Stress Can Worsen Diabetes Symptoms
Diabetes is the kind of disease that requires careful monitoring. When diabetes is under control, you can live a normal life. But when you have stress to deal with, then this can worsen the symptoms that come along with the disease.
Stress can be so damaging for those with diabetes because it interferes with your ability to keep glucose levels within a healthy range. Any time you feel stress, your body releases hormones in response and this raises your glucose.
Because this kind of reactional glucose isn’t used by you during the stress, it remains in the bloodstream. Whenever you have glucose in the bloodstream, you get a blood sugar spike.
What some diabetics don’t realize is that this kind of spike has nothing to do with food. So you can end up out of a healthy range even when you’re not eating food that raises the levels.
In fact, you don’t even have to eat at all to get higher levels. It’s all happening because of the stress. When your body is under a constant battle of blood sugar spikes, this can affect you physically as well as emotionally.
It can become difficult to control your diabetes. You won’t be able to do it by tightening up your eating habits, since that’s not the root cause. When your body releases cortisol in response to stress and it pushes your levels up, the only way to get it to back down is to deal with the stress head on.
What you may not realize is that a stress response for people with diabetes also affects how your body is using and storing fat. When you get stressed, you can gain more visceral fat.
That’s because there’s a molecule in the body that will trigger the fat cells and prompt them to multiply – all thanks to stress. You can struggle to control your glucose levels, and you can gain more fat – but you can also enter a stage of deeper level of insulin resistance, which will further impair your ability to fight back against and control your diabetes.
You may end up needing more medication – or diminish your health to the point where you’re having to take insulin injections. Stress can affect your diet and make you want to eat more as well as eat more of the wrong kinds of food.
This can contribute to glucose spikes and worsen your diabetes symptoms. But stress can also cause insomnia, which worsens how your body fares with having diabetes. This can cause you to feel tired, affect you emotionally and contribute to your stress levels.
The best thing that you can do for your diabetes is to get your stress under control. Learn healthy ways to cope so that when a stressor occurs, it doesn’t have to impact your disease.