Your quality of life matters in more ways than you think.
Multiple scientific studies around the world now link this basic concept to conditions such as depression, anxiety, diabetes management, sleep complications, kidney disease, increased risk of cancer, and the occurrence of chronic illness such as fibromyalgia and Lyme disease.
How is “Quality” Defined?
Quality of life measures the positive and negative aspects of your daily existence. It is your overall wellbeing as a person.
This includes your current level of health, family history, freedom of movement, exposure to inequality or discrimination, living circumstances, exposure to environmental pollutants, socioeconomic status, available support systems such as education and health care, and your feelings of self-worth and dignity.
In other words, every part of your life determines your psychological and physical health.
Researchers are finally beginning to understand that your stress, toxin exposure, and lifestyle effect your mental and physical health in the long term.
Learning how to improve your quality of life is crucial to your very survival.
Because many patients with chronic illness maintain a consistently poor quality of life, they present with weakened immune systems. This causes established immunity-based medical tests to return a “false negative” – implying that as many as 50% of these patients do not suffer from a host of conditions!
You must also make sure your doctor sees you as his or her patient. The average doctor/patient visit lasts less then fifteen minutes. Not much can be communicated in that time – especially when you’re talking about your health.
Correct diagnosis depends on your physician understanding your entire profile, symptoms (past and present), as well as your desire to fully recover from your illness – not simply be placed on a lifetime prescription. Doctors must treat the patient – not the symptom!
With more than eighty forms of autoimmune disease affecting various parts of your body, knowing what is wrong is the first step in making you better. You need to know what you require from a physician and firmly expect the level of care to make you better.
How to Improve Your Quality of Life
This concept of unhappy “life wellness” used to be associated primarily with the poor – and they remain the largest sufferers in our modern world. However, it is important not to confuse “standard of living” with “quality of life.”
Standard of living is an objective determination that can be calculated with the right data. It refers to your economic status – your earnings, employment, access to medical care, expectation of personal safety, education, housing, etcetera. Every factor of standard of living can be determined by numbers.
Quality of life is a subjective determination that is not always easy to understand. How another person is doing overall is complicated to calculate because many factors can alter the data. If a person is homeless, lives in a house without adequate heat, struggles with addiction or abuse, or even works a stressful job that interferes with their ability to sleep – their quality of life can drop substantially.
7 Tips to Improving Your Quality of Life
- Take time every day to think about your life and ways that you can make changes. Whether you choose to pray, meditate, or make lists – the result is a more focused YOU. Even small steps in the right direction move you forward.
- Experts estimate that more than two-thirds of the industrialized world is sleep deprived. Lack of sleep makes it hard to focus, slows down response times, and causes lapses in memory. Get more sleep! Adequate rest starts your day off right.
- You might not want to hear it but getting regular exercise is key to improving your mind, body, and spirit. The hormones released during physical activity make you feel better emotionally and mentally. Naturally, there is no end to the physical health risks you lower or prevent with exercise.
- Accurately identify “negativity” in your life – whether it regards a job, a family member, friend, or yourself. When you can clearly define problems, you can then address them to make positive change.
- Once you have that list of changes, make sure you set attainable goals so that you don’t set yourself up to fail. Setting realistic goals – and being willing to put in the time/effort to make them happen – keeps you from needlessly beating yourself up.
- Not everything or everyone is within your power to change and you must accept what is outside of your control and focus on yourself and your goals. Don’t let people or situations sabotage your outlook for your future. You are a powerful being with limitless potential and all you must do is tap into it.
- It is an incredible feeling to step outside your comfort zone! Take a class, pick up a hobby, go to a party or function you wouldn’t normally attend, and allow yourself a break from stress in a whole new way. Be good to yourself, be grateful for every ounce of happiness you have, keep striving for more, and pass it on to others.
Talk to your doctor about your goals – mental and physical – and make sure they’re receptive to helping you attain your goals. If you suffer from a chronic disease that’s causing you to be shuttled from one specialist to another – don’t give up hope!
The right doctor will worry about healing you and won’t consider putting you on various medications to control your symptoms as an acceptable “solution.”
Understand your own quality of life and then put together a plan to make it better. Don’t wait another day.
REFERENCES
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/ten-ways-to-improve-your-quality-of-life.html