World Meditation Day: The Power Of Meditation When Living With Diabetes

Meditation is known to help improve your focus and clear the mind, but it has a lot more to offer, especially if you’re also living with diabetes. The process of mental training associated mainly with yoga, provides more than mental health benefits, but also has physiological effects on the body. Some of these physiological responses may be connected to the mental health benefits, but not all of these mechanisms are clearly understood. However, it is quite clear from research that meditation can have a positive influence on metabolic, cardiovascular, and neurological functions, among others. Some health benefits of meditation for diabetes in particular include the following.

Meditation For Diabetes – How It Helps

Relieves Stress And Anxiety

Meditation is widely used as a stress-reduction technique, even employed as a therapeutic technique in psychology. Studies show that meditation can relieve stress, lowering levels of cortisol, which has been linked to an increase in inflammatory chemicals known as cytokines. This also explains findings that meditation relieves stress-related conditions such as irritable bowel disorders and fibromyalgia.

Blood Pressure Regulation

Hypertension is a common problem when dealing with diabetes and it significantly raises the risk of other diabetes comorbidities including heart disease, stroke, and chronic kidney disease. Meditation offers proven benefits as a therapy to lower blood pressure and is even recommended by the American Heart Association. The precise mechanism of action is not understood, but is thought to be both related to stress reduction and physiological effects.

Supports Diabetes Management

By relieving stress, improving your mood, and strengthening focus, meditation makes it much easier to adhere to a diabetes treatment plan, which can otherwise be quite challenging. Additionally, meditation has a direct effect on blood sugar regulation, with the practice seeming to improve insulin sensitivity. This again could be linked to the effect of meditation on cortisol levels, as cortisol is known to contribute to insulin resistance. 

Chronic Pain Relief

Meditation is often used as a tool to strengthen self-awareness and self-control, but it also builds greater pain tolerance and reduces feelings of pain so that there is less need for pain medications. The practice helps by activating specific regions of the brain that regulate pain sensations and reduces the negative emotional response linked to pain. The combined reduction in pain severity and increased tolerance is even observed in individuals who are beginners at meditation. 

Strengthened Immune Function

Like many other benefits of meditation, strengthened immunity may be linked to stress reduction and lower levels of cortisol. While the cause is not clearly understood, research shows that meditation can help modulate certain immune parameters, reducing pro-inflammatory markers while increasing cell-mediated defence parameters and enzyme activity to defend against cell ageing. 

Protects Against Memory Loss

Diabetes makes individuals more vulnerable to memory loss and it is also known to significantly increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Meditation may help to some extent, as studies show that the practice may improve memory and cognitive function in older adults, who are often afflicted with age-related memory loss. 

These are just some of the health benefits of meditation that are particularly notable for diabetes patients. However, meditation has a lot more to offer, requires little time, and costs you nothing, making it one of the best practices that anyone with diabetes can take up. 

References:

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5934947/
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0889159112004758
• https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/hyp.0b013e318293645f
• https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/410453
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19853530/
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4940234/
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24571182/