Question:
LIfe stress and midlife diabetes ?
Answer:
It sounds like I do, doesn't it? While it's very difficult for me
to separate, the two (I see them as a mutually interdependent
feedback loop), I don't think I do think they are the same.
I can speak about four major life stressors: new job, living in
a foreign country where you don't know the language, moving,
death of a parent.
A new job is major stress. There's the finding of the new job,
which is very stressful, but even when you've had time off before
hand and you start out well-rested, you're always tired the first
few days. I don't think this is emotional, I think it's physical.
You have all of these new inputs to cope with, which is a major
stress, and you react by being exhausted. Which means your
cortisol levels, among other things, are affected.
Living in a foreign country, particularly one where you don't
speak the language, is the same thing. You have to pay a LOT more
attention to every little thing, every facial expression, every
bit of body language, if you don't know the language. And you end
up exhausted, which makes it easier to get sick. (Especially if a
plane ride was involved--this decreases the amount of mucus
available to ward off viruses.)
As far as moving goes, that's physically exhausting, too. I've
always packed and moved myself, and lived purely on adrenaline on
moving day. Which is a setup for getting sick. It's also hard to
eat well when you've packed all of the pots!!!!
As far as the death of a parent is concerned, well, I don't
remember getting sick after my father died. But I certainly
became ill after my mother died. I arrived in Michigan after not
sleeping for more than 3 hours in 3 days, something like that--I
was in a severe state of sleep deprivation and had started
hallucinating. I slept okay at my sister's, but the night before
my mother died, I slept only a few fitful hours, in a chair and
on the floor. I kept waking up to listen to her breathe. And got
sick two weeks later.
These are some of the reasons I think that stressful life events
have enough physical stress around them, in general, to make
anyone ill. I'm quite sure that my current illness has a 'mind'
component, but I also think that I wouldn't have become ill if I
hadn't set my body up for it by not sleeping and by having a
pre-existing physical situation that made it a likely occurrence
whether I was stressed or not.
Diabetes has been viewed as a mind/body disease for some time, so this is
interesting confirmation that it is far more than just a "body breakdown."
Perhaps you have something here in separating out what you call
*physical stress* from emotional stress.
I didn't quote the whole news item but the study authors said diabetes
was associated with "life alterering" stressful events such as losing
a spouse or a financial crisis and not with [quote] "a forced job
change, retirement or long-lasting problems at work".
OTOH I don't see how they can make such differentiations with such a
small sample in survey type of study.
