Connecting the Dots on Diabetes: The Benefits of Self-Reflection

Welcome to Connecting the Dots on Diabetes, a series by Sydney Williams of Hiking My Feelings, chronicling the organization’s mission to hike 1 million miles for diabetes awareness.

Throughout the series, Sydney, who received a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes in 2017, will dig into questions like: Is there a relationship between trauma and diabetes? If so, if we treat the trauma, can we more effectively treat diabetes? And how can self-reflection help make sense of a diabetes diagnosis and lead to better outcomes?

I’ve been connecting the dots on my life online for 20 years now, and before that, in journals and diaries with heart-shaped locks on them. Self-reflection via journaling and meditation is how I make sense of my life and the world around me.

More recently, this practice has been instrumental in helping me figure out how to navigate all of it as someone who is living a full, happy life with type 2 diabetes. I believe my self-reflection practice — one that was well-established before my diabetes diagnosis in 2017 — is why I’ve been able to stick with a diabetes management plan that works for me.

I already had an intrinsic sense of curiosity. Diabetes just fueled that fire. What was happening in my body? Why? What could I do about it? How could I use this practice to better understand my body, my diabetes, and myself?

So many factors affect blood sugar levels in the body, and managing this disease is complicated enough as it is. When my doctor narrowed all the factors down into four categories — food, exercise, medication, and stress — I visualized a quadrant.

Armed with my target glucose ranges and these metrics to track against, I felt like a scientist, and managing life with diabetes was my experiment.

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My self-reflection process

Each morning, I would wake up, prick my finger, and wait while my glucometer measured the blood on the test strip. When I was first diagnosed, I took as much data as I could. I knew I didn’t need to prick my finger five times each day, but I was curious about how my actions, food choices, and external factors impacted the readings.

Over time, I got to know myself really well. I knew what foods could spike my numbers, and which ones would keep them in range. I started to notice at which levels I felt my best before, during, and after exercise. Having all of this information empowered me to make informed decisions that were unique to my own diabetes management journey.

This kind of self-reflection might not be as fun as visualizing your ultimate vacation and writing about it in your journal — but self-reflection quickly became an integral part of my morning routine.

By asking myself how I felt after eating, during exercise, and over the course of the day, I was able to practice mindfulness and reflect on the day. In the process of these reflections, I was giving myself an opportunity to start paying attention to the signals my body was giving me.

The deeper I allowed myself to go into these reflections, the more I learned about myself. And as time went on, I looked forward to documenting my choices, and I made better choices knowing that I would be documenting them.

I was able to hold myself accountable and find pride in the changes I was making, which made it easier to keep making those choices.

Asking the right questions

One morning in May 2018, I reflected on a hike I had done the day before. It was my first real hike since my diagnosis.

At the summit of that hike, I remembered feeling so calm, so peaceful, and so proud. This did not make sense to me, because other than the hiking, everything else seemed like it was falling apart.

I had quit two jobs in the span of 5 months, I was a newly diagnosed — and now uninsured — diabetic, and I didn’t have another job lined up. I realized at that moment that it was because of hiking that I was able to feel calm and peaceful at this fork in my “trail of life.”

I had come to understand that thanks to my diabetes diagnosis, I was hiking my feelings instead of eating and drinking them.

My mind was clear, and my stress felt nonexistent. And the numbers reflected that.

For me, self-reflection is best done in an environment where the energy moves freely through my body and I’m free from the distractions of the hyperconnected world we’re living in. No podcasts, no Netflix, no audiobooks — just me, the sound of the crunchy trail beneath my feet, and fresh air.

This is why hiking has been such a beneficial tool for self-reflection for me. And from a diabetes management perspective, hiking taps into all four areas of that quadrant.

I know I want to eat lighter, healthier choices when I’m gearing up for a hike — there’s nothing worse than feeling bogged down by a heavy meal before hitting the trail. Hiking also meets my exercise requirements, and since I’m completely disconnected from my devices when I’m hiking, it reduces my stress.

What started as a deep reflection on my day-to-day experiences while learning how to manage diabetes quickly turned into an entire way of living: hiking my feelings. My self-reflection instincts kicked in again. Why was I eating and drinking my feelings to begin with? What led to these behaviors?

Two weeks later, I found my answer on the side of a mountain on Catalina Island, California. I had reached the summit and felt better than I had in a really long time.

I was asking myself questions like, “When was the last time I felt this good? When was the last time I felt this confident about my future? When was the last time I felt this comfortable in my body?” I was searching and searching.

As I was making my way down to the campground, it hit me — the last time I felt this good was before I survived sexual assault, 12 years prior.

This is why I’m so thankful for this diagnosis. While my journaling practice was strong before, it was usually just making notes of events that I might want to write about in a book someday or visualizing what I want my future to look like.

Developing a self-reflection practice and giving myself space for curiosity around diabetes management set me up to ask the right questions and be open to the answers.

Start your own self-reflection practice

Ready to start your own self-reflection practice to manage stress? Feel free to create your own quadrant and use the prompts listed below.

No matter if my blood sugar reading was on target or not, I took notes on the following things in the quadrant:

• Did I take time for myself yesterday? What did I do?
• How were my stress levels yesterday?
• If yesterday was stressful, where is the stress coming from?
• What can I do today to better manage my stress?