Why stress is bad for your blood sugar

It may seem surprising that there is such a strong link, but when you learn about the physiology of the stress response, it makes a lot of sense. When you are stressed, your body activates its physiological response "fight or flight". Part of this reaction involves your body releasing blood sugar so you can use it immediately in an emergency. For example, if you were fleeing a dangerous situation, you would need this fast energy provided by the glucose in your blood. However, a problem occurs when you are still stressed. When this happens, you get a constant release of blood sugar, which also results in increased release of insulin.

This high insulin state, called hyperinsulinemia, essentially causes your body to try to force glucose back into the cells. Insulin is also one of the hormones that signal your body to store fat, which is why people often gain weight during a stressful time in their lives, even if they do not change not their eating habits.

If you were to look inside the body while all this was going on, you would see the brain perceiving stress or anxiety and releasing cortisol from the adrenal glands. Then you would observe a message from the brain that was coming into the body to release blood sugar and increase hepatic gluconeogenesis, a process that regenerates glucose. Once the stressful event is over, the signal stops.

This is fine if it happens infrequently, but for most of us this happens several times a week, every day or even every hour! This can leave your body really confused and with a lot of useless glucose floating in the bloodstream which the muscles and the body do not really need.