Jane Matera is a counsellor with Diabetes UK and she writes an interesting article in the charity’s latest magazine about her theory that type 2 Diabetes is often triggered by people not dealing sufficiently well with the stresses of life.

I’m not going to delve into that subject here – I’m hardly qualified to do so, except by having type 2 Diabetes myself. What interested me as much in Matera’s article is that she actually spells out the stresses we face in modern life compared with earlier generations. Not a surprising list but interesting to see it gathered together in one place.

Humans have always had stress. The hormones involved in the fight or flight response protected early humans from the dangers of the prehistoric world. Some degree of stress is creative, stimulating and necessary to a life fully lived. But […] our bodies are only equipped to cope with short bursts during periods of acute danger.

In our society, I feel there are many everyday stresses that might have been unthinkable 50 – or even 10 or 20 – years ago. They are accepted as immutable facts of life [and] not challenged or much discussed.

This normalisation means we maybe living for long periods […] at a level of stress […] considerably too high for our minds and bodies to safely cope with. And this is at a time when the traditional human support structures – such as the community, work security, the extended family, stable relationships and religious faith – have changed, been depleted or are not available to us.

Common modem stresses that have been normalised include:

• long-distance commutes, either through heavy traffic or at the mercy of public transport when we are most tired and vulnerable, either at the too – early start or exhausted end of the day
• the working world of short-term contracts, constant appraisal and machine-led environments may seem practical and economical but can take a human toll
• the pressure on mothers of even young children to work outside the home to meet the demands of an inflated mortgage
• mechanisation, which means humans are forced to adopt methods of communication and behaviour dictated by the machine rather than those that are innate
• mobile phones, iPods, ATMs, etc., disconnect the individual from human contact
• the fear of a terrorist attack – not a new phenomenon, but one that seems intensified of late in urban areas
• the completely rational fear of air travel, which is seen as neurotic because of its ubiquity.

How do we fix it? Unless there is a paradigm shift in society and the way our economy works sadly I suspect all we can do is to mitigate these stresses in ways which work for us individually. And hope this is enough to keep Diabetes – and depression – at bay. I see no magic panacea.

Food for thought.