: fatigue, loss of energy, poor appetite, and sleep disturbance) and partly because many patients see depression as a character weakness or personality flaw, when it's really a common clinical condition that affects as many as one out of five patients with heart disease.