The key to living with asthma is to learn how to adequately control it. Depending on the severity of your asthma, learning how to control it can be a long and stressful process, but once you learn how to control your asthma, you can live a healthy and enjoyable life!
While there is no cure for asthma, there are many options for ways to control it. If you think you have asthma, check out your symptoms with these asthma symptoms, or if you already have asthma, but want to know what some treatment options are, check out these asthma treatments. In order to learn how to appropriately control your asthma, there are a few things that you should do.
Action Plan for Living with Asthma
Your doctor will help you create a plan to help you create an action plan to make living with asthma easier. An asthma action plan consists of:
- Your medications
- Instructions for medications
- Known triggers
- Previous responses to changing symptoms
- Benchmarks to measure control
- Emergency instructions
Education
The next thing to do is educate yourself. To begin, learn as much as you can about asthma, and if possible about the specific type that you have. If you have allergy-induced asthma, take the time to learn as much as you can about it and the experiences that other people have had. This is important because it gives you an initial understanding of asthma, but it does not teach you about your specific situation.
In order to learn about your situation, taking constant data is important.
- Record when you have symptoms
- Record where you have symptoms
- Keep track of triggers
- Use a peak flow meter to measure your lung function
When you have a constant supply of data, you and your doctor are better able to monitor and keep track of your progress or regression. With all of the data, you can learn more about your body, its reactions, and how it responds to environments or medications. It will also allow you to better manage any problems that may arise.
Avoid Triggers
Triggers are what prompt your asthma symptoms to appear. They can appear in almost any form, but some of the most popular include:
- Smoke
- Pollen (and other allergens)
- Exercise
- Stress
- Dry/cold air
- Specific smells
Sometimes triggers, like exercise, are impossible to avoid because they are part of a healthy lifestyle, but there are ways to reduce the impact. Reducing the level of exercise or by using a quick-relief medication before exercise can help reduce the symptoms of your asthma.
Preventative Care
Make sure that you take preventative measures to reduce the problems you experience with your asthma. This includes regularly visiting your doctor: how often your visit your doctor depends on the severity of your asthma. If your asthma is severe or uncontrolled, you typically want to visit your doctor every 1 or 2 months. For moderate asthma, every 3 to 6 months is adequate, and for mild asthma, every 6 to 12 months is usually good.
By keeping up with your stats, doctor visits can be very effective. You and your doctor can examine what is and is not going well with your current action plan and how can adjust it.
Be Flexible
With treating asthma, you want to only take enough medications for them to adequately treat your symptoms. There is often some back and forth with this as you and your doctor determine what is the best method for you, so it is important to be flexible, so you can make appropriate changes. Your asthma can change, so just because you have found a good treatment plan now, does not mean it will work for you forever.
Remember that the key to living with asthma is learning how to control it. Do what you can, so that you can live your BEST life with asthma.
