
How to Manage Work Stress If You Have Diabetes | Everyday Health
Positive coping strategies for high-stress work situations are crucial for people with diabetes, as stress can cause dangerous blood sugar swings.
When Sheryl Hill goes into work at the St. Louis Park, Minnesota,nonprofit where she is a co-founder and theexecutive director, she attends countless meetings, sifts through a sea of paperwork, and plows into a seemingly bottomless inbox. But with prediabetes, Hill, 61, also makes sure she carves out time to de-stress so her blood sugar stays under control.
Im a strong advocate for meditation over medication just one letter is the difference in being healthier, Hill says.
Research suggests Hill is right to prioritize stress management at work, especially because she has prediabetes. A study published in September 2014 in Psychosomatic Medicine found that work-related stress and job strain are major risk factors for type 2 diabetes in men and women. In the observational research, which involved about 5,340 healthy working participants, those people who reported high job strain had a 45 percent higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes than those who reported low strain after a follow-up period of about 13 years.
The way we perceive stress also matters. A study published in September 2012 in Health Psychology found that people who said they believed stress negatively affected their health and also experienced high levels of stress had a greater risk of early death than people who experienced high levels of stress without this belief.
For people with diabetes, managing the physical and psychological reaction to stress is cru
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