Your Body Doesn't Know the Difference

By Scott Coulter I tend to write about various aspects of stress, mindfulness, and the psychology of diabetes fairly often. My background as a therapist probably has a lot to do with that. In any event, I was looking through my old blog entries the other day and thought it might be interesting to see what I could find out about the actual physical impact of stress on blood glucose. I tend to write about the psychological impact of it, and that's certainly an integral part of the issue with chronic stress, but it has been shown to have physical effects on health — not just for people with diabetes, but for absolutely everyone. What IS a stress reaction? Our stress reaction is something designed into us, and it serves an important purpose. Or at least it CAN serve an important purpose. Our body's chemical reaction to stress is as follows: • Our body is flooded with several hormones, adrenaline and cortisol chief among them. Adrenaline increases our heart rate, raises our blood pressure, and limits our thought process to simple black-and-white, yes-or-no, fight-or-flight responses. Meanwhile, the cortisol helps raise our blood glucose! Yep, that's right. The cortisol increases the level of glucose in our blood. • In this heightened state, we are now capable of higher levels of physical exertion and endurance. We are thinking quickly — not thoroughly, and not seeing a big picture, but rather scanning for quick options and acting. The extra glucose in our...
Source: Diabetes Self-Management - Category: Diabetes Authors: Source Type: blogs