You’ve been diligently following your health plan—eating right, staying active, yet your blood sugar levels refuse to play along. You feel like you’re doing everything by the book, but the numbers on the glucose meter tell a different story. If this scenario sounds familiar, it might be time to consider a factor often overlooked in the quest for balanced blood sugar: stress.

The truth is, no matter how spot-on your diet or exercise regimen is, chronic stress can throw a wrench into your efforts to manage diabetes or pre-diabetes. When we’re in a state of constant alert, battling burnout, and navigating life’s pressures, our bodies are fighting an uphill battle without us even realizing it.

The Science Behind Cortisol and Blood Sugar

To understand the connection between stress and blood sugar, it’s crucial to dive into the role of cortisol—the body’s primary stress hormone. When we’re faced with a stressor, our adrenal glands release cortisol, preparing us for a fight-or-flight response. This ancient survival mechanism also triggers the liver to increase blood sugar levels, ensuring you have enough energy to face the perceived threat.

However, in our modern lives, where stressors are often not life-threatening, this response can become counterproductive. Chronic stress keeps cortisol levels high, signaling the body to continually release sugar into the bloodstream. Over time, this can lead to insulin resistance and difficulty in managing blood sugar levels. Essentially, if you’re constantly in fight-or-flight mode, your body thinks it needs to keep energy reserves (sugar) readily available for emergencies that never actually come.

Somatic Healing: Calming the Nervous System

The good news is, through somatic healing practices such as yoga, breathwork, and meditation, we can teach our bodies to exit this constant state of alert and enter a rest-and-digest mode. These practices help reset the nervous system, reducing cortisol levels, and, in turn, can have a positive impact on blood sugar management.

Yoga, in particular, is a powerful tool for this kind of healing. By combining movement, breath, and mindfulness, yoga helps reduce stress and promote a sense of inner peace. This calming effect on the nervous system can help mitigate the constant release of cortisol, giving your cells a chance to thrive and potentially improving your body’s response to insulin.

Five Yoga Poses for Nervous System Healing

Here are five yoga poses you can incorporate into a daily 10-minute routine to help calm your nervous system and potentially aid in better blood sugar management: 

• Child’s Pose (Balasana): This grounding pose helps to stabilize blood pressure and calm the nervous system, making it an excellent starting point for stress relief.
• Legs-Up-The-Wall (Viparita Karani): By reversing blood flow, this pose helps to relieve tired legs and feet and can also help in reducing anxiety and stress.
• Cat-Cow (Marjaryasana-Bitilasana): This sequence gently massages the spine and belly organs, stimulating the digestive tract and helping to relieve stress and calm the mind.
• Seated Forward Bend (Paschimottanasana): This pose helps to calm the brain, relieve stress, and reduce fatigue, while also stretching the spine and shoulders.
• Corpse Pose (Savasana): A deep relaxation pose that ends most yoga practices, Savasana allows the body to fully surrender, integrating the benefits of the practice and deeply calming the nervous system.

Yoga: Your Journey to Calm

Incorporating yoga into your daily routine is more than just an exercise for the body—it’s a practice for the mind and soul. By allowing ourselves moments of calm amidst the chaos of daily life, we can begin to shift our body out of the constant fight-or-flight mode, offering a chance for our blood sugar levels to stabilize.

Remember, managing blood sugar is not just about diet and exercise; it’s also about managing stress and giving your body the rest it deserves. As you embark on this journey of inner calm, you may find not just improvements in your blood sugar levels, but in your overall quality of life. Your path to better health is unique and embracing practices that heal both the body and mind can make all the difference.