Stress Management Tips For CKD and Other Chronic Diseases

Podcast #83 Released on March 2, 2018
I want to talk to you about Stress Management and Chronic Kidney Disease because while they often happen together, they aren’t necessarily the best thing to go together. So I wanted to go over some thoughts and ideas that I have about how you can better manage your stress to help improve your health and wellness and life in general.
Very common seeing for people to do is to say “I’m going to have that lower stress, less stress” whatever point in your life. Either when you find out you have chronic kidney disease or it’s a new year or something happens. That is a great kind of resolution or change that you can make in your life. But we all know that chronic kidney disease adds a lot of stress to your life.
You have financial things, you have society things going on, and you have probably family obligations, your emotional stress. All those things and now you have additional medications additional doctor’s appointments, additional diet restrictions – all that you have to manage as well. That does not decrease your stress level.
The other thing is that you’re now thinking about “Am I going get put on dialysis? How long am I going to manage these restrictions? How can I slow this down?” And you probably already had either diabetes or heart disease or both. All of that together just does not make for a happy comfortable stress-free life.
Let’s talk about how stress can affect you. You can check on the link renaldiethq.com/stress-management-tips-new-year for more information about how you can manage stress.
Stress can elevate your blood pressure, it can cause higher blood sugar levels, it can affect all of your other health problems that you may have and it can make it more difficult for your kidneys to function in addition to the fact that you are already having some difficulty and it can just kind of generally harm you all together if you’re not managing it. It kind of eats away your health a little bit if you don’t manage your stress a little better.
You’re not going to get rid of your stress but some things you can do that can improve your stress levels and decrease them.
Number one thing you can do is exercise. If you’re not exercising, remember you need to talk to your doctor about it but if you are just being active, moving, taking your dog for a walk, walking around your house. Your brain releases those feel-good endorphins when you exercise so this helped reduce your stress just because they’re making you feel a little better.
The point of exercise is it kind of increases your heart rate and teaches your body how to manage the stress of an increased heart rate and so your body learns how to bring it down faster. Then, in a regular experience if you have an increased heart rate when you relax your heart rate will come back down to normal more quickly and that’s always helpful to you.
Number two is diet. Following your kidney diet making sure you feel healthy altogether – eating lower salt, lower sugar, any other restricted items that you may have, fluids or potassium or phosphorus any of that – so managing those and if you watch our Zestify Your Diet series, then you can find great diet meals, recipes for you to use but watching your diet is especially important.
Sleep. It’s not a badge of courage or it’s not helpful to get no sleep. Making sure that you’re getting enough sleep and you know what ...