Emotions and Wellbeing
This section focuses on addressing skills and knowledge for maintaining well-being and developing meaningful and health promoting daily habits, routines, and rituals. You can address your current diabetes management challenges and discuss positive coping skills and wellness strategies.
For instance, you may mess up your medication regimen when experiencing a high amount of stress. You and your OT then may consider the use of this section to help work on stress coping strategies to help increase engagement in medication management. With regards to social skills, you may want to work on assertiveness to appropriately communicate your needs to friends, family members, coworkers or healthcare providers. In this situation, you and your OT may consider referencing this section to work on assertiveness to ensure that you can engage in appropriate activities with the help you want or need.
Identifying Sources of Stress
- Daily Hassles and Stress
This worksheet allows you to rate a number of items related to daily health considering the last month of your life. - Levels of Stress
This worksheet gives you prompts to understand stresses on the personal, interpersonal, and environmental level with “temporary” and “chronic” categories. - Stress 101
This worksheet explains how stress, focus and time management can affect each other and explains how some stress can be helpful while other stress can be challenging or damaging. - Stress Maze
The stress maze can help you determine how best to respond to an event that you perceive to be stressful by asking yourself helpful questions about the situation.
Identifying Symptoms of Stress
- Where Do I Feel Stress in My Body
This worksheet gives you examples of ways in which stress can affect the body and provides a way to better understand and write down your personal bodily reaction to stress. - How Does Stress Affect My Diabetes
This resource illustrates the process of stress affecting blood sugar levels to help understand how developing coping strategies for stressors can help you manage your diabetes.
Identifying Strategies to Manage Stress
- Be a Stress-Busting Detective
This worksheet helps you to understand your personal response to stress and discover and use individualized quick stress relief techniques as well as documenting the situation, related feelings, activity to address the situation, and new feelings. - Calming Technique for Anxious Breathing
This resource discusses the role of breathing in anxiety and guides you through a simple calming technique. - How Does My Body React to Stress
This worksheet gives you a framework to think about what you can do using their body, mind, emotions, or behavior to address your stress level. - Progressive Muscle Relaxation
This resource gives you a technique to address muscle tension related to stress and outlines the optimal environment and sequence for progressive muscle relaxation.
Wellness & Wellness Strategies
- Cycle of Depression
This resource illustrates the effects of unhealthy behaviors and depressive symptoms on diabetes self-management. - Emotion Labeling Chart
This worksheet provides a bank of different emotions to identify in yourself with a thermometer to mark the intensity of each of your present feelings. - Facing Diabetes Grief
This resource provides education regarding the grieving process, guiding on ways to balance your personal needs to heal and recover with accepting your diabetes diagnosis and resulting life changes. - Five stages of Grief
This resource provides an explanation of each of the five stages of grief, as defined by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. - Healthy Coping
This worksheet provides education on understanding emotions related to diabetes and developing healthy coping strategies to manage emotions. It allows you to document your own emotions, who you can discuss them with, and what you can do to feel better. - Restorative Activities
This worksheet can help you understand restorative activities, how they can benefit your health, and provides space for you to explore how to add more to your daily routine.
Diabetes Burnout
- Avoiding Diabetes Burnout
This worksheet allows you to identify what makes you frustrated or angry about your diabetes and ways that you can cope with those things. - Getting off Track vs. Getting Stuck
This worksheet prompts you to understand what “getting off track” and “getting stuck” means to you, your potential struggles, and who could help you overcome those things.
Other Resources
Some apps that are great for mindfulness and meditation are:
American Diabetes Association Mental Health Resources
The ADA has informational resources about Depression, Anger, Denial, and Diabetes Distress. The ADA has also recently developed a directory of mental health providers that understand diabetes that can be accessed here.
College Diabetes Network Resource Hub
The Mental Health section of the resource hub has a number of resources for individuals with diabetes and mental illness or mental health challenges.
Diabulimia
We Are Diabetes is an organization primarily devoted to providing support, education and awareness for people with type 1 diabetes who suffer from eating disorders.
“My Chronic Illness Totally Changed How I Think About Mental Health”
Ashley Batz writes about how “living with a chronic illness isn’t just about the daily routine of medication and checkups - it’s about doing the emotional work too.”
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