Journaling helps your type 2 diabetes by getting your thoughts out of your head and onto paper to process them and control your blood sugars better.
What does journaling do to the brain?
Type 2 diabetes can be a life-changing disease.
- Lists of new “Dos and Don’ts”.
- New medicines
- More doctor appointments
- New worries
Keeping a journal or diary (whatever you want to call it) can help you keep all these new balls in the air. It can help you understand all the new information you must absorb.
By keeping your brain engaged, your subconscious can help you stay in control.
You can conquer your type 2 diabetes. The more information you have, the more power you have over it.
What are the benefits of journaling to help your type 2 diabetes?
We all have lots of thoughts floating around in our heads. Most of them are fleeting and useless.
- “What shirt should I wear today?”
- “Was that a Tesla that drove by?”
But many of these thoughts are important and documenting them can be helpful.
Keeping a journal can help you control your type 2 diabetes by getting your thoughts out of your head so you can act on them.
Sometimes it’s to reflect on memories and lessons you learned. Sometimes it’s to look at your worries about your life and figure out the best ways to deal with them.
And sometimes it’s to make sure that you remember that your worries are outweighed by your blessings!
The idea is to stop the stress-inducing rumination. Stress causes increases in stress hormones and blood sugar levels. So, anything that can decrease stress can help your diabetes.
Increased stress also leads to inflammation. This inflammation not only increases your blood sugar but also damages the lining of your blood vessels.
This damage to the blood vessel lining can lead to heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure, and loss of vision.
So, if a simple technique like journaling can calm the mind and decrease stress and inflammation, isn’t it worth trying?!
The act of journaling can put you in a more focused and relaxed state.
It can help you to have a place for:
- Your questions for your doc
- Your meds and their dosing and changes in them over time
- Your reactions to your meds
- Your blood sugar levels- labs, finger sticks, continuous monitors, glucose, A1Cs
- Your feelings about the whole process
- Your diet and exercise changes.
Documenting this, and more can keep you in control of your disease.
Are there negatives to journaling?
With any new endeavor, there are pluses and minuses.
The first minuses are yours:
- “I don’t want to journal!”
- “I don’t want to look at my mistakes, my worries, my fears.”
- “Why would I look at the past?!”
The idea of journaling is not to create a permanent record of your mistakes and fears!
The idea is to get them out of your head. By getting them out of your head you can acknowledge them and move on.
By handwriting your thoughts you then allow your subconscious mind to help you work on them.
Getting these thoughts out of your head can eliminate them as a problem, or cement them as a solution.
This can all happen without even looking at them again. That’s how powerful your subconscious is!
The only other minus I can think of is being too selective in what you write down.
If you’re only writing down your worries and problems, think about your process.
Remember to record your wins too!
Leave a record of the bad AND the good.
How do you start journaling to help your type 2 diabetes?
Grab a spiral notebook or buy a leather-bound journal. It doesn’t matter what you write on. You can even use an app on your phone or computer.
But, handwriting, instead of typing, can do something magical in your brain. Handwriting your entries can help you process the info better.
Whatever way you decide to journal, it just matters that you write.
Record your thoughts.
Write a Daily Note and capture whatever info occurred to you during that day. Or you can do it every few days or weekly.
Look up journaling prompts.
Some folks will use a template with specific prompts like:
- What am I thankful for today
- What bothered me today
- What do I need to do today
- Where do I need to be today
- Who did I meet today
- Etc. etc.
Write down whatever is important to you at the time.
Some prefer to write down thoughts throughout the day instead of writing at a specific time of day. This practice is interstitial journaling.
Some prefer to “free-write” or “brain dump”, at a specific time of day, writing down random thoughts they have for a timed session.
Some prefer to fill a specific number of pages at a specific time. Julia Cameron suggests this method in her book, The Artists Way. In it, she talks about writing “morning pages”.
Look up and model famous people’s journals.
Just start.
Discover your best method. Try different methods and document them in your journal.
Journal your way to empowerment over your type 2 diabetes!