Diabetes Puts Your Emotional Well-Being at Risk

Discovering that you have diabetes can throw your emotions into a tailspin. The disease itself - plus dealing with it - can feel like such a heavy burden that it can put your emotional well-being at risk.

Emotions Linked to Diabetes

Type 2 diabetes can send many people into a state of grief - both those who are newly diagnosed as well as people who’ve lived with the condition for years. When you discover that you have it, you’ll go through the stages of grieving the life that you once had and this is a normal reaction.

But if you’ve had the disease for a while, you can reach the point where you just get tired of the disease and you can start to grieve everything that’s now different and everything you’ve had to put up with.

One emotion linked to diabetes is denial. This can happen in both the early stage of discovery as well as striking out of the blue after having dealt with it for months or years. People just decide that they don’t want the disease, so they convince themselves that they don’t have it or that everything will be fine.

Another emotion linked to diabetes is anger. People who have diabetes can sometimes feel angry at having the disease and all the side effects that go hand in hand with the condition.

They might get annoyed seeing someone else who is overweight who doesn’t have the disease and wonder why they didn’t so lucky. This anger can impact a person physically.

When you get angry, it can raise your glucose levels. It can make your heart pound and anger that isn’t treated can lead to a heart attack if you’re under enough emotional duress.

Anger can cause you to have headaches, problems with sleeping and eating, it can also lead to anxiety and depression. Diabetes can cause anxiety. The anxiety can raise your glucose levels and lead to problems keeping it under control.

It can cause you to feel worried about managing the disease, which leads to greater anxiety and high glucose levels. It’s common to struggle with depression when you have diabetes.

The more out of control your glucose numbers are, the more you can suffer from depression. It acts like a catch-22. When you feel depressed, you don’t want to deal with your diabetes and when you don’t deal with your diabetes, you feel depressed.

You also feel worse physically as the higher numbers take a toll on your body. Whatever emotions that diabetes is causing in your life, you have to deal with it - otherwise, your health will worsen.

You can start to have fatigue and trouble concentrating. Your weight can fluctuate, and both weight gain and weight loss can impact your diabetes. You may lose interest in food or find that you’re overeating and just don’t care.

Diabetes puts your emotional well-being at risk because it can cause you to feel like it’s the worst thing in the world and that nothing will ever get better. You may find that you’re closing yourself off.

You might stop doing things that you once enjoyed doing and just stop practicing good diabetes care. Diabetes can drain you emotionally because of all the stuff you have to deal with to take care of yourself.

Why You Must Deal with Diabetes for Your Emotional Well-Being

Diabetes isn’t the kind of condition that you can just blow off. You can’t just sort of take care of yourself once or twice a week. It’s a daily thing, taking care of your diabetes. You have to deal with your condition in order to have good emotional well-being.

There are many options that you can use to help not only come to terms with living with diabetes but taking care of yourself physically as well. You can do things like practice meditation or mindfulness.

You can take up yoga or a hobby. But whatever you do, don’t just avoid dealing with whatever it is that your diabetes is causing you to feel. Because if you don’t, you can get what’s called diabetes burnout.

This is what happens when you reach the point where you feel you just can’t take it anymore. You’re tired of the constant vigilance in making sure that you take care of your diabetes.

You can feel like you’re always having to watch your step. This happens because diabetes puts you under a lot of stress physically, which makes you feel stress emotionally.

And if you don’t deal with it, you can reach the place in your life when you feel like throwing your hands up and declaring that you’re done. This is a normal reaction, too - but you can’t give up.

Instead, you have to decide that you’re going to find ways to deal with your diabetes that give you the best health possible. When you do that, your emotional well-being will benefit.

You can start by realizing that you’re never going to achieve 100% accuracy in anything you do to take care of yourself. There will be days when you’re not going to want to eat in a way that’s best for your disease.

That’s normal. But what you must realize is that 28 days in a month taking care of your diabetes is still better than giving up altogether. There will be times when things are going to go on with your body because of the diabetes.

As a result, you’re not always going to have glucose levels that are where you want them to be. What you have to do is to accept that one high glucose reading does not make you a failure and it doesn’t mean your diabetes is out of control.

What you have to learn is that taking care of your diabetes is taking care of your emotions. When you eat right, exercise, and get the right amount of sleep, you’re going to feel more empowered.