How to Live with Diabetes Stress-Free? 5 Simple Hacks
Diabetes is a potentially harmful disorder that is characterized by high blood sugar and can lead to many serious complications in the long term. In the USA alone, there are tens of millions of people who suffer from diabetes or prediabetes.
While a serious condition, diabetes is treatable and many can live almost perfectly normal lives with diabetes. However, that doesn’t stop people from worrying or stressing about it. Thankfully, there are some things you can do to help yourself live with diabetes stress-free.
Do Your Research and Understand the Issue
The first thing you can and should do is to is to research and learn about diabetes. Know what causes it, how to make it better, things to watch out for and more. There are millions of people all over the world suffering from the same disorder, and researching their experience can help yours.
Also, it’s a good idea to understand your health insurance plan fully, so you know what is covered and what is not. In fact, some health insurance providers will offer those with diabetes a lot of helpful information and content. For example, if you work with Humana health insurance, they have great resources and assistance that can ease your mind. The more you know about your disorder and the things you can do to help it, the better you should feel.
Practice Meditation or Other Calming Practices
In general, stressing about a condition or disorder you have is normal. You don’t need to fully stop the stress, but just limit how often and how long it affects you. One of the best ways to do this is to meditate or utilize another calming practice and method. Meditation and other introspective techniques have been used to reduce all types of stress for many years.
They work by helping slow down your mind, and your breathing, and allow you to live in the now, and not worry about the future. Meditation has also been shown to be able to lower blood pressure and could even lower blood glucose levels. Even taking only a few simple minutes a day to practice mindfulness can have huge benefits to your mood and stress.
Talk to Others
Dealing with a disorder or the stress that accompanies it is never easy. You might feel hopeless and lost and not know what to do. This is a lot to handle on your own, so be sure to talk to others about your issues. Your friends and family members will be happy to talk and will always be there to help you when you’re in need or having a down day.
There are also plenty of online communities full of people you can relate to and converse with. So if you don’t have a great friend or family situation, there is still an opportunity to talk to others about your disorder and what’s on your mind. Talking to others can help your mood improve, can help you see things from another person’s perspective and so much more.
Don’t Focus on What You Cannot Change
One of the most common things for people to do when suffering from a disorder or other illness is to think “why me”? They can spend hours, days or weeks obsessing about their disorder and letting it consume their thoughts. As you can imagine, this can be quite harmful and unhealthy. Instead of doing that, only focus on the things you can change.
There is no used focusing or stressing about things you have no power to change. Instead, focus on changing your responses to those things. For example, you can’t change your diagnosis, but you can change your lifestyle to stay healthier. Lots of us yearn to control our lives and situation, but that is rarely ever able to be done.
Utilize Reminders and Schedules
Living with diabetes can be a lot to handle. Between the medication, potentially dietary changes, doctor visits, and pharmacy visits, there is a lot on your plate. If you are not organized surrounding these tasks and responsibilities, it can be incredibly stressful and your life may feel like a jumbled mess.
Instead of continuing to live like that, you should take control of your life and your diagnosis. Using reminders and schedules to keep everything in order should have a huge impact in helping you reduce stress. If things are planned out well and you know when you have to deal with certain things, life automatically becomes a little more simple. Things become a lot less stressful and disorganized when everything you worry about is recorded, scheduled and taken care of.
In conclusion, hopefully this blog post has been able to help you learn to live with diabetes without stressing about it nonstop. It’s not always easy, but it can be done.
Post contributed by Wendy Dessler
