Why Your Lifestyle Matters?
Brainspan, healthspan,
lifespan
Focus on a fulfilling life
In our fast-paced lives, we often lose sight of the big picture. We can’t see the forest for the trees. We want fast, simple, and straightforward answers as well as useful and comfortable answers.
What if the “answer” is not fast, simple, convenient, or comfortable?
Years ago there was a public service announcement showing that a person’s brain was like scrambled eggs when they used illegal drugs. Now, what if your life is scrambled by poor diet, insufficient sleep, inadequate exercise, and stupefied by the pace of modern life? This situation is no simple thing, nor should you expect that a simple thing like a drug will correct the underlying problems.
Why focus on brainspan, healthspan, and lifespan?
Life becomes less fulfilling when your healthspan, the number of years you live not limited by disease, is shortened. Your heart may still be beating, but your diminished quality of life weighs heavily on your happiness, functionality, and those around you.
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How long do you want to live? Your body may be riddled with disease, and your mind may be baffled by dementia, but your heart still beats.
Traditional medicine, as embodied by medications and treatments, makes an admirable attempt to treat ailments, but for many patients, the more vital issues are lifestyle issues. Lifestyle is important for your lifespan.
Use your brain.
Brainspan ends when your brain, mentally ill, demented, or burdened with Alzheimer's disease, removes you from the joys of knowing and enjoying your friends, family, and business associates.
You sure don’t want to become a burden
to those around you.
The work is to improve and advance your brainspan and healthspan. There is increasing evidence these changes are possible, but change is necessary.
That’s why we need to treat people and not their conditions.
Unfortunately, lifestyle medicine is not fast, simple, or convenient. Nor should it be. Behavioral change, the keystone of lifestyle medicine, requires special attention.
Comfort zones require elimination.
These factors and developing science is the foundation of Lifestyle Medicine. The complexities of lifestyle changes cannot fit into the busy clinical schedule of many professionals. But it is precisely those lifestyle changes that will make medical care cheaper, safer, faster, and more productive.
Lifestyle medicine is a medical approach that uses evidence-based behavioral interventions to treat and manage chronic diseases related to lifestyle.
Guiding its practice are a set of core competencies that help primary care providers understand how lifestyle impacts health. By integrating lifestyle factors into their practice or health program design, care providers can more effectively coach patients about nutrition, physical activity, stress management, sleep, social support and environmental exposures.