staying motivated with diabetes

[Guest guest]

Clay Wirestone

Aug 14, 2011

You've successfully resisted the urge to eat that slice of cake. You've

remembered to check your blood sugar

<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/monitoring/blood-sugar/> that extra

time. Maybe you've resisted and remembered for days, or weeks. Perhaps you

now think that you've figured out how to keep yourself motivated in dealing

with your diabetes <http://www.diabeteshealth.com/> . Actually, you're just

getting started.

Keeping motivated isn't about days or weeks. It's about years. In the last

installment of this series, we sketched out some of the challenges of

dealing with diabetes -- both type

<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/community/type-1-issues/> 1 and type

2 <http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/community/type-2-issues/> -- on

this extended time scale. We also looked at an Israeli study that provided

compelling proof about the benefits of aggressive treatment to keep us

motivated and engaged.

But how do those two things work together? How do the challenges of

maintaining self motivation interact with the real benefits that it provides

us?

To answer that question, we should take a look at a study, published last

year in the journal Chronic Illness, that offers a different take on the

issue of self-motivation.

This study was simply observational: It asked 77 people questions about

their diabetes and the measures they took to control it. Importantly,

patients were asked about their level of self-care first. This gave

researchers a baseline for subsequent questions: They knew which patients

took care of themselves, and which didn't.

The subjects were then asked about their level of motivation, how much they

knew about their disease, what the current state of their health was, and

how much social support they received.

Each one of those topics had the potential to affect how well the patients

managed their illness.

But only one topic counted: motivation. Motivation was the only variable

that made a difference in how well patients ate or checked their blood

sugar.

Another win for motivation, right?

Well, yes and no. While the researchers, all from the University of

Missouri, acknowledged the effect of motivation, they wrote, " Individuals in

this study had difficulty in maintaining self-care demands, especially

exercise <http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/fitness/exercise/> . Meeting

recommended levels of self-care activity was challenging. "

In other words, motivation works. But it doesn't mean that the challenges of

diabetes recede or that we ever fully master the disease. And the

researchers also showed that simply educating ourselves or having the

support of others doesn't matter as much as we might think. What really

matters comes from inside us, not from any outside source.

In the next and final installment of this series, we'll give some tips on

simple ways to increase your motivation as you manage diabetes.

If you have any thoughts about the series so far, please leave a comment

below.

Source:

http://chi.sagepub.com/content/6/3/202.short?rss=1 & ssource=mfr