This content material initially appeared on Beyond Type 1. Republished with permission.
By Julia Flaherty
There are quite a bit of advantages to seeing and utilizing your information on diabetes management platforms, smart insulin pens, and continuous glucose monitors (CGMs), however your information an excessive amount of will be detrimental to your mental health. By limiting how a lot you take a look at your information, you’ll be able to create a extra balanced life with diabetes.
This information breaks down the cons of information over-stimulation and the way utilizing information out of your good insulin pen, CGM, or diabetes administration platform can assist you’re feeling higher about your administration technique.
Alarms: So Helpful, however So Loud!
When you concentrate on diabetes information, you seemingly assume of fixed sounds coming from a range of your tech! And whereas it’s nice to be within the know, listening to alarms an excessive amount of can facilitate alarm fatigue.
For instance, if you’re operating excessive or low and listen to your CGM alarm go off, it could take longer to answer the discover in case you’ve listened to it usually earlier than. The sense of urgency might go down over time, or it could develop into white noise within the background of your life.
They are a terrific information level to have entry to that may assist stop extreme highs and lows, however in case you want slightly aid from the noise, speak to your physician about the place you’ll be able to regulate your information factors to scale back the quantity of alarms you hear per week barely.
It’s not inspired or supreme to show off alarms, however limiting whenever you hear them might assist to scale back the psychological burden of diabetes.
Setting Reminders: More Configurations Lead To Less Forgetting
Being in a position to depend on information from these units can assist you develop into much less hands-on together with your diabetes. For instance, you’ll be able to set reminders on some good pens, like whenever you final took insulin and must take extra. These reminders can assist stop over-correcting or forgetting to take insulin shots.
If you lately began insulin therapy, this can be a crucial profit!
But for the reminders to work throughout these units, it’s a must to enter your insulin doses and work together with your physician to configure your reminder settings. So, in case you aren’t huge on that group or don’t take into account your self tech-savvy, this would possibly really add extra to your workload than lighten it.
Technology Reliance: What Happens if It Fails?
While it’s nice to have the ability to depend on expertise to assist together with your diabetes administration, relying on it too closely could make expertise failures much more anxious. Unfortunately, they’re certain to occur in some unspecified time in the future in your diabetes journey merely resulting from human error. (We are imperfect beings and can’t make good issues!)
When expertise fails, you might not have entry to the information you’ve grown accustomed to, proper at your fingertips, anymore. Though uncommon, in case your system breaks or the diabetes administration platform you employ goes down, you might really feel at a loss.
You want to contemplate whether or not these few experiences you might have will deter you from utilizing what might profit you most of the time. (Though, in case you expertise this extra incessantly, it could be time to re-evaluate your diabetes management strategy or device use with your doctor.)
Not gaining access to information stinks, however there may be often a fast treatment across the nook, whether or not going to your pharmacy for a refill or contacting buyer assist to request a complimentary backup of the failed product.
Don’t let the unknowns or worry of expertise failure deter you from seizing the potential advantages of diabetes information entry!
Diabetes Data Connections: More Pros Than Glitches
If you want issues to go as easily as doable at your diabetes checkups together with your physician and don’t need to overlook to say a excessive or low blood sugar streak from every week in the past, information connections supply many advantages.
Diabetes administration platforms additionally aid you:
- See all of your diabetes information in a single place.
- Recognize developments in your blood sugar ranges than can assist you make changes together with your physician to fulfill your target range.
- Enable you to have more virtual visits together with your physician, stopping a drive to see them and lowering anxiousness about seeing them in particular person.
- Make extra knowledgeable selections together with your physician between and at diabetes checkups by enabling them to entry your information remotely.
- Quicken diabetes checkups when your healthcare supplier has entry to your diabetes information of their portal by your related app.
- Reduce the necessity to log your insulin doses or blood sugar ranges manually.
- Reduce the emotional burden of fascinated with diabetes greater than you must by computerized information logging.
- Connect your system to your cellular app, eliminating the necessity to carry round extra diabetes provides than it’s a must to.
Though there may very well be glitches, the few occasions you might expertise them shouldn’t be sufficient to sway you from automating your diabetes information processing. It generally is a large aid!
Smart Insulin Pens: Is the Data Worth the Hype?
If you might be on multiple daily injections (MDI) and at the moment use “regular” insulin pens or syringes with insulin vials, you might take into account upgrading to good insulin pens for his or her enhanced information logging advantages.
With many of as we speak’s good insulin pens, you’ll be able to:
- Be notified when your insulin has expired or gone over its temperature vary.
- Quickly determine your insulin doses at mealtimes utilizing built-in calculations you configure together with your physician.
- Prevent lacking or skipping insulin doses by setting alerts and reminders.
- Share your insulin dosing information simply together with your physician.
- Connect your good insulin pen together with your smartphone (often iOS or Android) by way of its corresponding cellular app.
- Figure out your insulin dosing wants at mealtimes based mostly in your meals consumption, insulin on board, and the settings you and your physician have configured.
- Share your information together with your healthcare supplier extra seamlessly at checkups.
While completely different insurance providers cowl good insulin pens at completely different ranges, they’re value wanting into if these information advantages make your thoughts drool with chance!
How You Feel About Your Data Matters
While gaining access to diabetes information is useful, the way in which we give it some thought and see it issues simply as a lot as greedy it. If you see your good pen information, for instance, and spot you might have missed 27 injections and deal with what you’ve missed as an alternative of what you’ve achieved, that’s problematic.
Data can facilitate creating false narratives in your head about the way you see your diabetes administration technique. Remember—for each 27 injections you miss, you didn’t overlook 120! (Or no matter your numbers are.) And, even in case you’ve missed extra injections than you’ve administered, don’t be laborious on your self. Being imply to your self about your information or in any other case by no means helped anybody.
Seeing your diabetes information needs to be a chance to have an open and empathetic dialog together with your healthcare supplier about what’s and isn’t working for you.
Data entry ought to by no means act as a method to disgrace or blame. Your self-worth will not be the identical as your information logs. If you inform your self this or hear it from others, that’s not okay. Then the information isn’t working the way it ought to! Data ought to empower, not disgrace.
You are rather more than a snapshot of numbers in a given interval, and information shouldn’t trump how laborious you’re engaged on managing your diabetes. Even if the numbers don’t match the trouble you might be really giving, each little higher is healthier.
The Bottom Line: Do What’s Best for You
This information touches the floor of the professionals and cons of diabetes information in present expertise. How you’re feeling about your information issues simply as a lot as seeing it in entrance of you. For some individuals, extra information equals extra issues. For others, it equals extra aid!
However you determine to strategy your diabetes management, what issues most is that you just do what’s the least anxious and most useful for you. Diabetes information needs to be one other cheerleader in your crew, not a hindrance.
Everyone advantages from various things of their diabetes administration technique, and that’s okay!
