Picture your circulatory system as a network of garden hoses running through your house. The pressure inside depends on how much water is flowing, how narrow the hoses are, and how much resistance the water meets along the way. Turn up the flow, tighten the hose, or add a kink somewhere, and the pressure gauge climbs. Your blood pressure works the same way. It is not one thing. It is the sum of several forces acting on the same system, and the good news is that most of those forces are things you can actually adjust.

Here are five with the strongest evidence behind them.

1. Dietary sodium. Sodium pulls water into your bloodstream, which increases the volume moving through those hoses. Cutting sodium intake can lower systolic blood pressure by several points on its own, and combining that with the DASH eating pattern, rich in vegetables, fruit, and low-fat dairy, can produce even larger drops.

2. Body weight. Extra adipose tissue means more blood vessels supplying it, more blood volume, and more work for your heart. Every kilogram of weight lost is associated with roughly a 1 mm Hg drop in systolic pressure.

3. Physical activity. Regular aerobic exercise trains your blood vessels to relax more efficiently, which lowers resistance in the system. Evidence shows meaningful reductions in both systolic and diastolic blood pressure among people who exercised regularly, whether or not they started out with hypertension.

4. Alcohol intake. Alcohol raises blood pressure in a fairly linear way, and cutting back lowers it. Reducing alcohol consumption produces a measurable, dose-dependent decrease in both systolic and diastolic pressure.

5. Potassium intake. Potassium helps your kidneys excrete sodium and relaxes the walls of your blood vessels, essentially widening the hose. Oral potassium supplementation can significantly reduced blood pressure.

None of these factors work in isolation. Someone who tightens up their sodium intake but stays sedentary is only turning one dial. The biggest drops in blood pressure occur when several of these levers move together, not just one.

If you want help figuring out which of these matters most for your numbers, that is exactly the kind of thing we sort out on a FREE discovery call. You can book one at theheartnd.com/start/.