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Can Stress Make Diabetes Worse?

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Dealing with Stress & Diabetes

Stress can be a major disruption of your health. It is also considered a silent killer. Research shows that poor stress management could be responsible for health conditions, including raising your blood sugar to abnormal levels. Hence, it can contribute to the development of diabetes, heart disease, and other life-threatening illnesses.

Stress Demystified

Stress is defined as anything that causes the body to behave as if it were under attack. With stress, the body prepares to take action: to fight or flight. When you’re stressed, the stress hormones cortisol and epinephrine (also known as adrenaline) kick in to elevate blood sugar levels for energy, when you need it most. However, in people with diabetes, the “fight-or-flight”response doesn’t work effectively. Insulin, the hormone that keeps sugar in your blood from getting too high, is not able to continually allow extra energy into the cells. In effect, blood sugar piles up in the blood.

The Bad (Distress), the Good (Eustress), & Blood Sugar

When you’re sick, your stress levels naturally rise. This signals your body to produce increased levels of hormones, which, in turn, raises the blood sugar levels in your bloodstream. If you’re non-diabetic, your body produces insulin effectively, which manages this rise in blood sugar. However, for people with diabetes or insulin problems, the pancreas produces less or virtually no insulin over time.

But do you know that even excitement or good stress raises your blood sugar? Yes, it does. The excitement from cheering for your basketball team will mobilize and heighten your sugar the same way a terrible traffic jam would. So understanding that even good stress can increase blood sugar can help people, especially diabetics, to take precaution, monitor regularly, and work with your physician for proper advice and management.

How Stress Affects Diabetes

If your have diabetes here is how stress will impact your blood sugar:

1. Stress hormones alter blood sugar directly– when you become anxious, angry, or stressed, your body releases hormones which have a double effect: elevate high blood sugar, and hamper the body’s ability to deliver sugar for energy use of your body tissues.
2. Stress can translate to an unhealthy lifestyle- Individuals who are under significant stress may not find time to take care of themselves or exercise regularly. Often, people either overeat or stop eating healthy meals when distressed. Worse, they may resort to heavy alcohol drinking, smoking,and other unhealthy habits that prevents blood sugar control.

For individuals who have no diabetes (but may be prone to acquiring it because of risk factors such as heredity, ethnicity, and unhealthy lifestyle practices), the psychological componentsof stress, among other factors, have been found to lower insulin secretion and raise blood sugar.

Chronic Stress

When you are under chronic or long-lasting stress, day after day, this results to consistent elevation in the stress hormones and other ill effects in health. As a consequence, adverse conditions occuurs, including spikes in blood sugar and blood pressure readings, suppressed immunity, elevation in blood cholesterol (lipids), and even bone loss and impaired brain function.

When stress hormones are constantly elevated, this can cause the stored sugar in your body to be released from the liver and muscles into your bloodstream. At the same time, fat is released for energy use. Sugar and fat are great energy sources, but they cause gain in weight when stored in the body. Nowadays, it is believed that weight gain or obesity may bedue to the following factors:

1. The shift from physical to psychological and/or emotional stress- evidence shows that chronic mental or emotional stress raises the stress hormone cortisol which stimulates your appetite, making you extremely hungry, while mechanisms in your brain tell you that you are not yet full.
2. The release of insulin due tto psychological and/or emotional stress  can result in more fat storage.

Symptoms of Chronic Stress

Most individuals, even you, may be unaware that you are being affected by chronic forms of stress. Are you experiencing any of the following regularly? You may have it. Talk this over with your physician for proper care.

The Evolution of Stress

It is clear that stress, in its many forms, contribute to high blood sugar, and eventually, the development of conditions such as diabetes. With rates of diabetes at the highest ever, we may wonder whether the stress we are experiencing today is much higher than that which people experienced a hundred or maybe a thousand years ago.

Experts believe that people throughout history have always been subjected to more or less the same amounts of stress. And that diseases such as diabetes are so high today because of our lifestyle.

Here is Why

➢ Diet changes through the years- A hundred years ago, the rates of diabetes were much lower because people did not overeat as much fats, sugars or calories as we do today.
➢ The rise of physical inactivity- In the past, people were more physically active. Today, cars, drive-through food chains, internet shopping, and other modern-day conveniences have significantly eliminated our need to move about actively. This has contributed greatly to the high rates of diabetes.

The key, thus, is to sustain a healthy lifestyle while reducing too much stress. Watch what you eat, prioritize activities that boost your health and well-being, and embrace diet and new habits that will keep you happy and stress-free, so you can monitor and keep your blood sugar levels where it should be.

Tips for Managing Stress

Here are some tips which can help minimize and manage too much stress:

➢ Identify your stress source- Naturally, eliminating your source of stress is the best way to go, but this is often not an option. It’s virtually impossible to remove all stress that affects us. What is doable is to do things or opt for ways that make stressful situations easier to cope or manage.
➢ Let it go – First, try not to get upset or worry over things that are out of your control. You cannot control many things around us, such as the weather, other people’s actions, and many other things. Many believe that a sense of “letting go” of the situation (especially the bad ones) and doing our best to make outcomes as positive as possible is the best approach.
➢ New habits- In order to succeed, you must make big changes in your lifestyle. This means making several alterations, even the radical ones, to implement the healthy changes you want to achieve. Practically, this means killing your old ways and starting brand new habits that work well with your plan for achieving a healthier, better version of yourself. The good practices include good sleep, regular exercise, hydration (drinking water), eating healthy, and having less stress.
➢ Have fun & be happy- It’s never too late to start doing things that make you happy. Do spend beautiful mornings in the garden, enjoy reading your favorite book, go fishing, do an artistic task, or play your musical instrument of choice. What important is that you make it a habit to unwind and stop stress from building up.
➢ Exercise- Physical activity is essential to reducing stress levels, and consequently bringing your blood sugar to the normal range. The great thing about physical exercise is that it can be addictive! So when you start the habit of exercising for a sufficient period, you will likely begin to enjoy the activity and it will become an essential part of your daily activities.
➢ Engage in relaxation (such as yoga)- The combination of yoga, relaxation, and deep breathing techniques often help individuals reduce their levels of cortisol in the blood, and eliminate its harmful effects such as elevated high blood pressure which is not good news when in tandem with blood sugar problems.
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