stress...
...a word that everyone would rather not put in his or her mouth.
And yet it is one of the most common problems among people. Who knows someone who experiences little or no stress?
Stress can really mess up your glucose levels. I will explain how much this is in detail in the article. It is far more than you realize.
In this article, I will also give you a clear - and unfortunately quite gloomy - picture of what 'not feeling well' does to your blood sugar and diabetes.
Although I will often talk about stress later, this actually includes several things that all raise your blood sugar.
Sometimes they are causes of stress, but sometimes they are also consequences of stress. Think about:
- Being depressed/depressed
- To be anxious
- Feeling rushed
- Traumatic experiences (losing your partner, for example)
- Anger and aggression
- Bad sleeping
- In general, I'm not feeling good.
- Also, Read What cholesterol is good
What is stress, and why do we feel it?
If you feel threatened, the body will react to it. It does this through the fight-or-flight response.
This response increases your stress hormones and prepares your body for danger. Here the body prepares - as the reaction is also called - to do one of these two things: fight or flight.
During this reaction, several things happen in your body.
For example, your body releases the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol, and your breathing rate increases. Your body also directs more blood to the muscles and limbs so you can fight or flee.
- Cortisol makes your insulin less sensitive so that more sugar remains in your bloodstream to burn.
- And adrenaline causes you to release more sugars into the blood.
So far it all sounds good and it is. Both give you more energy, which is useful if you have to run away from a lion that is attacking you.
But with prolonged stress, it becomes a completely different story.
When you experience prolonged stress, your body will have to endure a lot. Your blood sugar, weight, and mood will especially deteriorate.
I'll make clear why this is the case.
How long-term stress increases the risk of type 2 diabetes?
Stress can increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes in two different ways:
The first route is through your behavior. Stress has been shown to cause an unhealthy lifestyle, according to research. This means that you will both eat less healthily and eat more. But also less exercise and more smoking and drinking. All of these factors raise your blood sugar and therefore increase your risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
The second route is through your body itself. The moment you experience stress - as I said earlier - cortisol and adrenaline are released into the blood.
Cortisol makes your insulin insensitive and adrenaline makes you release more sugars into the blood. Normally this effect would be positive as your body needs more energy during such a fight or flight response.
But when this effect takes place for a long time, it also increases your blood sugar a long time, which greatly increases the risk of type 2 diabetes.
It turns out that 'not feeling well' (apart from stress) can generally raise your blood sugar considerably and also the risk of type 2 diabetes.
And that is not unthinkable of course.
If you are a bit more depressed or have to endure continuous setbacks, you may also eat emotion a little faster. Or you don't stick to a healthy diet. Or don't go to the sports club.
And you will see that reflected in your blood sugar. This is apparent from various studies.
Depression, anxiety, and the risk of type 2 diabetes
A large study found that the risk of type 2 diabetes was 60% greater in depressed people compared to non-depressed people. This turned out to be the case even 10 years after the study.
Do you suffer from severe depression or anxiety disorder? Then the chance of type 2 diabetes was even higher than that 60%.
Another study shows that when you feel depressed, your fasting blood sugar is chronically elevated. The effect was so strong this effect was already visible the next day. Are you a little depressed one day? Then you will see this immediately in your fasting blood sugar measurement the next morning.
Your mood has a direct effect on your blood sugar.
Traumatic events and the risk of type 2 diabetes
The cause for long-term stress can be losing a loved one. it makes a lot of sense of course if you have lost someone whom you have loved the most.
It is traced in a study that individuals in the past five years who had faced traumatic events were likely to have 1.6 more times to be diabetic compared to persons who had not faced any trauma.
It is of course bad enough that you have experienced a trauma, but because your body is so busy processing that trauma, it is not able to allow other processes in the body to run smoothly.
You can't always just remove a trauma, but there are certain ways to better process it.
Emotional Stress, Anger & Aggression and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes
This is the kind of stress you experience when something happens to you that isn't fun (other than, for example, work stress).
Can't pay the bill or do you have family problems? These are things that fall under the heading 'emotional stress' and that increase the risk of type 2 diabetes.
For example, there is a study that looked at the effects of emotional stress on human behavior. Interestingly, compared to those with low-stress levels, people with high-stress levels were less likely to quit smoking, were less likely to exercise and were less likely to quit drinking.
All of these factors are known to increase the risk of type 2 diabetes and may explain the link between stress and the development of diabetes.
Anger & Aggression
Everyone is angry or grumpy sometimes. That in itself is not a disaster. But when you notice that you have a short fuse because of the stress, this manifests itself more quickly and more often in anger and aggression. And that has no positive consequences for your health.
For example, a study in which they followed more than 11,000 'non-diabetics for a long time showed that anger and anger attacks increased the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
Another study also found that men who suffered a lot from aggression were more likely to suffer from insulin resistance. This was mainly caused by the stress hormone nor-adrenaline.
Work stress and the risk of type 2 diabetes
Work pressure, you know. Just because there is still an order to finish. Or because you just can't say "no".
Still, I really recommend that you start with that from now on because this form of stress does not help you in terms of health.
Overwork to the point of exhaustion...
Over-dedication to one's profession has been related to a 400% increased incidence of type 2 diabetes in Japanese males.
The Japanese are already literally and figuratively working themselves to death. They even have a special word for that: Karoshi.
But this shows how great the influence of work stress is on your blood sugar level and health.
When the work stress becomes too high, you can develop burnout. And if you have that, then you're even further from home.
Burnout due to chronic work stress has also been studied as a risk factor for developing type 2 diabetes.
In a study of 677 working men and women, burnout symptoms were associated with the development of type 2 diabetes. The study shows that the risk of type 2 diabetes increases by 84%.
Poor sleep and the risk of type 2 diabetes
How happy are you after a night of not sleeping well or too short?
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say:
Not exactly cheerful.
After a bad night, you have a shorter fuse, it is more difficult to say "no" to unhealthy food and you have little willpower to exercise. But your body also has less energy to allow processes to run smoothly.
For example, poor sleep (because you are worrying/stressed) increases the risk of type 2 diabetes.
From research, it was found that with a short sleep duration - less than 5 to 6 hours per night - the risk of type 2 diabetes increased. Difficulty falling asleep also increased the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
But interestingly, people with a long sleep duration - more than 8 to 9 hours a night - had an increased risk of type 2 diabetes.
An explanation for this could be that people who sleep a lot (and therefore do not want to get out of bed) are generally more depressed. Not wanting to get out of bed is a classic symptom of depression.
80% and more of the risk factors of type 2 diabetes increased because of the sleep problems
The vicious circle of stress and diabetes
It is now clear:
Stress increases the risk of type 2 diabetes.
But what if you already have type 2 diabetes? Then the situation is worse.
When you are a diabetic, The glucose produced during this stress response cannot be processed by your body.
If you are not able to use and absorb glucose it starts storing in the bloodstream. When this is the case for a long time, it also turns out to be stressful for the body.
This creates a vicious circle. Stress can cause type 2 diabetes, but having type 2 diabetes increases the risk of stress.
As you are already sick you are not able to deal with this stress.
This vicious circle has even been shown in a study with brain scans.
But how high does your blood sugar really get due to stress?
You have read above that stress and not feeling well increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, but you may wonder how big this effect really is on your blood sugar.
Research shows - hold your breath - that it can save 1.6 points on your HbA1c measurement. The people in this study who did not know how to cope with their stress had an HbA1c of 9.1%. But the people who were actively taught how to deal with their thoughts, feelings, and stress had a value of 7.5%.
A difference of 1.6 on your HbA1c is huge!
That is going from 60 mmol/mol to 42 mmol/mol (7.6% to 6.0%) just by thinking differently and learning to deal with your stress better.
So by controlling your thoughts/stress, you can improve your HbA1c by more than 20%.
That is an improvement that many people have difficulty getting when they take medication. You almost only see that kind of drop when you inject insulin. It can be that powerful if you learn to think 'differently'.
You can think of yourself as healthy
As you have read, what happens between your ears has quite a lot of influence on what happens in your body.
But luckily you also read in my last piece that you can significantly improve your blood sugar by dealing with your thoughts, feelings, and stress differently.
In the HbA1c study above, people received a stress management course to actively lower their stress. These people literally learned to positively influence their blood sugar with the power of their brains.
And this is not the only study showing this effect.
Various studies show that you can think of yourself as healthy... if you are given the right tools. And unfortunately, we never got these handles.
Imagine how much healthier you could be if your thinking could directly affect your blood sugar.
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