Mental Health
If diabetes is getting you down, try doing the following:
Pay attention to your feelings. Almost everyone feels frustrated or stressed from time to time. Dealing with diabetes can add to these feelings and make you feel overwhelmed. Having these feelings for more than a few weeks may signal that you need help coping with your diabetes so that you can feel better.
Talk with your diabetes team about your feelings. They might be able to help you problem-solve any concerns you might have about diabetes. All the diabetes team have knowledge of diabetes burn out so will understand if you talk to them about it. They can also talk to you about things that might help such as changing alarm settings.
Allow family and friends to support you. Those closest to you might be a great source of support both emotionally and practically, when managing diabetes.
Click the Diabetes Topic tag on Tellmi to find other people who get what you are going through. Ask them how they deal with their diabetes and what works for them. This may help you feel less lonely and overwhelmed. Your diabetes clinic might run events or get togethers where you can meet real world peers who have diabetes too.
Pace yourself. Often, we set unrealistic goals and then feel worse when we can’t reach them. Then we lose motivation, and it is a vicious cycle. So, make very small goals or break larger goals into small steps and remember that making changes is often a bumpy time!
Do one thing at a time. When you think about everything you need to do to manage your diabetes, it can feel overwhelming. To deal with diabetes distress, make a list of all of the tasks you have to do to take care of yourself each day. Try to work on each task separately, one at a time. If you really can’t do all of them, have a chat with your diabetes nurse and see if there are any ways of making your diabetes care simpler whilst you are experiencing burn out.
Take time to do things you enjoy. Give yourself a break! Set aside time in your day to do things you really love. Make sure you are planning in activities, or time with other people that helps you feel good.
Try not to see your diabetes numbers as pass or fail. Remember, your blood glucose BG numbers only relate to diabetes and that is impacted by loads and loads of factors. They don’t reflect who you are as a person or how you are doing!
Try to be kind to yourself. Managing your diabetes isn’t about being perfect; it is normal to find it difficult to look after diabetes. Focus on the big picture, celebrate your wins and don’t worry about making mistakes, as you are doing your best. Managing diabetes is hard!
It is OK to accept help when you need it! It might be that you don’t generally need much support and are quite independent with your diabetes. If you are experiencing diabetes distress you might need a bit more support. That is OK and you can always go back to needing less support when you feel ready. You don’t have to be fully independent with diabetes no matter what age you are. Having a “diabetes team” that you can ask for support from is always a good idea. It is also okay to tell your loved ones if the way they are helping you is creating more stress.
Managing diabetes involves complex activities that disrupt your daily life. Monitoring blood glucose levels, dealing with highs and lows, multiple injections or pump infusions, counting carbs, adjusting insulin doses depending on diet and physical activity, etc. It is boring and relentless, but it is the only way to stay healthy.
Because diabetes is largely invisible, most people just don’t understand how hard it is to manage. Keeping on top of diabetes all day, every day can ‘burn you out’ and one in four people with type 1 diabetes also have high levels of diabetes distress. Diabetes distress is not a mental health diagnosis, it is an emotional response to the pressures of living with the condition.