Accepting Discomfort with Diabetes and Breaking the Fear Cycle
by IDS Director of Mental Health Services, Anna Sabino MSW, CDCES
Nobody wants to feel uncomfortable. We are not patient. Everything in life now is at our fingertips. If we don’t have an immediate answer to a question, we have access to someone or something that does (thanks, ChatGPT).
Our society strives for answers constantly-I mean I do. I ask Alexa to tell me the weather, and I get a response within a literal second. I flip my wrist and I get my blood sugar reading with its trend instantly.
Yet, why am I still so anxious all the time? Why does diabetes make us so irritable?
I’m Anna and despite being a clinical social worker, diabetes educator, passionate about helping you all, I am still on edge about my own blood sugar most days. Diabetes does this-we’re constantly trying to figure out our own body’s life-long science experiment with synthetic insulin. Fascinating.
What if instead we were ok with not knowing every single thing going on within our cells every second of the day? What would it be like if we took a few hours off from data staring? Now, if you are someone who absolutely cannot feel their low symptoms whatsoever, or lives alone and has a history of DKA, please be safe.
However, the majority of my clients are those like me-sometimes so stressed over the ups and downs and arrows and IOB that they have forgotten how to breathe and simply sit in the discomfort of not knowing what the next dot on the screen will bring. This is a big problem.
If you are one of the people reading this who can’t go five minutes without a dot on a graph, reach out.
If you are someone who can maybe only go an hour without a dot, I encourage you to take some deep breaths, perhaps do a finger prick, and train your brain to pause and wait 5 minutes before doing anything else.
Insulin doesn’t work as fast as we want it to, and there are absolutely zero research articles out there offering evidence that staring at blood sugar graphs for hours speeds up the pace of insulin working in the body.
In fact, the more we glare at these graphs throughout the day-we are actually increasing our likelihood of increasing our anxiety around the changes and catastrophizing the outcome. The fear cycle continues.
Discomfort is ok with diabetes.
In order to accept diabetes into our world. We have to accept a little discomfort and a little anxiety too.
As always, here as your IDS therapist, reach out to schedule anytime.
**Listen to my conversation on the Think Like a Pancreas — The Podcast, with renowned diabetes psychologist Dr. Bill Polonsky, founder of the Behavioral Diabetes Institute, to learn about the anxiety that comes with type 1 diabetes and low blood sugars.
