Meditation and Diabetes
Introduction
Recently I've been learning a lot about how to Diabetes Type 2. I learned that lifestyle changes are needed to control it. The main ones are:
Diet: Reduce the amount of carbs your body ingests.
Exercise: Help your body to burn those carbs.
Sleep: Let your body heal (and, you can't eat while sleeping :P ).
Stress: Avoid excess of adrenaline and cortisol which makes the insulin work harder.
The first three were easy to understand, and of course, there's much depth for each of them. The fourth one; stress, was not very clear to me.
Stress is a tool our body has to get a boost of energy in certain moments, initially to run away from predators. In our modern life, our predators are different and some are artificial, but even then, stress can help us to focus on things that are important to us e.g. meeting a deadline, or protecting our loved ones.
Ok, so, when I tried to get more information on how to reduce stress I found (among many other things) meditation. But then I found meditation also in sleeping better, eating healthier, and memory, productivity, procrastination, anger management, and relationships, gee! basically, any other activity was somehow related to meditation, and I though this looked like a scam!
I have practiced meditation on and off for about five years, learning the basics, and getting better at it, and then I abandoned it for a few months. I felt a bit deceived because even if I got better at it (going from 1 minute, to 5, and up to 10) I never really felt it helped for all those things it offered. For some reason, the starting guides didn't explain clearly how it is going to help, or probably, I was not listening.
So, as I was saying 2 months ago I got my DT2 diagnosis. After the initial shock, I started learning about how to manage it, and eventually, meditation appeared again!
How meditation works
So first of all, a disclaimer, I'm far from an expert, there are many types of meditation, and the one I know is mindfulness meditation.
In mindfulness meditation, you make an effort to be present. What does that mean? You just focus on the current moment and don't think too much about what you did yesterday, nor what you have to do tomorrow.
The common misconception is you suppress thoughts and your mind goes blank, but that's not the case, is more about detecting when your mind starts wondering and catching it and bringing it back to the meditation.
You get better with practice. In the beginning, I was falling asleep all the time. The longer the practice the more I got distracted. Eventually, I was able to stay away and catch my mind before it wandered out of control.
How it helps
Suddenly it clicked, or I finally listened to what the guide was saying, and then I started finding more of it.
The whole point of "catch your mind when it starts wondering" is to be aware of what is happening, not only external noises or internal thoughts but also feelings. That was the mini woah moment. Yeah, I can meditate and avoid being distracted by the car passing by, or realize my mind was thinking about the things I want to do for the weekend, but it was not as easy to consider feelings when you're idle meditating (there are not many feelings happening at that moment), but as I got better (since diagnosis I've been trying to meditate every day) I realize (and I was told) I can catch my mind when I'm feeling something too.
Detecting the feelings is where meditation helps, for instance with procrastination: I have a pile of dishes to do. Before I just passed them and did something else, now when I'm passing in front of them I think: "Ugh that's boring", and then I could tell why I don't want to do them. Something similar happened with sleeping better; my mind was wandering and that was easy to spot, I should just stop thinking about the things I have to do tomorrow, but then I realized I could catch a feeling of why I was thinking about the next day! I was feeling anxious about waking up late and missing the bus. Now that I know the actual reason, I can think a little bit more about it and see if the worry is real or if I can do anything about it ("like setting up the alarm").
Yeah, yeah, what does all this have to do with diabetes?
So, how does this help with diabetes? Using this awareness to for instance improve my diet.
For example, I'm at a table, everybody is eating something high-carb delicious meal and I'm here with (also delicious) salad. Before I just grabbed a piece that high-carb food, and then another, and before I knew I was already chewing and probably extending my arm for more. Now I can detect this behavior before happens and do it consciously. I'm not saying that magically by meditating I just close my eyes and chant "OOOOhhhmmmm" and avoid cravings. I still grab a piece of that food. But now when I go for seconds I can detect and ask myself: Do I really want it? Most of the time the answer is: I don't. Sometimes I just want to feel included in what everybody is doing. This is what meditation helped me to detect. Before that, I was just acting without thinking.
The same goes for many other aspects, Anger: detect when I'm about to go nuts and consider. Productivity: Detect when I'm getting distracted and go back to what I have to do. Sleeping, avoid thinking about other stuff when I'm trying to sleep. And of course Stress: I can detect the source of stress, do something about it, and be in the driver's seat instead of just being a passenger, or I can tell if I can do anything about it at all. Anxiety: I can detect it now, I'm still working on how to deal with the source, but by being present I can break the worry cycle before it spirals out of control.
And the list goes on.
Conclusion
By being aware of what's happening outside and inside our mind, including our feelings, meditation helps to make better decisions.
Meditation is not easy, but is not hard either. It just takes practice like anything else, the more it is practiced, the easier it gets, or I guess it gets easier to realize there's nothing to do.
Of course, there are no magic pills. Just like diet would help us live better but won't cure us, meditation can help us take better control of our mind, but that's just another tool, a tool we can use to improve our quality of life.
How-tos and resources
There are a lot of resources on how to learn to meditate and apps.
What I use is now InsightTimer, which is just a tiny bell every 5 minutes.
I used HeadSpace and Calm to learn how to meditate, but now I prefer to skip the guides.
This Reddit post was super helpful to learn how meditation helps: [ADVICE] How Meditation Helps With Discipline & How To Do It
There are studies that show that mind-body and emotion-based behavior help reduce A1c levels in people with Type 2 Diabetes:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1751991822000602
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/jicm.2022.0586
And finally it just looks cool to be sitting there looking like Yoda!