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Controlling diabetes with diet, exercise, and medications is generally thought about, and the emotional side is rarely considered.
Emotional health and diabetes health are two-way; it is a two-way relationship. When an individual’s emotional level is cheerful, diabetes can be more easily controlled.
Mindfulness training has been shown to address depression, stress, anxiety, and chronic pain. These have been implemented with better glycemic control, diabetes control, and a higher quality of life.
On the other hand, people with diabetes are twice as likely to suffer from depression .
Treating depression can not only improve quality of life but could also significantly reduce the risk of complications.
Some stressors can emerge many weeks, months, or years after diagnosis. Alternatively, difficulties may arise in the initial diagnosis of diabetes and remain unresolved.
Coping with the diagnosis
Being diagnosed with diabetes can be a shock. The first reactions can be disbelief, feeling overwhelmed, or even anger.
These feelings usually ease after a while, and diabetes becomes a part of life. But sometimes, these feelings don’t go away quickly.
Many people can support the diabetic patient: his family, friends, and a team of health professionals.
When the patient has challenged the diagnosis of diabetes, be it a new or old diagnosis, living with this challenge can trigger a flood of emotions.
These emotions are natural responses and are experienced by many people, especially when first diagnosed with diabetes.
These emotions can also be experienced by someone who is managing diabetes long-term. Emotional problems can make it harder to take care of yourself (eat right, exercise, and rest), which can affect blood sugar control.
Also, you may try to reduce stress with unhealthy behaviors, which can contribute to diabetes complications.
Emotions and food
Diabetes can focus more on diet and diet. Paying close attention to what you eat and learning new ways to cook can be stressful.
Some people find that they eat more when stressed or eat less because they feel depressed. Eating different foods can also have an impact on your mood.
Sometimes it can also mean a greater focus on weight and body image. This can lead to an unhealthy relationship with food, something called an eating disorder or possibly an eating disorder.
The focus on food and numbers inevitably becomes a part of life when you have diabetes, but for some, this focus can become an obsession and lead to negative thought patterns.
Diabulimia or bulimia is a severe eating disorder in people with diabetes; it is characterized by weight and body image problems that lead to poor diabetes management.
Linking diabetes to emotions
Diabetes affects you physically, but it can also affect you emotionally.
Talking about diabetes and how it makes a patient feel is not always easy. You may not feel like you need to talk about anything, or you don’t want to burden anyone. But downloading something of what you think has many benefits for the diabetic patient and those close to him.
Stress and diabetes
Most people experience stress as emotional or physical tension. It can cause worry, anxiety, and uncertainty. Everyday events or life changes can create pressure.
Now, although everyone can feel stressed from time to time, having diabetes to control, as well as everything else in life, can be very overwhelming.
Stress can affect blood sugar levels, so the patient needs to recognize when stressed and how to deal with the problem.
Symptoms of stress can include:
- Nervousness.
- A racing heartbeat.
- Fast breathing.
- Stomach ache.
- Depression.
Stress can make it difficult to control your diabetes, as it can disrupt your daily routine and cause wear and tear on your body.
Stress hormones increase blood pressure, increase heart rate, and cause blood sugar to rise.
High blood sugar can make you feel depressed or tired. Low blood sugar can cause discomfort or nervousness.
If the patient thinks they may be depressed, they need to face it because studies have shown that people who fight depression and diabetes together tend to have more diabetes complications.
Sometimes stress can’t be avoided, but while you may not be able to live a stress-free life, there are things you can do to help reduce its effects.
First, you have to identify what is causing the stress, take the time to determine what is causing concern, accept that some things are out of control, and then the patient should focus on the things you can influence.
Common interventions for depression include cognitive behavioral therapy, which helps people correct harmful thought patterns and behaviors that can increase depressive symptoms. You can also incorporate lifestyle changes, such as:
- Take medications as directed and eat healthy meals.
- Use relaxation techniques like deep breathing.
- By exercising, stress can be reduced through activities like dancing, walking or biking, and doing something you enjoy.
- Sharing what you are going through with friends and family, if the diabetic patient talks about his problems, can help relieve his stress and perhaps solve those problems.
- Maintain a sense of humor. Laughing helps reduce stress.
- Join a support group. You can meet people with similar problems and make new friends.
- Seek professional help to discuss your concerns.
Over time, the patient will become familiar with what it means to live with diabetes.
It helps to write a plan for the day, including when to take your medications, times to test your blood sugar, your workout for the day, and some lovely healthy eating ideas.
This plan can be shared with the doctor to see if anything needs to be changed.
Depression and diabetes
Diabetes can be challenging to live day to day and depress the diabetic patient; this is entirely normal.
Having depression and diabetes is more common than you think, but people with diabetes are twice as likely to develop depression as people without diabetes.
You may be at risk for depression if you have any of the following symptoms for more than a week:
- Feeling sad or irritable
- Losing interest in activities you enjoy.
- Feeling worthless
- Have a change in sleep patterns.
- Feeling fatigued or like you have lost energy.
Feelings of fatigue or worthlessness may make it challenging to do self-care things that keep diabetes under control.
It is important to remember that doctors can help treat these feelings. Depression can be treated with lifestyle activities (such as increased exercise and relaxation), medications, and counseling.
Fortunately, most people who experience depression manage to overcome it.
Additional strategies can help reduce depressive states; people with type 2 diabetes improve their blood glucose control after battling depression by taking antidepressants.
Diabetes distress
Diabetes can be tough to live with. Sometimes people feel distressed, including handling frustration, guilty, sadness, or worried.
It is understandable if the patient feels this way from time to time and has to cope with the distress of diabetes.
Dealing with diabetes pays close attention to blood glucose and insulin control and medications, and these are important, of course.
But there is an emotional side to diabetes and the effects on your mental health that also need to be addressed:
- Diabetes interrupts the workday when you have to control your blood glucose.
- Diabetes means that you can’t just eat food when you want it; you have to plan.
- Diabetes prolongs the preparation in the morning while the patient washes and inspects his feet.
- Diabetes means spending money.
- Diabetes frustrates when your taste buds cry out for a cake instead of an apple.
- Diabetes makes the patient worry about the future.
All the time, effort, money, and stress disrupt emotional stability and introduce emotional complications, and it’s okay to feel frustrated, overwhelmed, or scared.
Diabetes and control
Most people like to be in control, and they don’t want to feel like something is out of control.
When it comes to diabetes, the patient can feel simultaneously in control and out of control.
Out of control
Because diabetes affects the body, the patient may feel that nothing is under control anymore. You can’t eat what you want when you want.
The patient has to take medication or inject himself. You may begin to feel that your body is no longer yours.
How to counter that feeling of being “out of control.”
Taking a step back and an objective look at the situation can help. You can say, “Yes, diabetes forces me to do these things, but diabetes does not affect my life.” A mantra to that effect, repeated when you feel particularly out of control, can help.
In addition, the patient can make a mental change: all these steps that you are taking to control diabetes are proactive and healthy steps. The patient is taking control of his condition and life as he learns to thrive with diabetes.
In control
One of the main things the doctor checks at appointments is blood glucose control, so yes, control is a big problem in diabetes. However, it is possible to focus too much (and therefore stress) on that level of control.
As with feeling out of control, it helps to take a step back. Knowing that you are doing the best to control your diabetes can release the expectation of doing it “perfectly.”
By addressing the emotions surrounding diabetes as they arise, the patient is taking a healthy step toward better diabetes management.
The reaction of the body to emotions
When the diabetic patient feels under pressure, it may be found that the blood glucose level begins to rise.
When the body is stressed, the body releases a mix of hormones, commonly known as ‘fight or flight hormones. Its function is to prepare and fight or flee by removing a lot of stored energy to make it available for the muscles to use.
Many people feel much of the stress is mental stress, not physical stress, but the body doesn’t notice the difference. Then mental stress will cause the fight or flight hormones to pump glucose into the blood, even though the body doesn’t need it.
Now, it is clear that stress will tend to raise the blood glucose levels of diabetic patients. This certainly appears to be true if you have type 2 diabetes; however, for type 1 diabetes, the picture is not so clear-cut.
For some people with type 1 diabetes, its levels may drop, possibly due to routine changes or increased physical activity.
Exercise can distract the patient from many problems; it also causes the body to release hormones called endorphins that make you feel happy and satisfied.
To understand the relationship of diabetes with the emotional state of the patient, it is recommended that when the diabetic patient undergoes the usual blood glucose tests, before each trial, a self-assessment is made, measuring their stress on a scale between 1 and 5.
Thus, comparisons can be made by recording the stress level and the blood glucose results in the daily monitoring.
