Diabetes and Stress- Find Your Stress Reliever
Diabetes and stress is an incredibly important item to discuss. Diabetes causes stress, but stress makes diabetes harder to manage. So, it's important to find ways to relieve stress, and I found one that works for me. A little exercise, and little social interaction, and a lot of pure beauty.
I wanted to talk to you about a super important topic that I think gets kind of shoved off to the side, because it's not really visible, and that is stress. This topic actually is good for everybody, because I think everybody, no matter who they are, whether they have diabetes or not deals with stress or has stress involved in their life.
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Is Your Blood Pressure Fluctuating Because of Stress?
But a lot of times we just don't realize it. It's kind of like take a moment, stop, breathe, take a pause to really look at life to see if you're feeling that stress. For people with diabetes especially, it affects us physically as well with our blood sugar control and our blood pressure. Both can arise when we're under stress.
I have this conversation with people that I work with, a coach with diabetes, and I also have this with myself too. Not realizing that I was under stress until you start taking a look at sometimes the way your blood sugars are fluctuating or rising or your blood pressure. That may be a direct indicator that stress could be involved in raising blood sugar or blood pressure.
Flowers - A Stress Reliever?
Just to give you an idea of something that I did, was I just took a look around my surroundings, to see what really brings me joy, what brings me happiness. One of the things that I never had thought of before was flowers.
In the community that I live in, they have an opportunity that you could help pick flowers, and then help work at the community farmer's market to sell flowers. I started this last year and now I'm continuing it this year. I didn't realize how much joy and pleasure it brings.
There's also some physical activity involved when I'm picking flowers, walking around cutting them so that's an added plus to help the blood sugar readings come to the target.
Also, the joy of putting flowers together in vases and seeing how happy it makes people who purchase the little flower bouquets. Just wanted to give you some ideas, remember that you don't have to wait for happiness or happy times.
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A way to start to figure out what can you do to be a stress reliever is possibly every night before you go to bed to write down at least three things that really make you happy. From that list, maybe you could find something that would be a really nice stress reliever.
Till I see you next time, hope that helps.
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