
Does your treatment focus on symptoms or the actual cause of your issue?
- How often have you found yourself being tired and instead of prioritising your sleep, you instead continue to drink more coffees as a form of treatment.
- Have you ever had a headache and your treatment was to take Panadol instead of considering to drink more water?
- How often have you had a recurring pain in your body and your treatment is a massage instead of looking at the cause of your pain.
This is a treatment that is focusing on the symptom rather than the cause!
A quote comes to mind “The definition of insanity is repeating the same thing, over and over, expecting a different result”.
This is symptom-based mindset.
We must alter this mindset this to actually create lasting change to have an effective treatment.
Some symptoms of being unhealthy may be – weight gain, mental fatigue, disease and illness.
Now the typical response is to address that one symptom, maybe you have been diagnosed with high blood pressure so you start taking blood pressure medications, maybe you lack energy, constantly yawn throughout the day and live off red bulls, coffees and a few hours of sleep a night.
Symptom treating is a quick fix, one that can often lead to other areas suffering later down the track.
My approach to solving a problem is simple. I ask why, I look to understand the broader picture, often we can become so entangled in our problems e.g. knee pain – that we focus only on the knee. If we ask the question ‘why’ my knee is hurting, zoom out and look at other structures in the body and how they are functioning or is there another weak link in the body that may be contributing to the exampled knee pain.
We continue to delve deeper and deeper into the problem until we find the root cause! This is how we should be treating symptoms, by taking the time to understand the whole problem.
We can apply this model to any area of our life
Work:
- Are you finding your performance has decreased?
- Look at how you feel about your job? Do you enjoy it or even care?
- What are you doing in other areas of your life – relationships, sleep, exercise? Is one taking up more time than others?
Training:
- Are you finding you keep having a recurring injury?
- Maybe you are performing exercises with poor technique
- Or too much or too little of an exercise
- Maybe you are even compensating for another weakness in the body.
If you feel like you are struggling in an area of your health – training, balance, lifestyle – nutrition and sleep. It may be time you look for some help!
Reach out today!
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