Living well with MS is possible through lifestyle changes. As a charity, we are here to support you make the changes that are right for you.
A healthy lifestyle can improve or help manage symptoms like fatigue, pain, mood and cognitive difficulties like brain fog or slow thinking. Making small changes to what you eat, how you move, your quality of sleep or how you manage stress have all been found to affect these symptoms. As they all tend to affect each other, small improvements to one behaviour can have a positive impact overall, making daily activities more manageable.
Healthy lifestyle choices can protect your brain from further harm and its natural ‘reserves’ last longer. People with MS can lose more brain tissue than those without MS. Their brains respond more to damage, and their ‘reserves’ get used up more quickly. Things that help protect the brain, or boost its ability to heal, include eating and sleeping well, getting regular physical activity, and keeping stress under control.
Lifestyle choices have been shown to impact the risk of developing other conditions like diabetes, obesity, and heart problems. These can all negatively impact MS, affect the success of disease-modifying treatment, or even increase the risk of relapse. They have also been found to prevent up to 40% of dementia which is really positive given how common cognitive impairment is in MS. Preventing these other health issues helps better manage MS and contributes to a longer, healthier life.
Making positive lifestyle choices has been found to increase the feeling of hope, which has been linked to better resilience and empowers people with MS to feel they have more control over their choices and outcomes, regardless of their MS. It also gives them a sense of control over how they manage their MS and general health, often leading to a better quality of life. Being able to manage their MS themselves often leads to better use of healthcare systems.
