No matter how much you try to control your type 2 diabetes by watching what you eat and how much you exercise, there are certain things in life that you simply can’t have complete control over.
One of them is the stress and anxiety that daily life brings. Rushing to pick up the kids from soccer practice, buying a gift for your spouse, anticipating a meeting with an important client, whatever it is, stress is just a part of everyday life. But what impact does it have on our blood sugar and how can we deal with it more effectively?
When we experience a stressful event, our body responds with what is called the fight-or-flight response, eliciting a flood of adrenaline and other hormones that readies the body for action.
When the stressful event occurs when we are out hiking along a nature trail and we see a mountain lion coming at us, this rush of adrenaline can save our life. But if we get this rush of adrenaline several times a day for other non-life-threatening events, we are unnecessarily flooding our body with hormones that can raise our blood sugar.
When stress hormones that are designed to deal with immediate and life-threatening dangers are triggered throughout the day by routine everyday things like getting stuck in traffic jams or preparing for meetings with clients, your blood glucose levels can spike and remain high throughout the day.
It’s one of the design flaws of our bodies. Getting these shots of adrenaline and other stress hormones are helpful when we need tha sudden burst of energy to outrun a bear who is chasing us, but not so helpful when they are triggered while we’re stuck in traffic or are simply thinking about an upcoming dinner with our in-laws.
In these kinds of non-physical, mental stress events, you can neither fight nor flight. You are, in most cases, not in a position to move at all, so you don’t need these extra stress hormones coursing through your bloodstream, gearing you up to physically protect yourself or avoid danger.
And because you are not doing anything physical, other than tightening your grip on a steering wheel, perhaps, you have no opportunity to burn off the extra glucose that this fight-or-flight process generates. If the body’s cells have no need for the extra glucose because the body is not physically moving or running away from anything, then this extra supply of glucose will be left in the bloodstream, raising blood glucose levels.
While it’s difficult to avoid these kinds of mental stress events from occurring throughout the day, there are a few things you can do to minimize them or at least decrease their frequency.
Tools to Turn the Volume Down on Stress
Since it’s likely you aren’t burning off this extra glucose by outrunning a bear once you get out of your car or after you wrapped up a stressful meeting, make it a habit to visit the gym after work and do some exercise.
Your workout should help in burning off some this extra glucose that may have built up in your bloodstream over the course of the day. Obviously, we are all different and respond differently to both food and exercise so check with your doctor to see what exercise program might be most effective in helping you to stabilize your blood sugar levels.
Working up a good sweat on the treadmill will have both physical and psychological benefits. Some studies even show that exercise can help treat depression, perhaps even more effectively than medication.
But how do you deal with mental stress in the moment, in real time? When you’re confronted with a situation that causes your stomach to tighten, your breathing to shorten, and your face to redden, you’re probably experiencing a stressful event or ruminating over something that is causing anxiety. It’s also likely that, as a result, your blood glucose level is rising.
If your stuck in a traffic jam and you’re beginning to worry about whether or not you’re going to make it to work on time, your thoughts will make you feel even more anxious and stressed. If left alone, these anxious thoughts will continue to feed off of one another, adding unnecessary stress to a situation you have little or no control over.
There are a number of psychological approaches and techniques for dealing with these kinds of mental stress events. Most of them are based on the idea of mental framing, which teaches that we can change our perspective of a stressful event—and minimize its adverse impact on our health—through a more productive thought process.
If, for example, you’re sitting in a traffic jam and realize you’re going to be late for an important meeting, your thoughts may be tend to inflate the significance of being late. You might irrationally think that your company might fire you or you might even blame yourself for being late because of some character flaw that the traffic jam has exposed. “If I was just more organized, I wouldn’t be in this situation. What’s wrong with me?” How do you think those thoughts are going to make you feel?
Mental framing approaches, like Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), help alleviate the impact of these types of stressful events by changing the way these events are viewed. Rather than turning a routine traffic jam into a life catastrophe where you lose your job, someone practicing CBT might be able to change his or her perspective to something like, “Ok, it looks like I’m going to be late. This can’t be helped. I haven’t been late in a long time and it’s not something I have any control over so I will just make the best of my time here in the car and enjoy some music on the radio after I call and let my boss know that I’m going to be late.”
Obviously, there is much more to CBT than what is described here, but hopefully it may prompt you to learn more about it or similar therapies for dealing with day-to day stress.
In addition to exercise and CBT, there are other non-physical ways to help in alleviating the stress that builds up over the course of the day.
Spending some time engaged in an activity or hobby can help you replace stressful and anxious thoughts with productive and enjoyable ones. If you’re hovering over a chessboard trying to figure out how to avoid losing your queen or getting checkmated, you’re less likely to be thinking about your upcoming dinner with your mother-in-law.
Or if you have just enrolled in a class on computer programing, piano, Shakespeare, or art history, your mind is going to be occupied for several hours a week focused on those subjects. And those irritating and stressful thoughts are going to have to make some space for these new mental demands. They may even be crowded out entirely at times as you begin to throw yourself into these new subjects and hobbies with deeper levels of interest.
The old axiom holds true, that science abhors a vacuum, and when it comes to our mind, reminding ourselves of this can provide great benefits.
References:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/diabetes/in-depth/diabetes-management/art-20047963
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/25/1/30.short
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09735070.2008.11886324
https://www.anxietybc.com/what-cbt-1
