Having diabetes can be stressful both physically and mentally. We focus most of our attention on reducing our physical stress through medication, diet, and exercise.
We often ignore the tools at our disposal for reducing the mental stress that physical stress usually carries in its wake. The good news is that working with the tools at hand for dealing with mental stress are even easier to apply than those we have for dealing with physical stress. And some of these tools are free.

Earlier, I have written here how one of these tools, meditation, has reduced the mental stress that came with my diabetes diagnosis. Many thousands of other people have also benefited from the Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction program that Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn started in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. It is an eight week course combining meditation and yoga to help us cope with stress, pain, and illness by using moment-to-moment awareness.


