Keeping your heart healthy comes down to a handful of daily habits: moving your body, eating well, sleeping enough, managing stress, and knowing your numbers. None of these require extreme measures, and small consistent changes in each area add up to significant protection. Here’s what actually matters and how much of each you need.
How Much Exercise Your Heart Needs
Aim for 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity per week, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity if you prefer shorter, harder workouts. Moderate intensity means brisk walking, cycling on flat ground, or anything that raises your heart rate enough that you can talk but not sing. Vigorous intensity includes running, swimming laps, or hiking uphill.
You also need at least two days per week of muscle-strengthening activity. This doesn’t have to mean a gym. Bodyweight exercises, resistance bands, or carrying heavy groceries all count. Strength training helps your heart indirectly by improving how your body handles blood sugar and by lowering resting blood pressure over time. If 150 minutes sounds like a lot, breaking it into 10- or 15-minute chunks throughout the day works just as well as one long session.
What to Eat (and How Much)
Two dietary patterns have the strongest track record for heart protection: the DASH diet and the Mediterranean diet. Both emphasize fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and fish while limiting red meat, processed foods, and added sugars. In adults over 60, strict adherence to the DASH diet reduced cardiovascular and all-cause mortality by roughly 17%. Other research on high-adherence groups has shown even larger reductions in cardiovascular disease risk.
A few specific nutrients deserve attention:
- Sodium: Keep it under 2,000 mg per day (about one teaspoon of table salt). Most people consume far more than this, largely from restaurant meals, bread, deli meats, and canned soups.
- Potassium: Aim for at least 3,510 mg per day. Potassium counterbalances sodium’s effect on blood pressure. Bananas get all the credit, but potatoes, spinach, beans, and avocados are even richer sources.
- Fiber: The American Heart Association recommends 25 to 30 grams of total dietary fiber per day from food, not supplements. Soluble fiber, the kind found in oats, barley, beans, and apples, is especially effective at lowering LDL cholesterol.
- Omega-3 fats: Eating oily fish like salmon, mackerel, or sardines two to three times per week provides meaningful amounts of EPA and DHA, the omega-3 fatty acids linked to lower triglycerides and reduced inflammation. If you already have heart disease, the AHA suggests about 1 gram per day of combined EPA and DHA. The FDA recommends that supplement labels cap their suggested intake at 2 grams per day.
Alcohol: Less Than You Think
The old idea that a glass of red wine protects your heart has largely fallen apart. The World Health Organization now states that no level of alcohol consumption is safe for health. The American Heart Association’s position is more nuanced: consuming no more than one to two drinks per day is associated with possible risk reduction for coronary artery disease, but anything above that starts causing harm. At around three or more drinks per day, the risk of heart failure, stroke, and sudden cardiac death rises consistently. Roughly 21 drinks per week is associated with a 50% increase in heart failure risk.
If you don’t currently drink, there’s no heart-related reason to start.
Why Sleep Matters More Than You’d Expect
Sleep is when your heart rate drops, your blood pressure falls, and your blood vessels repair themselves. Cutting that window short, or overshooting it, raises cardiovascular risk in a U-shaped pattern. The sweet spot is 7 to 9 hours per night. People sleeping in that range had the highest rates of ideal cardiovascular health across multiple measures, including blood sugar control, physical activity levels, and blood pressure.
Sleeping fewer than 6 hours was linked to significantly lower cardiovascular health scores, with an average drop of about 0.4 points on a composite health scale compared to 7-to-9-hour sleepers. Sleeping 9 hours or more showed a similar, slightly smaller decline. Only about 30% of adults actually land in the 7-to-8-hour range, which means most people have room to improve here.
How Stress Damages Your Heart
Chronic stress doesn’t just feel bad. It triggers a cascade of physical changes that directly accelerate heart disease. When you’re stressed, your nervous system floods the body with fight-or-flight signals. Cortisol, the primary stress hormone, suppresses nitric oxide production, a molecule your blood vessels need to stay flexible and open. Without enough of it, your arteries stiffen.
At the same time, chronic stress activates a low-grade inflammatory response. Your bone marrow releases extra white blood cells into circulation, and those cells migrate into artery walls and accumulate in existing fatty plaques. This inflammation is involved in every stage of artery disease, from the initial buildup of plaque to the moment a plaque ruptures and causes a heart attack. Prolonged stress also promotes muscle growth inside artery walls, which narrows them and contributes to high blood pressure.
The practical takeaway: stress management isn’t a luxury. Regular physical activity, adequate sleep, and deliberate relaxation practices like deep breathing, meditation, or simply spending time outdoors all help keep your stress response in check. Even 10 to 15 minutes of daily practice makes a measurable difference over time.
Know Your Numbers
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Three sets of numbers give you and your doctor the clearest picture of your heart health.
Blood Pressure
The 2025 AHA/ACC guidelines classify blood pressure into four categories:
- Normal: below 120/80 mm Hg
- Elevated: 120 to 129 systolic (top number) with a bottom number still below 80
- Stage 1 hypertension: 130 to 139 systolic, or 80 to 89 diastolic
- Stage 2 hypertension: 140 or higher systolic, or 90 or higher diastolic
Many people with elevated or stage 1 readings can bring their numbers down through diet, exercise, sodium reduction, and weight loss alone. Home blood pressure monitors are inexpensive and let you track trends between doctor visits.
Cholesterol
For adults 20 and older, the general targets for heart health are:
- Total cholesterol: below 200 mg/dL
- LDL (“bad” cholesterol): below 100 mg/dL
- HDL (“good” cholesterol): 60 mg/dL or higher is ideal. Below 40 for men or below 50 for women is considered low and raises risk.
- Triglycerides: below 150 mg/dL
LDL is the number most tightly linked to plaque buildup. Soluble fiber, omega-3 fats, regular exercise, and maintaining a healthy weight are the most effective lifestyle tools for moving it in the right direction.
Blood Sugar
Even if you don’t have diabetes, chronically elevated blood sugar damages blood vessel walls and accelerates plaque formation. A fasting glucose below 100 mg/dL is considered normal. Getting screened every few years, or more often if you have risk factors, catches problems early when they’re easiest to reverse with lifestyle changes.
Putting It All Together
Heart health isn’t about perfecting one habit. It’s the combination that matters. Someone who exercises daily but sleeps five hours a night and lives on processed food still carries significant risk. The strongest protection comes from stacking several moderate improvements: walking after dinner, swapping refined grains for whole grains, getting to bed 30 minutes earlier, and finding a reliable way to decompress. None of these changes need to happen at once. Pick the area where you have the most room to improve and start there. Each change makes the next one easier, because better sleep gives you more energy to exercise, exercise reduces stress, and lower stress makes it easier to sleep.