Diabetes Due to Stress
By: Agatha CarlssonTotal Views: 175, Word Count: 556,
It’s hard to argue that most of us live life at rapid speed. It’s the nature of a fast paced society where several family, social and work obligations could easily overpower your valuable time and resources. However, for people with diabetes both emotional and physical stress could take a greater toll on health.
The blood sugar levels in your body generally rise when you’re stressed. Stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine kick in, since one of their main functions is to raise blood sugar to help boost energy when it’s most needed. You can’t fight danger when your blood sugar is low, so it rises to help meet the challenge. Both physical and emotional stress could lead to an increase in these hormones, resulting in an increase in blood sugars which is also termed as diabetes due to stress.
Individuals who aren’t diabetic have compensatory mechanisms to keep blood sugar from going out of control. However, in people with diabetes those mechanisms are either missing or blunted, so they can’t keep a lid on blood sugar. When blood sugar levels aren’t controlled well through diet or medication, you are at a higher risk for many health complications.
How Stress Affects Diabetes?
Several sources of stress are long term threats. For example, it could take several months to recuperate from surgery. Stress hormones that are intended to deal with short term danger stay turned on for a long time. As a result, long term stress could cause long term high blood glucose levels.
Several long term sources of stress are mental. Your mind at times reacts to a risk-free event as if it were a real threat. Like physical stress, mental stress could be short term; from taking a test to getting trapped in traffic jam. In people with diabetes, stress could modify levels of blood glucose in two ways:
- People under stress might not take good care of themselves. They might exercise less or drink more alcohol or could forget or not have time to check their glucose levels or plan good meals.
- Stress hormones might also alter blood glucose levels directly
The effects of stress on glucose levels in people as well as animals have been studied by different scientists. Due to mental stress, most people’s glucose levels (type 1diabetes) go up whereas other’s glucose levels go down. In individuals with type 2 diabetes, mental stress frequently raises blood glucose levels. People with either type of diabetes are affected by higher blood glucose levels that are caused by physical stress such as injury or illness.
Diabetes Related Stress
No matter what you do, there are some sources of stress that would never go away and having diabetes due to stress is one of them. Still, you can lessen the stress of living with diabetes by adopting certain measures. Support groups could be of great help and knowing other people in the same condition helps you feel less alone. Making friends in a support group could lighten the burden of diabetes due to stress.
Speaking with members of your diabetes support group could definitely help you in resolving this issue. At times, stress could be so severe that you feel besieged and then psychotherapy or counseling would be of great help.
About the Author
Agatha Carlsson is a medical practitioner based in Sweden. Apart from being a physician, Agatha is also a Diabetes Educator who does lifestyle and food counseling for diabetic patients.
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