Sleep and Type 2 Diabetes Discussion

Sleep impairment can cause havoc with your health. 1. Identify the problems with sleep. Trouble falling asleep or waking up during the night and unable to go back to sleep. Another issue is still feeling tired after sleeping all night. 2. Inability to turn off your brain when trying to sleep. This can be alleviated by turning off all electronics 1-2 hours before bed. That includes TV. The blue light emitted from electronics stimulates the brain. Alternatives to promote sleep may be reading a book, journaling, listening to soothing music, or prayer and meditation. These activities calm the brain and promote sleep. Restorative sleep is the goal. Try these few tips to see if they help. Trinette Stanford, Community moderator

I think with me it’s, the antidepressant I’m taking for my depression what I think it was, all stress of being diagnosed with diabetes and all the things they tell you in the classes scared the crap out of me not depression and a whole lot of stress in my life. Also know one on my family gets the stress of living with this disease can have an impact on sleep to. There’s so many things that can impact sleep it’s hard to tell for sure what the root problem is. My mom died in 2015 lots of sleepless night with grief,and her husband died in 2021 so we just sold her house and still dealing with her will, it’s been very stressful and has brought up a lot of emotions to I miss my mom so much,her husband was not very supportive when I was diagnosed with diabetes, I needed my mom through this I was newly diagnosed and very scared, my doctor wasn't very supportive either. I told him I was scared when I booked an appointment with him after about a month and he put me on an antidepressant called Pristq I felt a bit down but not depressed more like really stressed, and overwhelmed no one understood where I was coming from be newly diagnosed. I didn’t feel right at all on the antidepressant it was way to strong, he told me to switch it to night then I couldn’t sleep at all at the time I didn’t know this caused insomnia and nervousness he didn’t explain any of this to me, I ended up in the hospital told them I couldn’t sleep they put me on a sleeping pill. And all along it’s the antidepressant. I’m finding this out in the last few years. That these meds can cause so many problems which I didn’t know. He also put me on anxiety meds but it wasn’t anxiety it was the antidepressant causing side effects, and anxious that I was going to have a low sugar but didn’t happen,these classes should not made to scare you. Then switched to Effexor that is very similar to Pristq, and now working with a psychiatrist to try and get off these meds, but there’s withdrawl syndrome coming off these awful medications because I’ve been on them to long. Not knowing all these side effects to phsyciatric meds, has caused so much stress. I’m doing my diabetes by diet and exercise fo 10 years now, and my aA1cs are good, but the grief is still there of my mom. So that makes me sad on many days, when I feel overwhelmed with diabetes I just want my mom, the tears are rolling down my face as I write this.😢

The diabetes (I refuse to say “my diabetes”) affects in the sense that i wake up in the early hours of the morning very hot and have to throw off blankets etc even in winter! Then I get cold and have to put them back on again. To be fair this only happens when my bgs are higher than they should be.

I find that high blood sugar promotes wakefulness and makes it harder to sleep. And sudden sugar fluctuations can produce the opposite effect, causing a crash. Low blood sugar can make waking up challenging but almost everyones’ bs rises in the AM for this reason. And high bs also causes night sweats for me and makes it very difficult for me to tolerate the 70+ degree temperatures my wife likes to sleep at.