That feeling of unease, worry and fear, we all know what anxiety is. It is a necessary human emotion, vital for helping us navigate the world. When it is applied to those of us who live with Type 1 Diabetes though, it becomes complicated. Those fears and worries that fuel anxiety are often necessary emotions in a world where you can’t rely on your own body to act the way you would like it to. You need to always be wary of anything that can effect you blood sugar levels because you don’t have a functioning system that can do this for you and so your fear and worry are to a greater or lesser degree, part of daily life. Operating alongside this, the actual feelings of anxiety further confuse blood sugar calculations as anxiety itself can lead to the production of adrenaline which has the opposite effect to insulin, raising blood sugar levels.
Anxiety in type 1 diabetes is also generated through our OCD levels of continually checking that we have all our T1D stuff with us at all times. Insulin - check, glucose - check, CGM and/or finger prick blood tester - check check. Then what if one of these things stops working? There are endless diabetes-related scenarios ahead of us in daily life that we can worry about from the mundane to the life or death ones.
As always, I’m not looking for sympathy (someone recently on twitter told me if I was it was in the dictionary between Shit and Syphilis. Nice and from a fellow type 1 too). No, I’m just trying to raise awareness. Anxiety and type 1 diabetes can both be managed and they can both be managed together. It is important though that we give it some thought and realise that there is a lot going on here and that all this stuff has mental health implications.