STRESS EQUALS SUGAR

   Last weekend I spent time with a great friend doing a fundraiser presentation in Oregon for Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund.

   For two weeks, she's worn a blood sugar monitor on her arm.  She's not diabetic.  She just wanted to see how it fluctuated throughout the day.

The one big thing she found:  stress made blood sugar spike.  More than food, more than sleep.  And the lowest consistent readings?  Right after yoga.  In fact, once she saw the trend, she made a point of meditating for 10 minutes post stressful incident, and the sugar came right down.  If she went to bed with it high , she woke up with it high.

Perhaps when the Bible says "let not the sun go down upon your wrath" it has more truth than we realize.  If she meditated and calmed down post-stress, she could see it drop and stay low.

I know an elderly guy who is diabetic, takes shots, etc. and his wife is often frustrated because sometimes when he cheats on his diet, his blood sugar stays fine, and when he doesn't cheat, it spikes.  Could it be that stress is playing a bigger factor than we realize?

As the individual wellness monitors of all kinds become more ubiquitous, I think we'll see more and more of these personal ahas as we trace physical responses to psychological and spiritual occurrences.  This kind of thing bothers me because I'm not a calm person.  I'm a Type A git'er-done guy who likes to see chips fly and jobs accomplished.  I get really stressed around lazy people, inefficient people, and careless people.

Fortunately, that's balanced with a lot of alone time out in nature, on the farm, quiet, beautiful, harmony.  When he coined the term "nature deficit disorder," Richard Louve was certainly onto something.  May the birds drop your blood sugar.

What do you do for stress relief?