Everyone experiences stress at some point in their lives. And stress can have a dramatic effect on blood sugar levels, both quickly and long term.
Even the fun stress of roller coaster rides causes increased production of hormones such as cortisol, adrenaline and glucagon. Without these hormones, your body would not be able to complete the grocery shopping task.
In this article, we will explain how each of these stress-related hormones affects your blood sugar.
At the end of the post, we summarize how all of this brings together to affect the daily lives of people living with diabetes, and what you can do to reduce the stress of your daily life.
What is stress?
Simply put, stress is your body’s response to situations, events, or changes in your life that require reaction or adjustment. Stress can develop physically, mentally and emotionally.
And that is an inevitable part of life. Both positive and negative experiences can cause stress responses in your body and mind.
In some cases, you may experience events that cause undesired stress. Abusive relationships and unbearable environments in your work are examples of causes of ongoing stress that may make a person feel more difficult to free.
These types of stress can lead to a state of “pain.”
Before adding diabetes to your mix, let’s take a closer look at what stress looks like.
Symptoms of stress
Stress manifests itself in a different way than one person and the next. For some people, positive or negative stress can cause immediate tears, for example. In others, it may make them feel silent and speechless. And others may easily become angry and irritated.
Symptoms may vary depending on the severity of your stress level. Here are some examples of stress symptoms.
Mild to moderate stress
- I’m crying
- anger
- I’m irritated
- excitement
- Hypertension
- headache
- Lack of appetite
- Binge food
- Acid reflux
- Difficulty in sleep
- Loose intestines
- Neck muscle tension
- Sweaty palm
- Tired
- Shaking
- trembling
- Changes in weight
- Lack of sexual desire
Severe stress
- Chronic headache
- nausea
- diarrhea
- Severe hypertension
- Chest pain
- Sexual dysfunction
- insomnia
- depression
- Panic attack
- anxiety
Research suggests that stress can lead to or worsen certain symptoms or illnesses. Stress is associated with six of the six major causes of death: heart disease, cancer, lung disease, accidents, liver cirrhosis, and suicide.
Before we move on to what stress affects your blood sugar levels and what you can do to reduce stress, let’s take a closer look at the hormones involved in the stress response.
What is cortisol?
This hormone is often discussed in negative light as it can be a sign that your body is under severe mental or physical stress and is linked to inflammation and weight gain.
Its main role is to help your body manage stress, but it also affects almost every organ in your body, and it takes 24 hours a day to keep your body alive.
Without cortisol, you cannot climb flights of stairs and endure the intense stress of losing a loved one, experiencing divorce or undergoing surgery.
Cortisol also helps your body:
- Control your blood pressure
- Manage your mental functions
- Reduces inflammation of the immune system
- Reduces overall inflammation
- Sugar used for energy (with the help of insulin)
- Control how your body metabolizes protein, carbohydrates and fats
Just as your insulin and other diabetic medication needs can change based on what you are doing and your diet, your body’s cortisol production should exactly match your needs at certain moments.
How does cortisol affect blood glucose levels?
Cortisol not only contributes to unwanted hyperglycemia, but is also essential for treating hypoglycemia. Let’s take a look.
High cortisol levels
Increases in cortisol production beyond a healthy baseline lead to a weaker body sensitivity to insulin. This means that you need more insulin during those hours to keep your blood sugar levels in your target range.
Your body produces cortisol 24 hours a day, but there are days when you can expect everyone to produce more, like the first one in the morning.
When managing diabetes with insulin, This also explains why you realize you need more insulin along with the early hours of the day and breakfast.
As soon as you wake up in the morning, your body will produce a surge in cortisol. This surge is important to start your day and function perfectly now that you are waking up!
And if the overall baseline cortisol needs to be increased due to constant ongoing stress, you will also notice that the need for baseline insulin increases.
For more information and practical tips on dealing with morning highs, you can read the post “How to Avoid Morning Blood Glucose Levels.”
Low cortisol levels
On the flip side, it’s not enough Any Cortisol You will fight constant hypoglycemia (hypoglycemia).
If a person with diabetes experiences hypoglycemia, cortisol is important to enable your body to actually utilize the glucose consumed to return blood glucose to a safe level.
Severe hypoglycemia can almost deplete your body’s cortisol reserves. This contributes to symptoms of fatigue even after blood sugar levels return to safe levels.
If you think cortisol is causing havoc on your blood sugar levels, talk to your healthcare team about adjusting your insulin dose or other diabetes medication to help with compensation. And of course, let’s see which areas of your life can be adapted to reduce your emotional and physical stress.
What is adrenaline?
Adrenaline – Also known as “epinephrine” – Although generally associated with exercise events, your body also responds to other events and produces adrenaline.
A fierce debate, a car accident that’s close to a mistake, or riding a roller coaster can all lead to an increase in adrenaline production.
Adrenaline is the response to intense, good or bad stress, the “flying or fighting” response of your body’s hormones.
This hormone basically secrets the liver and releases glycogen. It is glucose stored in the liver. When your body suddenly encounters intense stress, you need extra glucose for energy Bearable That stressful event. Without that extra glucose, your blood sugar levels will drop and you will be lacking the energy needed to perform during that stressful event.
How does adrenaline affect your blood sugar?
In non-diabetic bodies, the adrenaline spike, which causes a surge in glycogen, will also be accompanied by a surge in insulin.
As a diabetic patient, I lack the “surge in insulin” part. This allows you to easily spike blood glucose levels from 120 mg/dL to 300 mg/dL in less than an hour.
Adjusting insulin for this can be difficult. A quick bolus of insulin using the usual “correction factor ratio” may have little or no effect on hyperglycemia during the presence of adrenaline.
Personally, I found that a significant increase in background insulin doses is necessary on the day of the powerlifting competition to prevent blood sugar levels from surged due to adrenaline. The quick bolus had no effect, and otherwise the only thing that would defeat my blood sugar was when it was a race. Ended And my body relaxed.
For example, if you are dealing with predictable adrenaline for a sporting event, talk to your healthcare team about adjusting background insulin.
For example, if you’re just getting involved in a car accident and are dealing with a sudden, unexpected spike in adrenaline, you’ll need to try lowering it with a bolus of insulin, but it won’t go down for a few hours.
When it’s not actually adrenaline…
One thing adrenaline is often misinformed is during workouts at the gym. There are other reasons why blood sugar levels skyrocket during a typical workout, but when you’re in a competitive environment (rather than just a fierce solo workout), it’s rarely adrenaline.
Perhaps it’s breaking down the muscles that involve breaking down stored glycogen. Your body then breaks down that glycogen into glucose and returns to the muscles for energy. This can easily lead to hyperglycemia, as there is no additional insulin.
For more information, read Why Certain Exercise Can Increase Blood Glucose Levels.
What is Glucagon?
Glucagon is another hormone that helps your body to withstand certain types of stress, such as skipping breakfast!
The role of glucagon is simple. It tells the liver to release glycogen (above), which is converted to glucose, which can be used for energy or intentionally raise blood glucose.
How does glucagon affect your blood sugar?
Glucagon is not actually much associated with emotional stress, but it plays a role during physical stress when you spend a long time without food or experience severe hypoglycemia.
“Glucagon release is stimulated by hypoglycemia, a protein-rich diet, and adrenaline (another important hormone to combat low glucose). Glucagon release is prevented by raised blood sugar and carbohydrates in the diet, detected by cells in the pancreas.
During severe hypoglycemia…
If you experience severe hypoglycemia, perhaps less than 40 mg/dL, your blood sugar levels can spike within hours, even if you are dealing with only that low treatment with careful amounts of carbohydrates.
This is your body’s way Save your life! A surge in glucagon is broken down into glucose and causes a surge in glycogen, which increases blood sugar levels. For diabetics, it’s just too expensive!
When eating a strict low-carb diet…
between Ketogenic DietYour body actually produces more glucagon throughout the day to get more glucose, as your body cannot function with ketones alone.
Your brain needs to deliver glucose every 2 seconds to function!
Does this mean you cannot follow the ketogenic diet? no. But that means you may realize that your background insulin actually needs increase Cutting the carbohydrates low. This doesn’t happen to everyone, but it’s important to keep in mind if you’re trying ketogenic diets just to see that insulin needs to skyrocket.
When I skip breakfast…
Intermittent fasting It’s all upset right now, but there are a few things we need to know if we’re experimenting with this trendy nutrition approach as a diabetic person.
When skipping breakfast, your body will produce more glucagon during those fasting times. Because your brain needs glucose to function!
This does not mean you can’t practice intermittent fasting, but it does mean you need to take an extra bolus of insulin during the fasting period to compensate for that extra glucose.
Summary: How stress affects your blood sugar levels
In short, stress generally causes your blood sugar. It is also difficult to defeat it due to insulin resistance produced by stress hormones and the production of glucose from liver response to adrenaline.
Most stressful situations are not something we can easily predict, but we can predict that if we experience stress, our blood sugar levels may skyrocket.
Remembering to check your blood glucose during stressful situations is an important part of diabetes management, but don’t add to stress in the hopes of easily correcting your hyperglycemia in stressful conditions.
How to deal with stress as a diabetic person
In general, there are many things you can do prevent Blood glucose spikes from various types of stress hormones, as stress is not always predictable.
However, if you are dealing with predictable or ongoing stress, you should definitely talk to your healthcare team about adjusting your insulin doses that will help you tamper with these stubborn hyperglycemia.
Due to unexpected bursts of your blood sugar stress and rapid spikes:
An established “correction factor” should be used to determine the appropriate dose of insulin to lower blood sugar levels.
But keep in mind: until your body recovers from a stressful state, it is very likely that your blood sugar levels will sit at that higher level (especially in people with type 1 diabetes). When these stress hormones are pumped up and adrenaline produces more glucose in the liver, it can be very difficult to “preempt” it.
For continued stress during your life:
If you know that the next few months will be stressful due to a promotion at work, divorce, or death of a loved one, for example, a simple increase with a few units of your background insulin dose can have a major impact on maintaining your target blood sugar level.
Don’t underestimate how ongoing stress affects your daily insulin needs. Even on “normal” days during the stressful periods of your life, your body is still dealing with ongoing stressors.
How to lower stress levels
Learn what’s useful you Managing, reducing and reducing overall stress levels is an important lesson. The simplest thing to do is take deep breaths, lower your blood pressure, lower your stress hormones, and help you release the physical and mental grip of stress.
There are a few ideas for lowering stress levels.
Reduce stress at the moment
- Close your eyes and exhale deep inhalation and breath for 30 seconds
- I’m going for a walk
- Exercise to raise your heart rate and relax your central nervous system
- I’m going for a drive
- Check out your favorite stand-up comedy
- Create a to-do list to get everything from your heart
- I’ll clean your home
- Please call a friend
- Create a “voice memo” like your own private therapy session
- Dance to your favorite music
Everything that calms you, makes you smile, or helps you relax your body will have a positive effect on your stress levels.
Reduce ongoing stress
Reducing ongoing stress usually requires significant changes in your situation and lifestyle. The causes of ongoing stress vary from person to person, but there are some ideas on how to help reduce ongoing stress.
- Identify your biggest stressor and ask yourself: What can you change about this?
- Make time to meet your therapist every week/every week
- Make time for regular exercise – daily walks can be a surprise!
- Use the meditation app and stop at least Breath Deep for 2 minutes every day
- Clean and organize (with help) your home/office so that your “space” is clear
- Create weekly to-do lists to manage responsibility and recognize productivity
- Find a new job and submit two applications per week
- Leave an unhealthy relationship (get help from friends if necessary!)
In many cases, it is difficult to manage continuous stress because you cannot leave it. Take a deep breath and go back to see the bigger picture around this stressor. There is always something we can control and change, and something we can’t.
