What Low Blood Sugar Feels Like, and How to Stop It

Hey there, I’m Hyeunjoo, your resident Type One Diabetic.

Having low blood sugar is a pretty bad experience overall; it has health downsides, can lead to passing out, and carries with it a host of just negative stuff overall.

However, the actual scientific parts of being low are very well-documented, and you could probably find a dozen articles talking about it; so rather than talking about its scientific effects, I thought I could talk about how it actually feels, and how to deal with it best.

To put it mildly, low blood sugar feels awful. The closest sensation I think I could compare it to is when you’ve just finished a really long cardio workout; everything hurts, you’re tired, and you just want to lie down and to go sleep. Being low feels similar to that, but on a worse scale. In fact, if you get low enough, you may not even have the energy to move; which leads me into our next section.

Fast treatment of low blood sugar is an absolute necessity, but one of the most most annoying things about low blood sugar is that no matter how fast you treat it, it will linger for a while. That means that no matter how fast you respond, you will be stuck feeling like a burnt-out marathon runner for a solid minute at the very least. That’s why I’ve taken to doing a couple of things to help bear with that feeling over the course of my life with diabetes.

One of the easiest things you can do is just to lie down. Of course, you should only do this after you’ve taken some sugar-that goes for all of the things in this article as well-but lying down, sitting down, or generally resting is a good way to ensure that you don’t come out of the ordeal feeling too awful. This goes double for athletes or people who are active; being active not only will make you feel worse if your blood sugar is low, but it will actively make your blood sugar worse!

The next thing to do is tell someone around you, if you haven’t already. It’s good to have someone else aware that you are low, just in case you pass out(which is possible if you go too low!) or are otherwise unable to treat yourself. Having another person with you can help psychologically as well; being low can be very stressful!

That’s why my third and final tip is to do something that distracts you-within reason. Looking at doggy photos on the internet or otherwise doing something low-energy that keeps your mind off of being low is a good way to make your recovery feel quicker. Just make sure not to do anything too active, or you may end up making it far, far worse!

Finally, all you can really do is wait. Being low, if properly treated, goes away fairly quickly, though it does last longer or shorter depending on the person. The longest I’ve been low even with treatment has topped out at around 30 minutes, while the shortest was only around 1-2 minutes. Once you’re all set, the only thing you can do is wait!

But a drop of prevention is worth an ocean of cure(I may have misremembered that statement), so the best way to deal with being low is to simply not be low at all. The easiest way to do this is to keep a close eye on your blood sugar levels; using a Dexcom or something similar is the best way to do this, but using a good old fashioned prick test can work as well.

If you notice that your blood sugar is dropping rapidly, or you begin to feel low, then it’s worth it to take some candy or drink some juice; really, anything with a lot of sugar that acts fast will do the trick! Sugar tablets also work great, but do taste awful in general, so…take your pick!

Most of all, though, trust your body. Sometimes glucose monitors won’t read the right numbers or won’t pick up on a drop in blood sugar, and that can have bad effects. If you feel low at all, it’s best to take some sugar and be safe about it; trust me, I learned that lesson the hard way! Once you go low once, or even are just a little bit low, you will without a doubt recognize that sensation again, and after a while you’ll be able to know when you’re low and when you’re not based just off of how your body feels. My biggest tip for differentiating between being low and not being low is to think about if you’ve done some heavy exercise or pulled an all-nighter recently; if you didn’t, and you feel crummy, it’s probably because you’re low.

Hope this article helped!
Signing off,
Hyeunjoo