What is the connection between Stress and Diabetes?

Research suggests that high levels of stress hormones might stop insulin-producing cells in the pancreas from working properly and reduce the amount of insulin they make. Diabetes is often a cause of stress, particularly in the early days when you’ve just been diagnosed. Having to pay close to attention to what you eat and having lots of new things to learn and remember can feel tough. It may mean you now have to check your blood sugar levels a lot or inject yourself every day. Worrying about what the results will say or feeling anxious about needles can be really stressful.

Does Stress Increase Blood Sugar?

If you’re feeling stressed, your body releases stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. This should give you an energy boost for a ‘fight or flight’ response. But the hormones actually make it harder for insulin to work properly, known as insulin resistance. As energy can’t get into your cells, your blood sugar levels rise. If stress doesn’t go away, it can keep your blood sugar levels high and put you at higher risk of diabetes complications. It can also affect your mood and how you look after yourself, which can start to affect your emotional health.

How Can Stress Cause Diabetes

While stress alone isn't a direct cause of diabetes, it can trigger Diabetes? it can trigger it in many indirect ways. People with diabetes often feel overwhelmed or frustrated with their condition, worrying about potential health complications or feeling guilty when they are not able to manage it well. High levels of stress can increase these feelings, making it harder to cope with diabetes management. Moreover, stress can lead to an increase in risk factors associated with diabetes. It often results in poor dietary choices (like overeating, eating junk or erratic eating patterns) and a reduction in physical activity. Not just this, stress can cause mood disturbances like anxiety and depression, which are common mental health issues that coexist with Diabetes. These factors, combined with poor sleep hygiene, can lead to unhealthy lifestyle choices, ultimately increasing the risk of developing diabetes. Some individuals when stressed tend to eat excessively. This can result in gaining a lot of weight, which is a known factor to increase the risk of Type2 Diabetes.

How can stress affect Diabetes?

Stress can disrupt anyone’s routine. When a person is dealing with diabetes, it can potentially affect them more. They need to manage diet, exercise, and medication adherence, which are crucial for blood sugar control. All this can get overwhelming at times. Not to forget the other stressors in life too. All these put together, can cause fluctuations in a person’s blood sugar levels. That’s why it's most important to deal with your stress properly when you are managing Diabetes.

What are Tips to Manage Stress in Diabetes?

alking to a professional can give a healthy perspective to the entire situation and give you relief from stress. Taking care of your lifestyle by ensuring a healthy and balanced diet along with regular exercise helps to regulate stress levels. Incorporating relaxation techniques and breathing techniques really help in reducing stress significantly and have a very positive impact on overall wellbeing. Using Fitterfly's Mood Tracker can be of great help in understanding fluctuations in your mood over a period of time, exploring mood patterns over a week or month and trying out customized interventions to get immediate relief. Using this mood tracker regularly can help reduce stress levels.

What is Fitterfly Mood Tracker?

It is an innovative tool on Fitterfly’s App to assess your mood at any time during the day. It helps track your mood throughout the day and give you valuable insights about how your mood might be affecting your food choices, relationships, work life and much more. Not only this, the mood tracker is equipped with more than 100 interventions which will help you manage your mood and give you momentary relief. These interventions are a combination of videos, activities and guided audios. Mood is a key influencer when it comes to implementing lifestyle changes. Now with the mood tracker, you can explore various emotions which are frequently experienced by people with diabetes. You also get an opportunity to understand patterns of mood and how it enhances or acts as a hurdle in your diabetes management journey. To make the best use of the tracker, we recommend using it at least once a day.

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