Hate Mondays? You’re raising your risk of a heart attack

You’d better start loving Mondays.  People who hate the first day of the working week retain stress levels that can lead to a heart attack.

It’s something that especially affects older people who are 50 years and older, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re still working or not: hatred of the day itself seems to be enough to raise your risk of a heart attack, say researchers from the University of Hong Kong.

They monitored the stress levels of 3,511 older people and asked them how they felt about Mondays.  They discovered that the Monday-haters had 23 percent higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, in hair samples and this increased the risk of a heart attack by 19 percent.

There was one nuance to the findings: the higher stress levels weren’t restricted to those who were anxious about Mondays, but also those who worried the most on Mondays when work problems were being tackled.

High cortisol levels, which were still in hair samples several months later, also affect healthy immune function, insulin resistance—a precursor of type 2 diabetes—and hypertension or high blood pressure.

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