How Can You Overcome Diabetes Stress? Dealing With Stress As a Diabetic!

Overcome Diabetes Stress, Dealing With Diabetes Stress:

Diabetes is a condition that seems to be made much worse when one is under prolonged stress. But for most of us, it is a lot harder to figure out how to reduce stress than it is to talk about reducing stress.

Dealing with diabetes and stress starts with being self-aware. You need to be able to quickly recognize when stress is having a major impact on your psyche. Stress is such a major part of the modern lifestyle that most of us just think of stress as being normal.

We ignore stress and what it does to us physically and mentally. The way we deal with stress is often results in our vices, such as overeating, smoking, drinking, and television.

There Are Steps,

You can take that will reduce the amount of stress in your daily life as a diabetic. For most people, stress tends to come from either our workplace environments, our social environments, or our family environments.

For those who are quick to take action and responsibility, it is not so difficult to make changes upon recognizing which of these is causing daily stress. For the rest of us, it takes a serious and concerted effort to change our surroundings and make demands for a change of people.

Those of Us,

Who are not quick to take action may instead choose to withdraw from whatever environments lead us into stress. If, for example, you find your social environment to be stressful, you may choose simply to withdraw from social interaction.

A healthier approach might be to actively seek a change in the groups of people with whom you socialize. This can be particularly important when the source of your social environment stress is behaviors that you find very uncomfortable.

But if Your Family Environment is,

• The major source of your daily stress, things may not be so simple.
• You should first try to work out any differences with family members who are causing problems.
• If they show a willingness to talk things out and make changes, then you should work with them.
• If they are unwilling to make changes, you may have to cut the cord for the sake of your health and happiness.

If You Have Diabetes,

You must be willing to make such changes in order to sustain your health. While making the changes may be initially stressful, once the changes are made your stress levels should decrease significantly. Continue to face and solve stressful situations in your life as a part of battling diabetes.

Health Cycle of Human Physiology

Before knowing how to manage diabetes stress, it would be nice to know a few things about the conversion cycle of digested food into blood glucose illustrated by the following ‘Health Cycle’.

Taking food for energy – Conversion into the blood – Processing by heart – Pumping to lungs – Purification – Purified blood circulation with oxygen – Secretion of insulin – Conversion of blood glucose into energy – Physically activities and tiredness – Taking food again for energy

If anything,

Goes wrong in the above cycle anywhere, problems like kidney failure, lack of insulin secretion by the pancreas, loss of vision, increased blood sugar and high blood pressure, numbness of limbs, severe back pain and heart problems start. Anything can be borne except for heart problems. If all other parts are to function properly, the heart is to continue its function well.

If anything is broken in the cycle, then the danger is there which can be imagined. In this regard, maintaining normal blood sugar levels is important to protect the heart. Since hypertension is closely related to heart functioning properly, one should know how to manage diabetes.

What is Diabetes Stress?

Linking the physical and emotional impact of diabetes is a fairly new concept, so it still remains to be defined officially so my definition is “the emotional, cognitive and behavioral impact of living with the challenges that coping with diabetes can bring”. Diabetes Stress

Stress affects many people in modern life yet the feeling that we are not in control can still feel stigmatizing. Everyone, with or without diabetes, goes through times in their life when things feel difficult, their circumstances are getting to them and everything just feels “too much”.

However,

For those of us with diabetes, this can be even harder. Not only are we trying to cope with the usual stresses of life but we are also trying to handle the ongoing and often unpleasant demands of:

• Lifestyle changes.
• Managing blood sugar levels.
• Losing weight.
• Implementing an exercise program.
• Taking medication, whether it be insulin or tablets.
• Regular blood glucose monitoring.
• Always have your medical kit and food supplies with you.
• Possibly dealing with conscious or unconscious fears of long-term complications.
• Having to communicate with a team of healthcare professionals.
• The shame of injecting in public.
• Anxiety about hypoglycemia.
• Managing the reactions of our family, friends, colleagues, etc.
• And so on…

What Causes Diabetes-Related Stress?

Psychologists have found that no one factor is at the root of developing stress, rather there is a multitude of contributors, usually a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors: Diabetes Stress

1. Biological Factors: 

Relatives who experience psychological distress such as low mood and depression (especially parents and siblings), stress-related hormone levels.

2. Social Factors: 

Lack of social support in the form of friends or family and loneliness can increase the likelihood of experiencing a low mood. Work difficulties and bereavement can also have a negative impact.

3. Psychological Factors: 

Your usual thinking styles, coping strategies, and whether or not you feel in or out of control of your health. Some of these predisposing factors can be more easily changed than others and the following chapter focuses on the contributors that you definitely can influence the psychological causes of diabetes stress.

How Can You Overcome Diabetes Stress?

Cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT, proposes that there are four aspects to stress and negative moods:

• Thinking styles (‘cognitions’).
• Feelings and emotions.
• Behaviors – what we do or don’t do.
• Physical symptoms.

CBT teaches that by changing any of the components above, particularly our thinking patterns, we can begin to make changes to our mood and quality of life. Diabetes Stress

Here’s Three-Step Plan to Overcome Diabetes Stress: 

First Step: 

Allow Yourself to Think about the Negative or Painful Feelings About Diabetes. It is often the easiest thing to bottle up your feelings about diabetes and pretend they aren’t there. But this strategy doesn’t work, ignoring feelings isn’t a solution in the long-term instead, they stay within you and ‘freeze’ you.

You need to face, process and work through them, realizing that difficult emotions about diabetes are completely normal everyone has times when they feel depressed, worried, frustrated, guilty, angry, and so on.

Do you recognize any of these common, difficult emotions?

• Frightened.
• Sad.
• Angry.
• Frustration.
• Hopeless.
• Ashamed.
• Lonely.
• Guilty.
• Defeated.
• Anxious.

Look at the table on the following page and rate yourself according to how much you are affected by each of these emotions.

The Emotional Impact of Diabetes:

Circle how much of each emotion you are aware of in your life, on a scale of 1-5 where 1 is ‘Not Aware’ and 6 is ‘Extremely Aware’.

Second Step:

Understand Your Private Thoughts About Diabetes: 

Third Step:

Challenge These Thoughts:

When you feel depressed or low, get into the habit of becoming aware of the thoughts you are having before, during, and after you notice your mood changing.

There is a 5-step process that you can use to assist you:

I. What is the Situation or Event?

•  For example, measuring your blood glucose level and it being higher than you expected.

II. Do You Tell Yourself?

• What are the thoughts you notice running through your mind?
• What have I done wrong? I can’t do this. I’m a failure.

III. What is happening in your body and what do you do?

• Mood – hopeless.
• Body sensations – dry mouth, thirsty.
• Behaviors – snapped at my partner.

IV. Challenge Your Thoughts:

Ask yourself some helpful questions:

• What is the evidence for and against this thought?
• Is thinking this way of helping me?
• Are there other ways of thinking about this situation?
• If a friend told me they were thinking this way, how would I respond?
• Am I thinking in ‘all or nothing’ terms?

V. Come up with an Alternative, Balanced Thought:

•  “I have tried but just because I haven’t got the result I wanted it doesn’t mean that I’m a failure”
• “If a friend was feeling this way I’d help her see what she could do differently next time, or suggest she phones her diabetes nurse to ask for advice.” Diabetes Stress

Some Examples to Help You:

Natural Diabetes Stress Treatments:

Stress is essentially the by-product of advancement and progress. Eliminating stress is an elusive pursuit. Reducing the stress levels to short spurts and making it a rare occurrence is practical. There are some proven ways to beat stress.

1. Meditation and Yoga:

Exercise routines along with meditation and yoga will keep the mind serene and help reduce stress. The body will reach an equilibrium state. Yoga renders a supple body making it resistant to physical stress.

2. Change in Outlook:

The enemy is within us to conquer. An effective way to deal with stress is to face it out. Change the perspective of looking at a stressful situation. Does it deserve the sacrifice of health? Does it warrant so much attention? Learning to take things lightly is an effective method.

3. Measure Stress:

Every time the blood sugar level is tested, making it a point to test the stress level too. This way the directly proportional relationship between stress and diabetes can be starkly felt. This should be kept in mind every time one feels stress.

4. Avoid Stimulants:

Stimulants like caffeine produce artificial alertness in the body by increasing stress hormones. This gives an illusion of revitalization. But in the long run, it causes blood sugar levels to increase leading to diabetes.

5. Practice Relaxation:

There are separate relaxation postures in yoga for relaxation. It is essentially muscle relaxation. Listening to soothing music during relaxation will help to relax the mind. Relaxation before sleep yields maximum benefit because it renders the mind calm for long durations.

Both stress and diabetes are the offspring of the current lifestyle. Though they cannot be eliminated altogether, they can be kept under control. With proper exercise for physical and mental fitness, it is possible to lead a healthy, happy, stress-free, and importantly diabetes-free life.

Tips to Manage Diabetes and Reduce High Blood Sugar:

• 1) Try to take things easy.
• 2) Attend your routine duties with a pre-plan to avoid tension.
• 3) Be free from over anxieties giving disappointments.
• 4) Avoid imagining anything but don’t neglect diabetes risk factors.
• 5) Try to be optimistic.
• 6) Divert your mind to the aesthetic sense.
• 7) Feel yourself better than others with diabetes.

Conclusion:

It is common for people going through this process to find it very difficult the first few times they try. You can help yourself by arming yourself with as much information and education as possible educating yourself is one of the most empowering activities you can do. Talk to your doctor or nurse, read more diabetes-related information, attend a support group or make use of resources.

If you find this article useful, don’t forget to share it with your friends and family, as you might help someone in need. Thanks.

Disclaimer: “Nothing in this article makes any claim to offer cures or treatment of any disease or illness. If you are sick please consult with your doctor.”

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