Dr. Ahmad Shahzad
Founder | Lyallpur Diabetes Foundation
Consultant Diabetologist | Educator | Advocate for Preventive Care
Life with diabetes is much longer than the blood sugar level which can affect emotions, relations and daily activities. Being a way to balance nutrition requirements to preserve social relationships and emotional health, diabetes may change the way people relate with their partners, family, and friends. These difficulties should be comprehended to establish empathy, support, and positive communication. This paper discusses the effects of diabetes on relationships and everyday life and includes information about coping with them in a resilient and positive way.
Understanding Diabetes and Its Challenges
Diabetes is a chronic condition where the body has high blood sugar because it doesn’t produce enough insulin or can’t effectively use the insulin it makes. This can damage organs and lead to complications like heart disease, vision loss, and kidney disease. Challenges include managing the disease through lifestyle changes, medication, and blood sugar monitoring, as well as overcoming healthcare system inefficiencies and improving patient-provider communication.
What is diabetes?
- Core issue: Diabetes is the inability of your body to transport glucose (sugar) in blood to your cells to provide energy.
- Role of insulin: Glucose gets into cells with the help of insulin. In diabetes, insulin is either insufficient or is not utilized normally.
- Result: The glucose accumulates in the blood resulting into high blood sugar (hyperglycemia).
- Health risks: This may in the long term severely harm the nerves, blood vessels, eyes, kidneys and heart.
Common challenges
- Managing the condition: This entails the multi-dimensional method of medication, blood glucose, and carbohydrate counting.
- Lifestyle changes: Individuals with diabetes have to adopt healthy lifestyles that include healthy weight, balanced diet and regular exercise.
- Healthcare access: The coverage of treatment has disparities with less resources in low and middle-income countries.
- Communication between patients and providers: Certain patients complain that medical practitioners are not empathetic, disrespect them, or do not involve them in treatment decisions.
- Health system inefficiency: The barriers to effective diabetes management may include ineffective systems and caregivers.
Emotional and Psychological Impact
The emotional and psychological effects of diabetes are considerable, such as distress, anxiety, and depression, which are associated with worse health results and complications. Self-management of this condition can become frustrating, angry, and burnout-inducing. These psychological effects are vital to deal with to improve disease control and quality life.
Common emotional and psychological effects
- Diabetes distress: A unique emotional burden related to the daily burden of living with the disease.
- Depression: It is more prevalent among individuals with diabetes and may cause deteriorated self-management, health, and complications.
- Anxiety: There is a lot of worry and fear, which are often about getting the condition under control, such as the fear of hypoglycemia (hypo).
- Stress: It is possible to influence the level of blood sugar directly, because stress hormones may lead to sudden increases or decreases.
- Other feelings: Individuals can also feel angry, tired, frustrated, sad, guilty, and burned.
The Effect on Family and Romantic Relationships
Diabetes influences relationships because it is a unifying risk factor between partners and families, it affects emotions and health behaviors. Positively, good family and romantic support is connected to improved management and treatment compliance. Nevertheless, bad dynamics, poor communication, or stress may impair the health outcomes of a patient and the quality of the relationship itself.
How Diabetes affects family and romantic relationships
- Shared health risks: A study conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shows that people having diabetes as partners increase the risk of developing diabetes in their partners because of shared lifestyle, biological, and assortative mating of other risk factors such as BMI and blood pressure.
- Emotional and psychological stress: The continual care of diabetes may result in anger, frustration, worry, isolation, and stress in the diabetic, which can cause a strain on the relationship.
- Effects on relationship dynamics: According to research on ResearchGate, controlling/overprotective behavior by one of the partners may be reported as negative, whereas invisible support can be more beneficial in enhancing health outcomes.
- Shared lifestyle influence: Partners tend to have poor lifestyle habits such as poor diet and lack of exercise, which can be a source of conflict, or a common issue that must be resolved collectively.
How family and relationships can affect diabetes management
Positive effects:
- Greater compliance: Social and familial support has been mostly associated with increased adherence to treatment and management plans.
- Better outcomes: Favorable family functioning is related to enhanced self-care practices and enhanced glycemic control.
- Behavior changes: In cases where one partner undergoes favorable changes in lifestyle, the other partner is likely to do the same.
Negative effects:
- Poor outcomes: A low-quality marriage may worsen the results of diabetes and patient management capabilities.
- Communication breakdown: Ineffective communication about the disease may result in misunderstanding, frustration and reduced life quality of both partners.
Effective strategies:
- Outcome: Involving family members in diabetes education may result in healthier family behaviors and encourage patient self-management.
- Couples counseling: A counselor can assist couples to communicate more effectively and make health a common objective which may result in a more organized way of addressing diabetes.
- If you have diabetes: Support groups Support groups can also be helpful in minimizing feelings of isolation and offer helpful advice.
Managing Daily Life with Diabetes
Daily living with diabetes requires a regular regimen of healthy eating, exercise, and glucose monitoring, prescribed medication and regulation of stress. Healthy diet involves paying attention to portion size and consuming nutritious foods and reducing sugar, salt, and unhealthy fats. Exercising on a regular basis may incorporate a balance of aerobic and strength-training exercises and regular majoring can help you know how your body reacts to food and activities.
Diet and nutrition
· Use the plate rule: Make half of your plate with non-starchy veggies, a quarter with lean protein, and the last quarter with healthy carbohydrates such as whole grains or fruit.
· Selectively restrict poor foods: Eat less sweetened beverages, processed items, and high saturated fat foods. Instead of soda, take water and fruit because it is a sweet treat.
· Controlling portions: Pay attention to portions. Use measuring cups or use everyday items such as a deck of cards (meat) or fist (pasta) to estimate portions of food. Keep Away Dehydration: keep hydrated by drinking lots of water throughout the day.
- Monitor your salt consumption: Have salt in moderation of approximately 6 grams (one teaspoon) per day because a lot of the packaged foods have concealed salt. Prepare your own meals to have healthier control of salt.10 tips for healthy eating with diabetes
Physical activity
- Goal: 150 each week: At least 150 minutes of an activity of moderate intensity (e.g. brisk walking) at least once a week.
- Use strength exercises: Two times a week, include muscle-strengthening exercises where possible.
- Find fun things to do: Start simple, with something you like to do, such as walking, biking or swimming.
- Care about your feet: Learn to take care of your feet before, during and after physical activity.
- Healthy Living with Diabetes – NIDDK
Talk with your health care team about your alcohol-drinking habits. * Try to choose foods that include nutrients such as vitamins.
You may also like to read: Benefits of Peer Support Groups for Diabetes
Monitoring and medication
- Regularly test blood sugar: You must check your blood sugar level to know what causes it to rise or fall. This knowledge is essential in making changes to your treatment plan.
- Take medicine: This is because when you are not feeling well, it is important to take all medications as required whether you feel well or not.
- Balance food and medicine: Take care that you have a balance between food and medication. Excess food may result in elevated blood sugar whereas insufficient food may result in excessively low blood sugar (hypoglycemia).
Stress and mental health
- Accept stress: Recognize that being a diabetic can be a stressful experience, and it is only natural to at times feel overwhelmed, angry, or burned out.
- Improve coping skills: Learn to deal with stress. In case you are having difficulties, consult your healthcare specialist.
- Sleep well: It is recommended to get a good sleep of about 7 to 8 hours a day as it is likely to improve your mood, energy and blood glucose levels.
Final Thoughts
Diabetes covers a lot of life such as personal relationships, daily life but it does not need to restrict the happiness or fulfillment of life. Knowledge, openness, and regular self-care help people and their loved ones to develop stronger relationships and provide a conducive environment. Through patience and optimism toward diabetes, one can have a normal and fulfilling life.
FAQs
How does diabetes affect relationships?
What happens to mood and relationships with diabetes? The process of coping with diabetes can be stressful, and the change in blood sugar levels can also serve as a cause of mood changes. Such factors can put a burden on relationships. Diabetes affects the body by utilizing blood glucose.
How does diabetes impact someone emotionally?
Individuals with diabetes are prone to depression 2-3 times more often than those without diabetes. Only a quarter to half of diabetic individuals with depression are diagnosed and treated. Treatment, however, therapy or both, is often very successful. And untreated, depression tends not to improve, but to deteriorate.
Does diabetes cause anger issues?
Unchecked blood sugar directly influences your emotions; behaviors changes and mood swings occur. Once diagnosed with any chronic illness such as diabetes, a broad range of feelings will also be unsurprising to you: denial and anger, stress, grief, and sadness.