View attachment 22795
I thought this was interesting. This past Tuesday I had a very stressful event occur while I had a Freestyle Libre sensor running. I'm a recovering type 2 and I like to see how things are going occasionally by using a Freestyle Libre sensor.
A little background: The stressful event was a mediated meeting with a person with apparent mental health issues. We are both in the same volunteer organization and the person made hateful and delusional posts to and about me on the organization's closed Facebook page. Essentially, they thought I was a negative influence on the organization and wanted me out and thought that could be achieved by posting outlandish attacks on me online. The person was immediately suspended and the organization's leadership thought the best way to resolve this was mediation between the two of us.
So, the meeting was this past Tuesday at 7:30 pm. I got there a bit early at 7:20 pm and I felt stressed as soon as I got there. The meeting started at 7:35 pm. It lasted about 10 minutes. The graph above shows my blood glucose levels before, during, and after the meeting. I did not have any carbs before the meeting, or even that day. It's quite impressive how high my BG went up.
There was a satisfactory ending: about 30 seconds after the person began to speak (after I had a chance to speak about the situation for about 5 minutes first), the meeting was shut down and the person immediately ejected from the oganization due to the crazy things they started saying. It took quite a bit of self-restraint for me to not leap over the table and throttle the person. It was probably the most stressful moment in many years for me.
I suspect that chronic stress is also not good for BG levels, so I think it's important to focus on more than just food when it comes to controlling blood glucose levels. I suspect that the reason taking a half hour walk 5 days a week works to lower blood glucose levels is that it acts to lower stress. Reduction of chronic stress is definitely something I need to work on.
Does anyone else have any thoughts or personal experiences with respect to acute and/or chronic stress and blood glucose levels?