Lungs affected by COPD are very sensitive, particularly to things like respiratory irritants, physical strain, and less-than-ideal breathing conditions (such as hot or humid air). Because of this, if you have COPD, you've probably noticed that your COPD symptoms tend to flare up in certain environments or when you do certain things.

Many common habits and everyday activities can trigger COPD symptoms, and your lungs tend to get even more sensitive to these things as the disease progresses. Because of this, a vital part of learning how to manage your COPD symptoms effectively is learning how to protect your lungs from these triggers.

In some cases, that means going out of your way to avoid—or find a different approach—to activities and situations that can make your symptoms worse. Recognizing these situations can be a bit tricky, however, because many things can affect your lungs without causing obvious or immediate symptoms.

For every COPD trigger that you notice, there are likely others that you don't. Unfortunately, the hazards you don't know about can actually be the most dangerous; you can expose yourself to them over and over again without even realizing they pose a risk.

For example, most people with COPD know they're supposed to stay away from cigarette smoke, but many don't realize that using common household cleaning solutions can also harm their lungs. And that's just one of a plethora of lesser-known activities that can harm your lungs and/or exacerbate COPD symptoms.

In this guide, we've put together a list of more than a dozen different activities that can be dangerous or risky for people with COPD. We cover the little things—like sleeping in the wrong position at night—and the bigger, complex issues, like dangerous eating habits and ignoring serious symptoms that could signal a medical emergency.

Some of the things you see on this list might seem familiar, but you're bound to learn something new as you go through this guide. Our goal is to help you recognize at least a few activities that you didn't know were risky before, and to provide you with some practical tools and techniques you can use to protect yourself from those hazards in the future.

You'll find links to many expert online resources throughout this guide that you can use to learn even more about COPD hazards and what you can do to avoid them. We've also provided links to several other practical COPD health and wellness guides from our Respiratory Resource Center, where you can find even more detailed advice and information that expands on many of the topics covered in this post.

Activities & Habits You Should Avoid if You Have COPD

Cooking Without Ventilation

Many people don't realize that cooking releases smoke, oils, and other pollutants into the air that are harmful to your lungs. In fact, research shows that people who cook often—and are thus exposed to these fumes repeatedly over time—have reduced lung function, increased respiratory symptoms, and a higher risk for developing COPD.

Even short-term exposure to cooking fumes can affect your lungs and make your COPD symptoms worse. Prolonged or repeated exposure is even more risky and has the potential to cause additional long-term damage to your lungs.

This is why it's important to use proper ventilation while you cook, especially if you or anyone in your household has COPD. This can not only substantially reduce your exposure to respiratory irritants while you're cooking, but it also prevents the pollution from building up inside your home.

If you have windows in your kitchen, opening them up before you start cooking is one simple way to ventilate the room. This isn't the most efficient form of ventilation, but it will allow the fumes to drift outdoors instead of staying trapped in the room.

You can ventilate your kitchen even more efficiently if you help the air current along using a fan (facing out the window) or a built-in kitchen vent. Some kitchens also have vent hoods installed directly over the stove to whisk away cooking fumes straight at the source.

However, kitchen vents and fume hoods only work this way if they are actually connected to a pipe that takes the air outside. Unfortunately, some “vents” that come in kitchens—especially those installed under cabinets and wall-mounted microwaves—are nothing more than recirculating fans that blow the fumes right back into the room.

To learn more about how to reduce indoor air pollution, check out our guide on How to Improve Your Air Quality at Home.

Drinking Alcohol Before Bed

While there's no blanket rule saying that people with COPD shouldn't drink, you should still be a little extra cautious with alcohol if you have COPD. One reason for this is that alcohol can cause a side effect known as respiratory depression, which causes you to breathe more slowly and take more shallow breaths than you normally would.

Mild respiratory depression also happens naturally during certain stages of sleep, which is another reason why many people with COPD have increased shortness of breath and difficulty sleeping through the night. If you drink alcohol too soon before bed, it can suppress your breathing even further, making it even harder to breathe effectively while you're asleep.

This is particularly dangerous if you have a health condition like sleep apnea or COPD that also affects your ability to breathe during the night. These conditions also cause nighttime breathing problems that significantly increase your risk for nighttime oxygen desaturation (PDF link), which happens when your blood oxygen levels fall too low while you sleep.

When you add a respiratory depressant like alcohol to the mix, you're even more likely to have trouble breathing and experience low blood oxygen levels at night. Unfortunately, because it happens while you're asleep, you might not even realize that you're not getting enough oxygen at night until it starts to take a toll on your health.

In the short term, nighttime oxygen deprivation can trigger uncomfortable morning symptoms (including headache, fatigue, and shortness of breath) that can linger throughout the day and make your COPD symptoms worse. Over the long term, nighttime oxygen desaturation can put you at risk for more serious health problems like cardiovascular damage and cognitive decline.

This is why, if you have COPD, you should be extra careful about not only how much alcohol you drink, but also when you drink it. That means drinking in moderation, avoiding alcohol too close to bedtime, and being careful not to mix alcohol with other medications that can cause respiratory depression (including opioids, sleeping pills, and other sedative medications).

Showering Without Ventilation

Showering is a difficult activity for many people with COPD. The physical exertion of showering makes many people feel breathless, and it tends to get worse as the heat and humidity from the shower fill up the room.

This can be difficult cope with every time you need to bathe, but ventilating your bathroom can make it much easier to bear. That's why, before you start your shower, you should always make sure there's a way for the heat and humidity to escape.

You can do this by opening a bathroom window or, ideally, using a proper ventilation fan. If your bathroom doesn't have either, it might be worth considering getting one installed; too much humidity doesn't only make it harder to breathe, but it also encourages mold growth.

Mold tends to grow in enclosed spaces where humidity lingers, and it's a serious respiratory hazard that makes COPD symptoms worse. In order to keep your home safe, you should always vent excess humidity and look out for signs of mold growth, especially in places like bathrooms, basements, walls, ceilings, and around water faucets and pipes.

Taking Over-the-Counter Medications (Without Your Doctor's Permission)

When you have a chronic disease like COPD, you have to be very cautious about what drugs and medications you take. Even things that might seem harmless, like supplements or over-the-counter medicines, have the potential to cause dangerous side effects or interact negatively with other medications.

For example, many cold medications, allergy medications, and decongestants that you can buy at the store can cause mild respiratory depression. This side-effect is usually not too much of a concern for healthy people, but it can worsen breathing problems in people with COPD.

It's also important to be aware that certain circumstances can amplify the side-effects of over-the-counter medications, which is why you should always read the directions and warnings for every medication you take. Fore example, medications that usually only cause mild respiratory depression can cause moderate to severe respiratory depression if you take them at night, in large does, or in combination with another medication that lists respiratory depression as a potential side effect.

This highlights the danger of drug interactions, which happens when you take two medications (or a medication and a supplement) that have different effects on your body when they're combined compared to when you take them alone. Depending on the type of interaction, this can make a medication less effective, make its effects stronger, or cause additional side effects to appear.

To be on the safe side, you should never take any new medications or supplements without getting input from your doctor first. Additionally, you should always tell your doctor about every medicine, herbal product, and supplement you take, no matter how small or insignificant you think it might be.

Smoking

Smoking is a huge lung hazard—one of the biggest—and it's important to bring up even though it might seem obvious to some. We want to emphasize that quitting smoking is always beneficial for your health, no matter how many years you've been smoking and no matter how advanced your COPD has become.

Unfortunately, many people with COPD don't think it's worth it to quit. It's a common misconception that it won't make much of a difference to stop smoking once you've already developed a smoking-related disease.

However, this way of thinking is not only false, but downright dangerous. Quitting smoking at any time has numerous short-term and long term benefits for your overall health and your COPD.

Research suggests that quitting smoking can actually improve your COPD symptoms, slow down lung function decline, and generally slow down the progression of the disease. On the other hand, continuing to smoke while you have COPD can worsen your COPD symptoms, make your lungs more prone to infection (PDF link), and cause you to have more frequent COPD exacerbations.

Smoking can also affect your baseline breathing ability, as COPD patients who smoke have quicker lung function decline (PDF link). What's more, COPD isn't the only smoking-related disease you can get; if you continue smoking, you increase your risk for lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, diabetes, stroke, and more.

There's a reason that quitting smoking is considered a vital, first-line treatment for COPD, and you shouldn't take it lightly. Even though quitting smoking is hard (really, really hard!), it's more than worth all the work it takes to make it happen.

And don't worry! You don't have to figure it out all on your own; there are tons of quit-smoking resources out there you can use for help.

If you'd like to learn how to get started or how to find all the quit-smoking resources you could ever need, check out our comprehensive, 3-part guide on how to quit smoking:

• Part 1: Overcoming Doubts & Finding Resources to Help You Quit
• Part 2: Coping with Nicotine Withdrawal & Choosing a Quit Smoking Medication
• Part 3: Taking the First Steps & Strategies for Staying Smoke Free

Doing Dusty, Dirty, & Hazardous Jobs

Pretty much all allergens and small particulates, including dust, pollen, and mold, can harm your lungs and trigger COPD symptoms if you breathe them in. Many chemicals emit lung-toxic fumes as well, and they can come from unexpected places, including household products and home construction materials like treated wood, varnishes, and paint.

Because of this, people with COPD should generally try to avoid going dirty jobs, particularly work that kicks up dust (and other airborne particles) or might expose you to chemical fumes. This includes many types of home maintenance projects, including home repair, renovations, and heavy cleaning projects around the house.

Whenever possible, you should ask someone else to help you with these jobs—or at least the most risky parts—so you don't have to put your already-compromised lungs at further risk. If you have the means, you should consider hiring professionals to do hazardous construction, renovation, and cleaning jobs (e.g. mold removal) for you.

You should also take care with materials that can release hazardous fumes into your house, including many types of paints, lumber, adhesives, and even new carpets and flooring. If you can't avoid them while they're being installed or used in your home, consider staying somewhere else for awhile until the fumes have time to dissipate.

If you have no other choice but to do a risky project on your own, make sure you wear respiratory protection and—most importantly—that use the appropriate type of respiratory protection for the job. Some things are fine to do with dust masks while others require full respirators for safety, and if you choose the wrong equipment it might not offer any protection at all.

To learn more about the correct type of respiratory protection equipment to use for various jobs, you can reference this guide from the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

Going Outside When Air Pollution is High

Research shows that air pollution can have a significant impact on people with COPD; it can worsen breathing symptoms, increase your risk for exacerbation and hospitalization, and even increase your risk of death. Because of this, you should do your best to be mindful about when you go outside and try to stay indoors when your local pollution index is high.

You can find your current air pollution levels by checking your city's air quality index (AQI), which you can get from your local weather station or by looking up your zip code on airnow.gov. The air quality index is an simple, color-coded scale that tells you how healthy or unhealthy the outside air is to breathe.

In general, anytime air pollution rises above the yellow (moderate) zone, you should do two things: First, you should avoid spending time outside, and especially avoid doing any exercise or strenuous activity outdoors; that's because, when you exert yourself, you breathe in more air—and thus and more pollution—compared to when you're at rest.

Second, you should keep your doors and windows shut as much as possible on high-pollution days. You can still air out your home when air pollution is low, but if you don't check your local AQI first, you could accidentally invite all kinds of outdoor pollution to enter your home.

When you do exercise outside or do other activities outdoors, you should try to schedule them for times when air pollution is the lowest; often this is in the earlier and later hours of the day. You should also try to keep your plans flexible, that way you can easily reschedule them if the air quality ends up being too poor.

It helps if you familiarize yourself with the air quality patterns in your area, including how pollution levels tend to change throughout the day. If you look up your local air quality report on airnow.com, you can also get a breakdown of recent hour-by-hour trends.

(Image text: To see data on pollution trends in your area, you can look up your local air quality report on airnow.gov and click the button “local trends.”)

If you have seasonal allergies, you should also avoid spending too much time outside when pollen levels are high. You can look up your city or zip code on pollen.com to get all kinds of helpful allergen information, including your local pollen report, future allergen forecasts, and a breakdown of the types of pollen most prevalent in your area.

Cleaning with Common Products

Studies show that many household cleaning products release harmful fumes and aerosols that irritate your lungs and even cause permanent lung function decline. Ammonia and bleach, for example, are both lung irritants that are used in a wide range of different cleaning products.

If you have COPD, you should try to limit your exposure to these and other lung irritants as much as you can to avoid triggering COPD symptoms and doing further, unnecessary damage to your lungs. Instead, choose products that don't contain strong chemicals like ammonia and bleach, and try to find products labeled as having reduced irritants, including fewer fragrances and VOC's.

You can use the EPA's safer chemical ingredient list for reference of what types of chemicals you should seek out and which ones you should avoid. You can also look for cleaning products with the EPA's “Safer Choice” label, or browse through the EPA's catalog of these products online.

Another alternative is to make your own cleaning solutions at home using common—and safer—household products like vinegar, water, baking soda, and soap. You'll find that most cleaning jobs don't require anything fancy and can be done with simple mixtures you can make yourself at home.

To learn more about how to make your own DIY cleaning products, check out this guide on how to reduce chemical irritants in your home. There, you'll step-by-step instructions for making alternatives to several different types of commercial cleaning products, including a scrubbing solution, all-purpose cleaner, and grease-cutting solution.

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Palliative care is a type of treatment designed specifically to provide comfort and support to people with serious chronic diseases. Unfortunately, despite the many benefits it can offer COPD patients, palliative care is extremely under-utilized by people with COPD.

This is largely due to the fact that most people aren't familiar with palliative care options for people with chronic respiratory diseases. Even those that are, however, often don't realize when or if they are eligible for palliative care.

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Of course, it doesn't help that palliative care has gained a less-than-appealing reputation as a kind of hospice service for end-of-life care. To the contrary, palliative care is available for people with varying degrees of COPD severity; it's not just for those in the terminal stages of the disease.

In this post, we're going to do our best to bust that bad reputation and dispel the myths that discourage people with COPD and other chronic respiratory diseases from seeking palliative care. We'll also explore the specific ways that palliative care can help COPD patients and their loved ones better navigate the difficulties of living with chronic disease.

We'll even walk you through the process of getting into a palliative healthcare program and what you can expect when you start palliative care. We'll cover everything from how to know if you're eligible for palliative treatment, how to know if your insurance will cover it, and how to get in touch with palliative care specialists near you.

If you think that you or a loved one with COPD might benefit from palliative care, or you're just interested in learning more about what it has to offer, this post is meant for you. We believe that every person with COPD deserves top-notch treatment, and we hope that information in this guide will encourage more COPD patients to consider palliative treatment.

What is Palliative Care?

Palliative care is essentially a special branch of healthcare dedicated to helping people cope with the difficulties of living with severe and long-lasting illnesses. It includes a wide range of services that can be tailored to meet the specific needs and concerns of individual patients.

Here are some examples of common services and treatments offered through palliative care:

• Symptom relief (including both symptoms caused by the disease and side-effects of medications)
• Pain relief
• Emotional and psychological support
• Physical/occupational therapy

Palliative Care Versus Curative Care

Palliative care is often differentiated from “curative” care due to subtle—yet important—differences in how the two branches of medicine approach patient care. While curative care tends to focus on treating patients' underlying health problems (e.g. improving lung function and preventing exacerbations), palliative care focuses on improving patient comfort and quality of life (e.g. relieving chest pain and reducing breathlessness sensations).

Put another way, curative care practitioners are trained to balance the risks of medication and treatments with tangible health improvements (e.g. increased lung function and physical strength). Because of this, they are often more hesitant to prescribe treatments (e.g. oxygen therapy) when they aren't strictly necessary for the patient's health.

On the other hand, palliative care practitioners are specially trained to balance the risks of treatments with the patients' subjective well-being in addition to their physical health. This makes them better equipped to prescribe treatments that reduce pain and suffering resulting from complex, severe, and life-threatening illnesses.

That said, there is not exactly a hard line separating curative and palliative care. They are not mutually exclusive, for example, and there is often overlap between the treatments used in palliative and curative care.

Some people, particularly those those with chronic, lifelong diseases (like COPD), receive both curative and palliative care at the same time. Some only receive one or the other; for example, some patients with incurable illnesses (for which there is no known treatment) are solely treated with palliative care.

Some patients switch from curative to palliative care suddenly (e.g. after a major diagnosis) while others make a gradual transition from curative to palliative care. In the case of chronic diseases like COPD, this transition usually follows the progression of the illness, starting in the later stages of the disease.

Who Benefits from Palliative Care?

Palliative care is available for people with a wide range of health conditions, especially serious, chronic, and terminal diseases. Contrary to popular belief, however, you don't have to have a life-threatening condition to benefit; palliative care can help at any stage of a chronic illness, including the earlier stages of COPD and other chronic respiratory diseases.

Here's a list of some common health conditions that can be treated with palliative care:

• COPD and other chronic lung diseases (e.g. cystic fibrosis)
• Heart disease
• Both curable and incurable cancers
• Alzheimer's and dementia
• Multiple sclerosis
• AIDS

If you think you might be interested in palliative care, don't be afraid to bring it up with your doctor. It's never too early or too late to start the conversation and learn about palliative care options that can help you (whether now or in the future).

What Does Palliative Care Look Like?

Because palliative care is tailored to individual needs and circumstances, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Palliative care can take many different forms and every person's experience receiving palliative treatment is unique.

Most commonly, palliative care is provided by hospitals, hospices, and long-term care facilities because these are the places that tend to treat patients with the most severe symptoms and advanced forms of disease. However, you can also get palliative care from outpatient facilities; in some cases, you can even get basic palliative treatments (such as pain relief) from your usual doctor and/or COPD treatment team.

Palliative Care for COPD

Now that you know what palliative care is and who it's meant for, let's take a closer look at what palliative care looks like specifically for people with chronic respiratory conditions like COPD.

In the following sections, we'll discuss how palliative care is administered to COPD patients, including specific treatments and benefits that people with COPD and other respiratory diseases can get from palliative care. This should give you a better idea of what to expect—and what you can look forward to—if and/or when you (or a loved one) decides to seek palliative care.

How Can COPD Patients Benefit from Palliative Care

Most of the palliative care treatments for COPD are aimed at relieving the burden of the physical and mental symptoms caused by their disease. The benefits of these treatments include:

• Reduced chest pain
• Reduced fatigue
• Reduced shortness of breath
• Improved physical comfort
• Improved sleep
• Improved mental health (e.g. reduced anxiety and depression)
• Improved overall quality of life

Here are some of common COPD symptoms that can be treated with palliative care:

• Chest pain
• Coughing
• Shortness of breath
• Poor appetite & difficulty eating
• Poor sleep
• Fatigue
• Anxiety
• Depression

Palliative care can also have a downstream effect that benefits your loved ones, especially those who have taken on caretaker roles. When your primary needs are being taken care of by palliative treatment, your family doesn't have to worry as much or shoulder as much of the care-giving burden, leaving more room to establish and strengthen normal friend and family bonds.

What Kinds of Palliative Care Treatments Are There for People with COPD?

Palliative care for COPD can include a wide variety of therapies and treatments. This includes treatments designed specifically for COPD and respiratory disease patients as well as generalized treatments designed to treat common symptoms (e.g. pain and fatigue) affecting people with chronic disease.

Generalized palliative care treatments that can help COPD patients include medications and physical therapies to relieve chest pain, muscle soreness, and physical fatigue. You can also get mental health support for psychological problems (e.g. health-related anxiety and depression), which are very common among people with COPD.

You can also get help with problems related to appetite and eating, which are common in people with advanced COPD. A palliative care team can, for example, get you working with dietary and nutrition specialists that can provide you with a tailored meal plan and personalized dietary advice.

COPD-specific palliative treatments include efforts to reduce the discomfort of breathing and shortness of breath with medications such as inhalers, opioid medications, and supplemental oxygen. It can also include physical therapy and respiratory disease education that teaches skills for managing symptoms and carrying out daily tasks.

There are also treatments for patients who struggle with shortness of breath while sleeping or otherwise have difficulty getting restful sleep. These include sleep-inducing medications and respiratory therapies (e.g. CPAP, BiPAP, and supplemental oxygen therapy) that help you breathe easier while you sleep.

Some treatments that palliative care can provide are not typically offered by doctors that practice curative COPD care. These include opiate medications, which studies show can significantly reduce shortness of breath in (some) severely breathless patients, especially those in the later stages of COPD.

Of course, opiates have many health risks and, ultimately, only treat diseases symptoms; they don't treat the underlying cause of the disease. This makes many curative healthcare practitioners hesitant to prescribe them in the absence of a compelling physical health need.

Palliative care specialists, on the other hand, are better equipped to evaluate the risks of opiates and other medications for patients compared to the subjective benefits (e.g. reduced patient suffering) even if they aren't exactly necessary to treat the disease. They are also specially trained to treat symptoms in the most complex and difficult situations, including in patients with multiple co-morbid diseases (a circumstance that is common among people with COPD).

In some cases, palliative care can offer COPD patients easier access to supplemental oxygen therapy, which is normally only prescribed to treat low blood oxygen levels. Patients receiving palliative care, however, are sometimes prescribed supplemental oxygen to relieve breathlessness, even if their blood oxygen levels aren't quite low enough to justify it on its own.

Myths and Misconceptions About Palliative Care

Palliative care is a commonly misunderstood healthcare service, which is likely due to the fact that relatively few people have had real-life experiences with palliative care. As a result, many people have false ideas about palliative treatment, including what it is, who it's meant for, and what kinds of symptoms it can treat.

These misconceptions discourage some people from seeking palliative care despite that they could benefit from it significantly. So, before we share some tips for how to get started with palliative treatment (the final part of this guide), let's take a minute to discuss—and bust—some of the most common myths about palliative care.

Palliative Care is Only for People Who Are Dying

Unfortunately, one of the main reasons why people with chronic diseases don't get palliative care is that they simply don't realize it's an option. Either they don't know that it exists, or they (mistakenly) assume that they're not sick enough; they think that palliative care is meant for other kinds of patients, not them.

That's because palliative care has a reputation of being just like hospice, a holdover from when that used to be what palliative care was for. As we mentioned earlier, palliative care originated as an end-of-life health service for terminally ill patients, and this is still a major function of palliative care today.

However, the scope of palliative care has expanded significantly over the years to include services for patients with a wide range of health conditions. As a result, palliative care is now available to people with less severe diseases, including people with any stage or severity of COPD.

Unfortunately, many people still make the false assumption that you have to be on your deathbed (or at least getting near it) to qualify for palliative care. Luckily, many healthcare professionals are aware of this problem and are working to raise awareness about the broad scope of palliative care.

Accepting Palliative Care Means I've Given Up

Some patients are afraid to accept palliative care (or even downright refuse it) because they're afraid of what it might mean. For some people, starting palliative care feels like they're losing or giving up something, or even giving in to their disease.

But the truth is that accepting help when you need it isn't a weakness, nor is it an admission of defeat. In fact, it's the farthest thing from it; it means that you're still willing to fight for your own well-being, that you still have hope your future and maintaining a good quality of life.

Of course, it can still be very scary to face the reality of living with a chronic illness, which is something you just can't avoid in palliative care. But ignoring it won't change reality or make anything better—it will only make things worse by discouraging you from getting the help and support that could allow you to live a happier, more comfortable life with COPD.

Palliative Care is Useless

Hopefully we've done enough so far to convince you that palliative care isn't useless, but it remains a common worry among those that are hesitant to accept palliative care. They worry that it's a waste of time, that it won't be able to help them, or that it's not worth the extra effort and expense.

Of course, while not everyone who gets palliative care will see major benefits, you shouldn't assume that it won't work without at least figuring out if it's true. As we've discussed already, palliative care can provide all kinds of worthwhile benefits to respiratory disease patients, ranging from improved breathing symptoms to increased appetite and more restful sleep.

Additionally, what we've talked about so far is far from comprehensive; palliative care can provide benefits for people dealing with all kinds of different symptoms, ailments, and diseases that we haven't mentioned in this guide. In fact, palliative care is designed to provide solutions for uncommon and difficult-to-manage symptoms which haven't (or can't) be adequately addressed by curative care.

No matter what symptoms or ailments you're suffering from, it's worth looking into whether or not they can be treated with palliative care. You never know until you try; worst case scenario, nothing changes. But in the best case scenario, you could get some real, meaningful relief.

How to Get Palliative Care for COPD and Other Chronic Respiratory Diseases

Getting palliative care is not always a straightforward process. It can be very difficult for people—especially those with chronic illnesses like COPD—to know when they need palliative treatment. And, even when you do, it's not always clear how to access that kind of care.

So, in these final sections, we'd like to take a closer look at what it takes to get palliative treatment for COPD. We'll discuss how to get process started, how to manage the costs of treatment, and everything else you need to know about how to secure palliative care for yourself or a loved one with COPD.

Talk to Your Doctor

If you are interested in palliative care, the first step is to talk to your doctor and/or your COPD treatment team to figure out when and if palliative care is appropriate. As we discussed earlier in this guide, the answers to those questions are different for every patient and depend on each individuals' circumstances and needs.

Unfortunately, there's no easy way to pinpoint an exact time in the course of COPD treatment when you should begin palliative care. That's why it's up to you and your COPD treatment team to figure out what's right for you.

As one research review on palliative care for COPD put it, “there is often no clearly identifiable point at which [COPD] management changes from active supportive therapy to palliative care, and it's usually a matter of experienced clinical judgment.” This is why it's important to discuss future treatment options with your COPD treatment team early on and throughout the course of your COPD care.

Clear and open communication with your treatment team is key for ensuring that they are aware of—and taking care of—all your healthcare needs. They will be an integral part of the process when and if you begin palliative treatment, so don't be afraid to communicate with your doctor(s) about where your treatment is headed and when you should start thinking about palliative care.

Get in Touch with a Palliative Care Specialist

If you are a COPD patient that only needs basic palliative treatment, your regular doctor and/or treatment team might administer those treatments on their own. In fact, many COPD patients receiving standard COPD care are receiving some kind of palliative treatment whether or not it's explicitly referred to as “palliative care.”

In cases where you need more extensive palliative support, your doctor might refer you to a palliative care specialist. If you need help, your doctor can get you in touch with palliative care services in your area that can offer the kinds of services you need.

You can also inquire about palliative care services anytime you are hospitalized or receiving treatment in an assisted living facility. You can also locate palliative care specialists near you on your own through your insurance provider's directory or by searching your city, state, or zip code in the web directory at Get Palliative Care.

Securing Insurance Coverage for Palliative Care

Unfortunately, we can't talk about the realities of accessing palliative care in America without also discussing the financial costs. Just like every kind of healthcare, palliative care can get expensive, and the vast majority of people don't have the up-front cash to handle major medical expenses on their own.

Because of this, many people's ability to get palliative care depends on whether or not their health insurance will cover the cost. And because health insurance benefits vary widely between different plans and providers (even Medicare plans can vary state by state), there's no way to know for sure what your insurance provider will cover without looking at your personal benefit plan.

Fortunately, most medicare and private insurance plans cover at least some palliative care services; unfortunately, not everyone qualifies for coverage. Medicare, for example, usually only covers palliative care for terminally ill patients who are nearing end of life and are no longer receiving curative care.

Some private insurance plans have broader criteria and will approve palliative treatment for patients in less severe circumstances. It all depends on your particular benefit plan, which is why it's vital to review all of your insurance plan's rules, benefits, and exceptions before starting palliative care.

If you are ever unsure about whether a particular healthcare service (palliative care or otherwise) is covered by your insurance, calling your health insurance representative directly is the best way to find out. The closer you work with your insurance company to cover all your bases, the less likely you are to get blindsided by surprise bills, claim rejections, and out-of-network fees.

Conclusion

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For many people fighting chronic lung diseases like COPD, the hardest battles are not the physical ones, but the ones that happen inside the mind. Coping with a disease that disrupts your breathing—a basic life function—is far from easy, and it takes a major mental toll on many people with the disease.

Though COPD is usually thought of as a disease that affects the physical body first and foremost, it's known to come with a long list of psychological side-effects and risks. These include clinically-recognized disorders like anxiety and depression as well as other forms of mental and emotional distress that are a bit more difficult to quantify and define.

Many people with COPD find themselves consumed with worry, for instance, or over-focusing on the difficulties and losses in their lives. While this is a common, natural reaction shared by many people with chronic diseases, it's not a healthy, happy, or sustainable way to go through life long term.

Luckily, there are many healthy, effective tools for coping with COPD and the sometimes overwhelming emotional challenges of living with the disease. In this post, we're going to focus on one method in particular: gratitude exercises, which are proven to help improve happiness and emotional well-being.

Though little-known and under-appreciated, gratitude exercises are backed by a great deal of research that supports the idea that gratitude—when practiced correctly and consistently—can improve a variety of different aspects of mental health. In particular, gratitude exercises can make it easier to cope with misfortune and help you find more contentment and appreciation in life in spite of your COPD.

Why Gratitude?

At first glance, gratitude practice might sound like a strange solution for people who struggle to cope with the mental and physical strain of COPD. We understand how it might sound ironic—or even condescending—to suggest that people should feel grateful while dealing with a debilitating, chronic disease.

Certainly, we're not saying the people with COPD should be grateful for their disease, nor that people with COPD should feel any obligation to be grateful at all. However, gratitude is a recognized psychological intervention, and it's something that anyone can practice by doing simple exercises at home.

Practicing gratitude also doesn't mean you're supposed to feel grateful all the time. It's not meant to invalidate your feelings, replace negative emotions, or even drown out unpleasant thoughts. Instead, gratitude practice is meant to help you access more positive emotions in addition to the negative ones, and to help you see the good things even when the bad things are hard to see past.

According to one blogger who writes about their experiences with chronic illness, "It is not easy to feel thankful when we are chronically ill; in fact, sometimes we feel cheated out of life." However, she explains, that's all the more reason to practice gratitude, which, like any skill, can be honed and improved over time.

Practicing gratitude helps you look at the world through a different lens—one that helps you see beyond your struggles and recognize the good things in your life. In this way, gratitude practice helps you build a more positive outlook on life in general, which can help you keep hope and happiness alive no matter how bad things might seem.

What Does Gratitude Have to Do With Mental Health?

Research on gratitude shows that it has a variety of mental health benefits, and many people with COPD report finding comfort and relief in gratitude. Of course, that doesn't mean gratitude practice works for everyone, but it does suggest it's a worthwhile option for people who struggle with mental and emotional health because of their COPD.

Gratitude is an important concept in the field of positive psychology, a sub-set of psychological research that focuses on identifying traits and behaviors that support positive mental well-being. This area of psychology is all about strengthening positive traits (reinforcing the things that make people happy) rather than fixing negative traits (correcting the things that make people unhappy).

In the scope of positive psychology, the purpose of gratitude is not to treat any specific mental problem or disorder, but to help people cultivate habits and perspectives that promote better general mental health. Of course, we're not suggesting that gratitude practice is a substitute for mental health treatment, or that gratitude alone is enough to overcome the (often) enormous burden of COPD-related emotional distress.

While gratitude can be a helpful tool for those struggling with mental problems, it's not enough to treat serious emotional problems or mental illnesses on its own. If you suffer from a mental illness like anxiety or depression, or you are unable to cope with the mental burden of COPD on your own, you should first seek proper treatment from a trained mental health professional.

If you'd like to learn more about mental health treatment for COPD or other coping methods to try, check out the following guides from our respiratory resource center:

• Coping with COPD
• Mental health treatment options for people with COPD
• Mind-body exercises for COPD

What Does it Mean to Practice Gratitude?

We often think of gratitude as something we show to others, but gratitude is also something you can practice all by—and for—yourself. That's what this guide is all about: how gratitude as a personal practice can help you feel better and cope better with the mental difficulties that often come with COPD.

In the simplest sense, gratitude practice is simply the act recognizing positive things in your life. It's about seeing the good things through the bad and taking time to actively look for—and spend some time thinking about—things in your life that you can be thankful for.

Personal gratitude practice is not about expressing thanks to others; it's about using gratitude as a personal tool to improve your mental well-being.

More specifically, however, “gratitude practice” can mean doing structured gratitude exercises that help you “practice” gratitude in a more deliberate, goal-oriented way. These gratitude exercises (also known as “gratitude interventions”) are designed to help you harness the benefits of gratitude to improve your psychological health.

Gratitude exercises come in many shapes and forms, including written activities (such as gratitude journaling) and more abstract thought-based techniques (such as gratitude meditation) We'll show you how to practice these and other effective gratitude exercises a bit later in this guide.

Of course, it's possible to practice gratitude on your own without a strategy; however, studies suggest that you're likely to get more from your gratitude practice if you do it in a structured way. Gratitude exercises provide a framework to help you practice gratitude consistently and put the practice to work in your life.

As the authors of one study put it (PDF link), “relatively simple intentional changes in one’s thoughts and behaviors can precipitate meaningful increases in happiness.” That's what gratitude practice is all about: improving your mental well-being by taking deliberate actions to recognize and reflect on the things you have to feel thankful for.

How to Find Gratitude Under the Shadow of Chronic Disease

So far we've discussed the meaning of personal gratitude and what gratitude exercises are, but we haven't yet discussed what it really means to feel grateful, or what kinds of things you should feel thankful for when yo have COPD. These are personal questions that form the core of gratitude practice, and the answers depend on your depend on your experiences, your circumstances, and what you value in life.

Unfortunately, many people with COPD and other chronic diseases have faced so much misfortune that that they lose touch with what it's like to grateful. When your life is full of health problems and hardship, it can even feel impossible to find anything that you could feel thankful for.

However, times like these are often when you need the gratitude the most. Even if it seems like you don't have much to appreciate, doing gratitude exercises can help you fine-tune your gratitude senses and teach yourself how to recognize the good things, both big and small.

You'll likely be surprised at all the positive things you can find when you're actively looking for them instead of focusing on the problems and hardships in your life. With practice, you can learn to find joy and contentment in even the most mundane and unexpected places, like the pleasure of taking your first sip of morning coffee or the satisfaction of practicing self-care.

This is especially important for people with COPD, many of whom live with constant reminders of their disease and what their body can't do. Gratitude practice can teach you to love and appreciate your body more by helping you acknowledge all of the amazing, helpful things that your body can do.

That's what gratitude practice is all about—getting in the habit of looking out for the good things no matter how grim and hopeless your circumstances might seem. Sometimes it just takes some time to build up your gratitude muscle before you can break outside the box of negative thinking and explore the full positive potential in your life.

Just know that there is no right or wrong way to feel personal gratitude, and there's no right or wrong thing to feel grateful for. What matters most is what you think is worthy of gratitude, and how you can put those feelings of gratitude to work in your life.

The Benefits of Gratitude for People with COPD

The psychological sciences have long recognized the potential of gratitude to improve mental well-being, and it's been the topic of a great deal of studies over the years. In fact, there's a wide body of academic research on gratitude that spans the fields of positive psychology, mental health treatment, and quality-of-life improvements for people with chronic diseases.

Before we go on, however, it's important to clarify that there's an important distinction between looking at the benefits of gratitude (as an existing feeling or trait) versus the benefits of gratitude interventions (exercises that focus on gratitude and appreciation). Both are important for understanding how gratitude effects well-being, but they tell very different stories about what the benefits of gratitude mean.

Studies on the benefits of gratitude itself essentially describe the differences between people with different gratitude tendencies; they compare the well-being of people who have more gratitude to the well-being of people who have less. However, studies on the benefits of gratitude interventions actually measure how people's well-being changes in response to gratitude exercises, and how gratitude can be used to increase people's well-being.

In other words, the benefits of gratitude alone may only apply to those who are already grateful people; they don't tell us much—if anything—about what gratitude exercises can do. The benefits of gratitude exercises, however, can apply to anyone who completes a gratitude intervention, regardless of natural gratitude tendencies or baseline gratitude levels.

It's also important to note that, in general, the size of gratitude benefits tends to be modest; however, that doesn't mean that gratitude can't still have a significant positive effect on people's lives. Gratitude isn't exactly a game-changer, but it is an effective tool for building healthier mental habits and introducing more positive feelings and perspectives into your life.

Improved Emotional and General Well-being

Two things that research consistently finds about gratitude is that it tends to foster positive emotions and that people who feel more gratitude tend to have better mental health. Research also shows that gratitude exercises are associated with a variety of other benefits related to personal well-being.

Numerous studies, for example, have found that people who participate in simple, structured gratitude exercises—such as writing down what they're thankful for every day—tend to experience more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions than people who don't. Studies also show that gratitude interventions can increase people's general happiness and satisfaction with their lives.

One large meta-review that analyzed 38 high-quality gratitude studies offers a great summary of the effects of gratitude interventions, including how well they work and what their benefits are. The study identifies nearly a dozen specific benefits of gratitude practices, including:

• Increased gratitude
• Increased happiness
• More positive feelings
• Fewer negative feelings
• Reduced depression
• Increased well-being
• Increased life satisfaction
• Increased optimism
• Increased relationship quality

The meta-review also confirms that these positive effects aren't just temporary; in fact, they seem to be just as strong when measured at 6 months after the gratitude intervention as when they're measured just two weeks after the exercise is done. One study on older adults, for example, found that a two-week gratitude intervention resulted in improved well-being that persisted for at least 30 days.

This emotional boost is is something that many people with COPD could benefit from, particularly those who tend to feel hopeless or pessimistic about their condition. By helping you learn how to think and feel more positively, gratitude practice can help you break free from the cycle of negativity and despair that so often plagues people living with chronic diseases.

Increased Resilience

Research shows that gratitude is an effective tool for coping with hardship, including the hardship of living with chronic illness. One study, for example, found that feelings of gratitude are associated with a reduced risk of depression in people with chronic disease.

This is likely due to the the fact that gratitude fosters positive feelings, and positive feelings make it easier to cope when things get tough. This is part of the “broaden and build” model in psychology, which suggests that experiencing positive emotions creates a kind of “reserve” of positive feelings that you can use to help yourself feel better in times of need (PDF link).

In other words, doing activities (like gratitude exercises) that generate positive emotions now can make you more resilient to hardships in the future. This is particularly helpful for people with COPD and other chronic diseases whose lives are often filled with struggles big and small, both in the context of daily living (e.g. chronic discomfort and gradual physical decline) and in the context of managing their disease (e.g. hospitalizations and unpleasant treatments like oxygen therapy).

Gratitude exercises can help you build up the mental fortitude you need to cope with these struggles and get the most out of life. The stronger your mental health and skills in positive thinking, the better you'll be able to deal with whatever troubles that life (and COPD) throws your way.

Improved Relationships

Another benefit of gratitude that's worth mentioning is improved relationships. Several studies have shown that gratitude interventions can improve relationship quality and satisfaction, in part helping you appreciate your bonds with other people more.

This is an important benefit for people with COPD, who often feel isolated at a time when they need other people the most. Who knows? Practicing gratitude could help bring you closer to your loved ones or help you discover new sources of love and support that you didn't even know you had before.

Improved Sleep

A number of studies have investigated the impact of gratitude on physical health measures like blood pressure or sleep quality, but results so far are inconclusive at best. Unfortunately, there is very little research in this area, since most studies (understandably) focus on the mental health benefits of gratitude rather than physical health.

However, several studies suggest that gratitude interventions can improve sleep quality. This makes sense, since we know that gratitude can have a variety of psychological benefits, and research shows that sleep quality is closely connected to psychological health.

Other studies suggest that gratitude interventions might be able to improve other physical factors such as blood pressure, asthma control, or eating behaviors. However, based on the evidence found so far, many researchers doubt that these benefits are substantial, if they exist at all.

Improved Quality of Life for People with COPD

Unfortunately, very few studies have looked at the implications of gratitude and gratitude interventions for COPD patients specifically. Those that have, however, have come up with similar results to those found in other gratitude studies.

One study, for example, found that people with COPD who are predisposed to feel gratitude tend to have a better quality of life than those who don't share that trait. Researchers from one study specifically recommended gratitude exercises as a means for COPD patients to "work toward more flexible, positive thinking through the use of concrete tools."

This suggests that gratitude is not only beneficial for people with chronic diseases, but that gratitude exercises can be an effective tool for coping with COPD specifically. This is echoed in the personal testimonies of COPD patients (on sites like copd.net) who have found and hope and healing through gratitude.

To sum it all up, gratitude helps you appreciate what you have and feel more satisfied with your life and relationships, even when things are difficult because of your COPD. Doing activities that foster gratitude and other positive emotions can also also make you more resilient to adversity, making it easier to cope with health-related misfortunes such as hospitalization or COPD-related physical decline.

Potential Drawbacks of Gratitude Practice

While gratitude can be a helpful tool for good, it can sometimes backfire if used in the wrong way. For example, focusing on too much on gratitude—or letting it become a rigid way of thinking—can undermine other valid thoughts and emotions you have.

You might start to think “I shouldn't think these negative thoughts, I should feel grateful!” which can just make you feel guilty for feeling bad. That's why gratitude isn't supposed to be used to replace negative feelings, but rather to add more positive feelings and thoughts into your life.

You shouldn't ever feel pressured to feel grateful; it's okay to feel how you feel, even if you feel bad, and even if you have lots of things to be grateful for. In fact, it's important to let yourself experience unpleasant emotions without judgment or shame, and to make peace with your negative feelings rather than wishing them away.

According to the psychotherapist Katie Willard Virant, "to be thankful for what one possesses does not mean that one cannot simultaneously feel grief for what one has lost.” She explains how her experiences have taught her that gratitude does not necessarily put a stop to mourning, but rather “[places] it into a context that [makes] it more bearable.”

Another thing you should avoid during gratitude practice is comparing yourself to other people, which often leads to unnecessary judgment and guilt. For example, you might end up thinking, “Some people have illnesses that are worse than mine, so I shouldn't feel so depressed about having COPD!”

It's important to remember that your feelings—whatever they are—are valid, no matter whether or not other people have it better or worse than you. In fact, there's no need to pass any judgment at all about what you “should” or “shouldn't” feel grateful for. Whatever you can find to appreciate within yourself and your own circumstances is worthwhile, no matter what other people's circumstances might be.

As you practice gratitude, it's important to check in every once in awhile to make sure it's helping and working for you. Gratitude practice isn't for everyone, and it's only worth doing if it actually helps you feel better, not worse.

How to Practice Gratitude

Now that we've discussed the merits and reasoning behind using gratitude as a coping method for COPD, let's take a closer look at some different techniques for practicing gratitude. In the following sections, we'll introduce you to several simple gratitude exercises along with some helpful tips for how to get started on your own.

Like most types of mental health and coping techniques, everyone's experience is different, and different methods tend to work for different people. So, if you're new to gratitude practice (and even if you're not), you might need to try out more than one method before it sticks.

Gratitude works best when you practice it frequently; ideally, you should try to do a gratitude exercise every day or at least a few times per week. You might find it easier to make it a habit if you integrate the exercises into an existing daily routine, such as your usual self-care regimen or bedtime preparations.

Also keep in mind that none of these practices are set in stone; feel free to tweak, adjust, and combine these exercises—and any others you come up with—however you see fit. What's important is to find a technique that feels meaningful and resonates with you.

Daily Gratitude Reflections

Doing daily gratitude reflections is probably the easiest way to practice gratitude: all you have to do is spend a few minutes at the end of every day to think back on good experiences and the things you have to appreciate. It's a great place to start if you're new to gratitude practice since it's quick, simple, and doesn't take any special skills or supplies.

The goal of these reflections is to put yourself in a mindset of positivity and gratitude long enough to come up with at least a few specific things that you feel thankful for. Those things can be just about anything: something good that happened to you, something that's made you happy recently, or just about anything positive you've might have noticed or experienced throughout the day.

You might find these gratitude reflections more difficult some days than others, such as when you feel sick or things just aren't going your way. However, it gets easier to access feelings of gratitude—even on the bad days—over time as you practice putting yourself in the mindset of actively seeking out the good things in your life.

Gratitude Journaling

Gratitude journaling is one of the most common and well-studied methods for practicing gratitude. It's basically just like gratitude reflection but with one extra step: you have to write down the things you are thankful for, or at least write down your thoughts about good things you've noticed or experienced throughout the day.

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The need for a healthy diet is something that every person shares, young and old, sick and healthy, and everything in between. However, the importance of good nutrition grows as we get older, and it becomes critical for many people living with chronic diseases like COPD.

People with COPD need to be particularly careful to get enough calories and nutrients to support their lungs and other body processes that are affected by the disease. COPD also makes you prone to a variety of diet-related problems, including under-nutrition, weight gain, and weight loss.

However, health and nutrition can get complicated, and sticking to a healthy diet isn't an easy thing to do. If you're like many people, the idea of putting together a healthy, well-balanced meal might feel intimidating, or you might not even quite know where to begin.

That's why we've put together this guide to help people with COPD plan healthy meals and get all the nutrition they need. In this post, we explain not only what a healthy COPD diet looks like, but we also show you how to put together healthy meals on the fly at home.

We also present a variety of practical meal ideas and examples of healthy and versatile dishes you can prepare on your own and modify as you please. These, along with the additional guides and helpful resources linked throughout this guide, should give you everything you need to get started eating a healthier diet that improves—rather than exacerbates—your COPD.

The Cornerstones of Good Nutrition for COPD

Before we start looking at some specific COPD-healthy dishes and meal plans, it's important to have a general grasp of what a healthy diet for someone with COPD looks like. That doesn't mean you have to be a diet guru, but you should know some general principles of nutrition and how to put together a balanced meal.

You should also be aware of the different ways that your diet and eating habits can affect your COPD and worsen symptoms like shortness of breath. We'll address these and a variety of other important dietary considerations in the sections below before we dive into our list of healthy meal examples and some practical diet recommendations for people with COPD.

Balance Your Food Groups (Protein, Fat, & Carbs)

If you look up nutritional guidelines—which you can find online from a variety of government and health organizations—they contain a list of all the vital components that make up a healthy diet. They tell you everything from what categories of food to eat, down to the exact amount of vitamins and minerals you should take in on a daily basis.

Because this information is readily available from lots of great sources, we're not going to go into them in great detail here. However, we do want to highlight some of the most important principles you need to know in order to learn how to create balanced, nutritious meals.

Macronutrient Proportions

First, you should strive for a healthy balance of the three major macronutrients in your diet: proteins, fats, and carbohydrates (also known as carbs). Health experts recommend spreading out your daily calories between these nutrient groups, aiming for the following (approximate) percentages:

• About 20% of your diet should come from protein; high-protein foods include meats, seafood, eggs, beans, peas, nuts, and soy.
• About 30% of your diet should come from fat; this includes fats found naturally in foods like dairy, meat, eggs, and nuts, and also added fats like butter and vegetable oils.
• About 50% of your diet should come from carbs, which are found in a variety of foods including fruits, vegetables, dairy, and grains—however, people with COPD may benefit from a diet with fewer carbs (we discuss this in more detail the next section just below)

Healthy Sources of Nutrients

Second, you should be familiar with which foods from each of these nutrients groups are more or less healthy to eat. Here are a few examples of some healthy vs unhealthy sources of protein, fat, and carbs:

• Whole grain carbohydrates (e.g. whole grain breads and pastas) are healthier than simple, refined grains (e.g. white pastas and breads).
• Lean proteins (e.g. chicken and fish) and unprocessed meats are generally healthier than fatty proteins (e.g. beef and lamb) and processed meats (e.g. sausage, deli meat, and other cured meats).
• Unsaturated fats (e.g. oils and other fats that are liquid at room temperature) are generally healthier for you and your heart than saturated fats (e.g. butter, lard, and other fats that are solid at room temperature).

Major Food Groups and Serving Sizes

Third, you should know what the basic, top-level food groups are and how many portions of each you should eat each day. Keep in mind that what counts as a single portion varies among different types of food within the group.

You can learn more about correct serving sizes on choosemyplate.gov and in the table just below.

Here's an overview of what US guidelines for daily servings say:

As you plan your meals and snacks, make it your goal to choose foods that help you fulfill the daily requirements for each food group. You don't have to be perfect, either; approximating your portions and and getting as close as possible to these targets is a perfectly healthy goal.

Foods and Ingredients to Avoid

Finally, you should know what kinds of foods are unhealthy, or unhealthy in large amounts, and do your best to limit them in your diet. These include things like excess sodium, too many simple carbs, added oils, added sugar, and trans-fats.

Foods and Ingredients to Avoid:

• Fried foods
• Heavily processed foods
• Sugary drinks
• Foods high in salt
• Foods high in sugar and simple carbohydrates
• Foods high in saturated fats
• All sources of trans fats
• Foods with added oils and fats
• Too much caffeine
• Too much alcohol

Limit Carbohydrates for Better Breathing

Most people with COPD don't need to follow a special diet, and should be perfectly healthy following the general nutritional guidelines set by the USDA. However, there is one notable exception: some people with COPD may benefit from a diet with fewer carbohydrates.

Because of the nature of how the body processes carbohydrates, eating carbs causes your body to produce more carbon dioxide than when you eat proteins or fats. Because carbon dioxide is a waste product that has to be processed by the lungs, high-carb foods put extra strain on your respiratory system, forcing your lungs to work harder and use up more energy.

If you have COPD, this translates to increased shortness breath, since your damaged lungs are already struggling to process oxygen and carbon dioxide fast enough to meet your body's needs. In fact, studies show that relatively small changes in carbohydrate consumption can have significant effects on COPD symptoms, with more carbs causing notable increases in breathlessness and reduced exercise tolerance.

Because of this, a low-carbohydrate diet can be beneficial for people with COPD, improving their lungs' efficiency and reducing shortness of breath. That means reducing your intake of high-carbohydrate foods (such as grains, beans, and carb-heavy fruits and veggies), and replacing them with low-carb alternatives and more healthy proteins and fats.

You'll find more tips for reducing carbs later on in this guide, both in our sample meal ideas and in our section on practical diet & cooking tips.

Aim for Variety

Although daily diet recommendations can get very specific, that doesn't mean you need to go overboard tracking every little thing, nor do you need to stress about meeting the exact targets every single day. Unless you have specific instructions from a doctor or dietitian, getting the right balance of nutrients on average is perfectly acceptable, and will prevent the vast majority of nutrient deficiencies.

In fact, most people are able to get a sufficient amount (PDF link) of vitamins and nutrients without tracking their diet too closely. That's because, in general, most people eat a wide enough variety of foods to supply their bodies with everything they need.

Of course, this laissez-faire approach won't work if your diet is too unbalanced. If you're not careful, a diet that's too heavy in one thing or too light in another can lead to nutrient deficiencies, which can be particularly dangerous for people with COPD.

An easy way to prevent this, however, is to always strive for variety in your diet. That means not only eating plenty of nutritious foods, but also eating a lot of different kinds of healthy foods with different types of micronutrients, which include vitamins, minerals, and metals like iron and zinc.

It helps to familiarize yourself with the various food sub-categories, which are simply smaller groups within a food group that have similar nutrient profiles. For example, the USDA divides vegetables into 5 separate categories and recommends that you eat a certain amount from each group every week.

Here is a summary of the weekly vegetable sub-group guidelines for adults:

• Dark green vegetables: 1.5 to 2 cups per week
• Red & orange vegetables: 4 to 6 cups per week
• Starchy vegetables: 5 to 6 cups per week
• Beans and Peas: 1 to 2 cups per week
• Other vegetables: 3.5 to 5 cups per week

Knowing these different subgroups makes it easier to ensure that you pick out foods that come from a variety of different groups, instead of just one or two. Maintaining this kind of diversity in your diet will help you ensure that your body gets all the micronutrients it needs to fuel your lungs and keep your body strong.

Here are a couple links to more information about food groups and subgroups:

• A list of all the major food groups and sub-groups with examples of several foods for each category
• A list of common vegetables that belong to each of the 5 major vegetable subgroups

Choose Whole Foods When Possible

When you peruse all the boxed foods, frozen dinners, and other processed foods that make up the large part of grocery store shelves, it's often hard to tell what's good for you and what isn't. Even bold claims like “all natural” or “reduced fat” don't tell you much about a product's actual health, or what those claims even mean in the context of a well-balanced diet.

That's why it's best to cook your own meals at home using whole ingredients whenever possible. That means starting with basic ingredients that are as close as possible to their raw, natural state, such as whole fruits and vegetables, plain beans, and whole grains.

Your ingredients don't need to be “fresh” as long as they're are minimally processed and don't contain added ingredients like salt, oil, or sugar. Frozen fruits and veggies, for example, are just as good for you as the fresh (and more expensive) versions you'll find in the produce section.

Beware of Nutrient Deficiencies Associated with COPD

In ideal conditions, you could get all the nutrients you need just by eating a healthy diet. However, life is often far from ideal, and it's not always possible to get enough vitamins and minerals from the food you eat alone.

This is especially true for people with COPD, who often struggle to get enough nutrients due to both the symptoms and the biological effects of the disease. According to COPD nutrition research, up to 40% of COPD patients are underweight and undernourished.

Certain types of deficiencies are more common in people with COPD than others, including vitamin D, vitamin B12, and iron deficiency. People with disease are also especially prone to osteoporosis, which can be caused by deficiencies in both calcium and vitamin C.

Some of these nutrient deficiencies are directly related to COPD and the medications (such as steroids) used to treat it. Many of them are also associated with certain characteristics that COPD patients tend to have in common, such as age, tobacco smoking history, and other factors related to lifestyle and health.

Research also shows that undernourishment can have particularly severe consequences for people with COPD, including an increased risk of death and hospitalization, more frequent exacerbations. Poor nutrition is also associated with a variety of other negative COPD symptoms, such as reduced lung function, reduced muscle strength, increases shortness of breath, and declines in physical endurance.

Because of this, a large percentage of people with COPD need to take vitamin and/or mineral supplements to satisfy their body's nutritional needs. However, you shouldn't start using supplements without your doctor's permission; when you have a serious chronic condition like COPD, you should never take any new medicines or supplements without consulting your doctor first.

Seeing to your doctor also gives you the opportunity to undergo testing so you can know exactly what—if any—extra nutrients your body needs. Then your doctor can prescribe you the specific supplements you need in proper amounts to correct any deficiencies you currently have or that your doctor believes you are at risk for.

Know Your Calorie Requirements

Many people with COPD struggle with weight loss and undernourishment because of uncomfortable COPD symptoms that make it difficult to eat. However, another reason for malnutrition is simply not eating enough to make up for the extra calories burned through breathing, since lungs affected by COPD use up much more energy to breathe.

This extra energy has to come from somewhere, which is why people with COPD often need more calories and nutrients than the average healthy person. Because of this, many patients—especially those with advanced COPD—need to eat a high-calorie diet to satisfy their body's needs.

That's why, if you have COPD, it's important to talk to your doctor about your diet and to figure out how many daily calories you need to eat. If your doctor puts you on a high-calorie diet, make sure to take it seriously and do your best to meet your calorie target every day.

This can be difficult to do, especially if you're one of the many people with COPD who struggle with pain and breathlessness when you eat. However, there are a variety of strategies that can help, such as eating more frequent, smaller meals spaced out throughout the day (you can find more tips for adjusting to a high-calorie diet toward the end of this guide in the section on practical diet and cooking tips).

Make sure to consult your doctor if you're having trouble managing your diet on your own, and consider consulting a registered dietitian for more specialized help. Dietitians are trained to help people with special health and dietary considerations, and they can work with you to find solutions and put together a realistic diet plan that's tailored to your needs.

Limit Salt

According to US dietary guidelines, you shouldn't eat more than 2,300 milligrams (mg) of salt per day. However, because salt is ubiquitous in so many types of food, most people get far too much of it in their diet.

Unfortunately, too much salt is bad for your health in a variety of ways, increasing your risk for hypertension and heart disease. It's even more dangerous for older adults, and particularly people with COPD, who have a higher risk for age-related heart problems.

A high-salt diet can also cause water retention and bloating, which can worsen common COPD symptoms like breathlessness and chest discomfort. It can also make mealtimes more difficult if you have trouble eating enough food or struggle with shortness of breath when you eat.

Unfortunately, salt can be very difficult to avoid; many popular foods contain excessive amounts of sodium, especially processed foods and snacks. There are also many seemly-innocuous foods that have lots of

Keeping up with healthy habits is not an easy task; for many, it's a lifelong process—and sometimes a lifelong struggle—to stay on track. If you have a chronic health condition like COPD, it can feel downright overwhelming to shoulder the pressure of having to live a healthy lifestyle while also managing your disease.

If you don't have a solid plan and an organizational structure to guide you, it's nearly impossible to handle all those moving pieces on your own. That's why every person with COPD needs some kind of self-management system, and keeping a personal health diary is one of the easiest ways to establish such a system.

A health diary is simply a written or digital system for collecting, tracking, and analyzing all kinds of useful information about your health. Depending on how you use it, it can be a powerful tool for building new, healthier habits and staying on top of your COPD treatment routine.

In this post, we're going to show you how to create your own health diary from scratch, using an assortment of simple tools and health tracking techniques. We'll also show you plenty of ways you can utilize your health diary for practical purposes, such as motivating yourself to stick to an exercise schedule or remembering to take all of your medications on time.

The goal of this guide is to explain everything you need to get a functional health diary started, including how to collect useful data for your journal using a variety of different health measuring tools and data recording methods. We'll even walk you through the process of designing your own health tracking charts, spreadsheets, graphs, and other approaches to organizing and analyzing the information you collect.

What is Health Tracking, and Why Should You Do It?

Health tracking is a general term that refers to recording information about your body or actions you take regarding your health over a period of time. The system you use to record this data can take many forms, but is often referred to as a personal health diary or health journal.

You can make a health diary out of just about any medium that can store information: a blank notebook, a series of digital documents, a spreadsheet, a mobile app, and more. There's no single “right way” to do it, and there's a wide range of health-tracking methods you can choose from (many of which we'll teach you how to use throughout this guide).

You can use your personal health journal to track and store just about any information you want to, and it can be as brief, detailed, creative, or minimalistic as you'd like. The specific techniques and organizational methods your use are less important than finding a system that works for you and that suits the subject matter in your journal.

You can adapt a health journal to just about any disease or purpose, and different people keep them for all sorts of different personal and functional reasons. Doctors often recommend health diaries as self-management tools for patients with chronic health problems, especially those that are difficult to manage, like COPD.

In research and healthcare settings, health diaries are sometimes referred to as “clinical diaries,” “patient diaries,” or “self-management diaries.” These are used by doctors, researchers, and other healthcare professionals, too, to collect specific health data on their patients and closely monitor their conditions.

What's the Point of Tracking Your Health?

At its core, health tracking is all about collecting data that helps you (and/or your doctor) learn more about your health. This data can include objective health readings, like your weight, or subjective analyses like how energetic you feel throughout the day.

These records can give you and your doctor a clearer picture of what you're tracking than you could get from memory alone. In fact, some degree of health tracking is all but required for people who need to keep a close eye on a chronic disease like COPD.

Another key part of tracking your health is finding ways to actually use the data you collect to improve your health in some way. Most of the time, this involves looking for patterns and trends in the data and using what you've learned to adjust your habits and plan for the future.

For example, you could use a food diary to keep better track of your diet so you can look back over it later to find areas you can improve. Or, you could use a medication tracker to record when you take your COPD medications so that you can look at those records later to know when you should take your next dose.

Recording your choices in your journal is also a form of accountability that can push you to make the kinds of choices that you'd feel proud to write down. In this way, a health journal can be a powerful motivational tool if you're trying to change your habits or improve your health in a specific way.

Why Should People with COPD Keep a Health Diary?

Anybody can benefit from tracking their health, but it's especially useful for people who need to manage chronic health problems like COPD. A health diary can help you with just about any aspect of COPD management, including monitoring COPD symptoms, keeping your treatment schedules straight, and making healthy changes like exercising more, quitting smoking, and reaching a healthy BMI.

If you have COPD, your ability to succeed in all of these areas can have a huge impact on your quality of life and the course of your disease. This makes it all the more important to have a dedicated health tracking system to help you manage your well-being.

Here are a few of the major benefits that keeping a health journal can have for people with COPD.

It eases the burden of managing your health

Just like using planners and lists can help you manage your work routine, tracking your health and your COPD treatments in a journal makes it easier to manage your COPD. It can also help ease some of the mental burden of COPD management, especially if you tend to have a lot of worry or anxiety about your health.

Having a place to write things down and easily reference them later frees up time and mental energy that you'd otherwise be using to keep track of it all in your head. It also makes it easier to detect problems that might cause you worry, such as signs of exacerbation and worsening disease.

A health diary lets you know what's going on with your body so you can spend less time stressing about what might be happening. All of this can help you feel more secure and more in control of your health; this is especially important during uncertain times like the current COVID-19 pandemic, which is particularly scary for people with COPD and other conditions that make them vulnerable to serious disease.

It can help you set and track your health goals

Keeping a health journal doesn't just help you learn about your health; it can also be a powerful tool for improving your health and reaching your COPD treatment goals. In fact, health and habit trackers are an integral part of effective goal-setting, and they can make all the difference when you're trying to make a healthy lifestyle change.

Your health journal not only helps you asses you where you are at now, but also where you're going and how things change over time. It provides a practical framework to help you organize your objectives, visualize your progress, and make sure you're on the right track to reach your goals.

Because of this, health tracking is a particularly valuable tool for people with COPD, who often need to make major health and lifestyle changes because of their disease. For some people, this means completely overhauling their current routine, something that's incredibly difficult to do without a well-structured plan.

That's where your health journal comes in; when you're making a major habit adjustment, you need a place to write down your goals, record your progress, and keep track of all the steps you need to take along the way. While this might sound like an obvious strategy, it takes a lot of planning and work to get it right, and a reliable health tracking system can be your key for success.

It can help your doctor monitor your treatment

Unless you have a miraculous memory, it's impossible to remember all the little details about your health, habits, symptoms and other important things your doctor might need to know. Human memory is notoriously unreliable, especially when it comes to details, which isn't ideal when your doctor needs correct information to properly treat you and your COPD.

However, you won't need to rely on memory if you have a health journal to record that information (e.g. your daily COPD symptoms) as you go. Then, you'll have accurate records that you can reference or bring to your doctor so he'll have more precise and nuanced information with which to evaluate your health.

It can help you recognize the signs of lung infections and COPD exacerbations

Keeping a close eye on your symptoms is the best way to catch COPD exacerbations, which often start with a slight uptick in respiratory symptoms. Unfortunately, this change is often subtle; many people don't notice it at first and, as a result, miss the opportunity for early treatment.

This is why many doctors encourage COPD patients to keep a written log of their symptoms and how they fluctuate over time. This makes it much easier to track subtle changes in your symptoms that can help you identify—and more accurately pinpoint the start of—a COPD exacerbation.

How to Use a Health Diary if You Have COPD

One of the great things about a personal health diary is that it can be essentially whatever you want it to be. It could be a simple log book, a planner, a habit-tracking chart, all of these things together, or anything in between.

It all depends on which health attributes you (or your doctor) are interested in tracking, and what you plan to do with the data you store. However broad or narrow your focus, you can tailor your personal journal to fit just about any particular need.

For example, your diary could help you manage healthy habits and work toward healthy goals, like eating healthier, exercising more, and taking your medications on time. You could also use a health diary to track and monitor certain aspects of your health, such as your weight, your physical activity, or your energy level from day to day.

You might also have specific health concerns that you want to monitor, such as your oxygen levels, blood pressure, or intake of specific nutrients. It's also a great way to keep track of your COPD symptoms and watch for patterns and triggers that could help you learn how to better manage your disease.

In the next sections, we're going to show you how you can use a health diary for a wide range of practical purposes, with a special emphasis on your diary can help you monitor and improve your COPD. We'll also introduce you to a variety of different tools and methodologies that can help you gather all kinds of useful data to record in your journal.

What To Record in Your COPD Health Diary

Information About Your Diet

An integral part of a healthy diet is keeping track of what you eat, and sometimes memory just isn't good enough to do the job. It's easy to underestimate unhealthy food choices or guess your calories wrong, which is why recording what you eat in a diary is one of the best ways to get an accurate picture of your dietary health.

This is especially important if you're trying to make changes to your diet, whether you're trying to lose weight, make healthier choices, correct a nutrient imbalance, or limit certain foods. These are changes that many people with COPD have to make after their diagnosis, since weight and diet can have a significant impact on your ability to breathe.

Because of this, doctors often prescribe special diets (e.g. low-salt or low-carbohydrate diets) and set target weight goals for COPD patients as part of their treatment. Unfortunately, people with COPD often have an extra hard time maintaining a healthy weight and diet, and often need extra help to succeed.

A health diary can provide that extra support by helping you track your food choices and manage a diet plan. This helps you understand your eating habits better, which is the first step to finding ways to improve it. It also forces you to think about your dietary choices more often, which helps you stay accountable to yourself and mindful about what you eat.

You can also use your health diary to schedule your diet and coordinate your meal routine. It can help you with everything from making shopping lists and meal planning to food prep and ingredient management.

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Used right, your health diary can help you develop dietary discipline and establish long-term habits that can not only help you reach your diet goals, but also maintain those healthy habits once you get there. Over time, this can make a huge difference in your overall health and your quality of life with COPD.

Here are some different ways you could use your health journal to track and manage your diet:

• Keep a simple food diary: Keep a log of the types and approximate amounts of all the foods and beverages you eat and drink throughout the day.
• Track your micro/macro-nutrient intake: This requires a more detailed log of what you eat and drink that includes nutritional information and precise portion sizes. Luckily, free food tracking applications can do most of the work for you (e.g. nutrient calculations, daily/weekly totals, trend analysis, etc.) as long as the information you enter is accurate and complete.
• Make a weekly meal schedule: Plan your diet ahead of time by working up a meal schedule for the coming days or weeks, either on your own or with the help of a doctor or dietitian. It could be as simple as a list of meal options to choose from or a detailed chart specifying exactly what you plan to eat for every meal each day.
• Track specific nutrients over time: Determine which nutrients you want to keep track of (e.g. things you're trying to limit, like saturated fat or salt) and keep a running total of how much of that nutrient is in the foods you eat throughout the day. Then, you can map the totals you're interested in (e.g. from each meal, each day, each week, etc.) onto a simple chart or graph to get a better picture of how your intake of that nutrient varies over time.

Information About Your Medication

People with COPD often take several medications and have complicated treatment schedules that require a great deal of discipline every day. This is a major source of stress for many COPD patients, and often results in occasional missed doses and other treatment mistakes.

Unfortunately, poor medication management can have serious and lasting health consequences for people with COPD, including worsened breathing problems and more frequent COPD exacerbations. That's why, if you have COPD, it's absolutely vital to have a system in place to help you keep track of your medications and take them correctly every day.

This is a perfect job for your health diary, which can be an invaluable tool for scheduling, remembering, and managing complex treatment plans. Whether you use a pen and paper or a mobile medicine tracking application, keeping a medication diary can reduce treatment errors and help you keep your schedule straight.

In fact, research shows that patients who keep medication diaries, even very simple ones, are more likely to take their medication correctly. Studies also show that health diaries can be valuable tools for patient-doctor coordination; it can help your doctor learn more about how you're using your medications (e.g. how often you need to use your rescue inhaler), how well you're adhering to prescribed treatments (e.g. how often you miss doses), and what—if any—changes need to be made to your treatment plan.

A medication diary can also relieve a great deal of stress associated with having to keep track of all your treatment details in your head. It gives you a reliable place to offload it all—your treatment schedules, coordinating difficulties, and any other details you stress about—so you don't need to worry or keep it in the back of your mind all the time.

Here are some ideas for how you can use your health diary to track and manage your medications:

• Make a minimalistic medication tracker: Make a simple list or chart of all of your doses of medication for the day or week, and mark them with the corresponding date at time after you take each dose. This helps you keep track of which medications you have and haven't taken already so you're less likely to skip or double up on doses. (We'll give you more detailed step-by-step instructions for how to make a medication tracker later on in this guide).
• Keep an oxygen therapy log: Keep a running total of the number of hours you use supplemental oxygen in your journal every day. You can also record more detailed information, like the time when you start and stop using oxygen, to get a fuller picture of how you utilize oxygen throughout the day.
• Make a basic medication log: Write each of your medications across the top of a page or chart, and mark down the the date and time you take each dose under the name of the corresponding medication. This can be particularly helpful for tracking your usage of as-needed medications (like rescue inhalers) that require spacing doses a certain length of time apart.

To learn more tips and techniques for managing your COPD medications, check out our guide on the topic here.

Your Physical Symptoms

As most COPD patients know, keeping close track of your symptoms is a key part of monitoring and managing COPD effectively. In fact, many doctors recommend using a logging system to record what symptoms you have and how severe they are every day.

Keeping a symptom log in your health diary can help you get to know your baseline COPD symptoms better and learn more about how—and possibly why—your symptoms change over time. This information is useful for several different reasons, including for gauging the pace of COPD progression (as indicated by worsening symptoms) and for evaluating how your symptoms respond to different treatments and medications.

Tracking your symptoms can also help you identify COPD exacerbations and monitor their course over time. Your records can also yield additional insight into the length, cause, and the nature of your COPD exacerbations, information that could help you and your doctor determine the best course of treatment.

Here are some ideas for how to use your health journal to track your COPD Symptoms:

• Keep a minimalistic daily symptom diary: At the end of every day, write down the date and some basic information about the symptoms you've experienced that day: e.g. describe them in a couple of sentences, rate them using descriptors like mild, moderate or severe, or jot down a couple bullet points.
• Make a daily symptom tracking chart: Decide on a scale to use for rating the overall severity of your COPD symptoms (e.g. via a numerical scale from 1-5, or a color-coded marking) and record your daily ratings in in a pre-made chart or graph.
• Track your symptoms individually: Make a list of all the symptoms you tend to experience regularly, and (separately) rate the severity of each one every day. Alternatively, you could simply mark a “yes” or “no” for each symptom or only list the the symptoms you experienced that particular day.
• Record your symptoms during everyday activities: Rate your symptoms and/or write down some notes about how you feel after everyday activities like cleaning, taking a walk, cooking a meal, etc. This can help you better understand the impact your COPD symptoms have on your life and identify ways to reduce or eliminate the burden caused by the most difficult tasks.

Instead of making your own, you can use a variety of pre-made symptom tracking templates available online, like this minimalistic tracker or this printable weekly symptom tracker (PDF link) from alnursing.org.

Your Exercise and Physical Activity

Getting plenty of exercise is an important part of COPD treatment, but it's one of lifestyle changes that people with COPD tend to struggle with the most. And that's not just because COPD symptoms make doing physical activities difficult, but also because building new exercise habits is hard thing for anyone to do—especially in older adulthood, which is when most people get diagnosed with COPD.

Unfortunately, the stakes are much higher for COPD patients, who have to maintain an active lifestyle to live a good quality of life. Getting regular exercise can make the difference between staying physically independent as your COPD progresses, and not having the endurance to do even light household tasks on your own.

Because of this, any tool that can help you stay active is worth using, and anything is better than giving up. You're much likely to succeed if you have a system—like a health journal—to guide you and help you overcome the additional physical challenges caused by COPD.

For example, you could use your journal plan out your exercise goals, your strategy for reaching them. You can also log your physical activities in your journal so you can track your progress and improvement, which can help you stay accountable and motivated to keep working toward your goals.

Here are a few ideas for how you can use your health journal to track your exercise habits:

• Keep an exercise log: Every day, take some time to write down any exercise or physical activities you've done throughout the day.
• Make a basic exercise planner: Make a chart or calendar in your health journal to keep track of when you need to work out as well as what type of workout you plan to do.
• Create an exercise habit tracker: Make a simple chart or graph to track information about your activity, such as the types of physical activities you do, your dedicated work-outs, or the number of minutes/hours of exercise you do throughout the week.

Your Mood and General Mental Well-being

Using your health journal to track your mental well-being is a great way to get more in tune with your emotions, including how you're coping mentally with COPD. It's also a great way to keep tabs on mental illnesses like anxiety and depression, which tends to affect people with COPD more often than people without the disease.

There's a wide range of mental health journaling methods to choose from, ranging from simple diary entries to complex mood and emotion-tracking spreadsheets. The simpler and briefer techniques make it easy to find trends and patterns quickly, while the more open-ended methods allow you to explore and express your thoughts in a deeper way.

A simple daily mood tracker, for example, can help you find patterns and possibly even identify triggers that affect your emotional well-being. You could also use your diary to keep tabs on specific feelings and psychological symptoms, such as anxiety, anger, or feelings of hopelessness and despair.

Of course, there's always the traditional personal diary format where you simply write down your thoughts however feels best to you at the time. Any technique will do as long as you have an idea of what kinds of personal struggles or mental traits you'd like to monitor or explore.

Daily medications are a primary life-line for people with COPD, and a necessary part of life for people with asthma and other respiratory diseases. In fact, most COPD patients have to follow a strict treatment regimen and take several different medications every day just to keep their symptoms under control.

Of these medications, inhalers are perhaps the most important and are certainly the most frequently prescribed medications for people with asthma and COPD. Unfortunately, an alarmingly high number of patients don't use their inhalers as they should.

A major reason for this is the fact that asthma and COPD medication regimens can be complicated and difficult to keep track of. However, there's a new kind of tool available, known as smart inhaler technology, that is designed specifically to address this problem.

Smart inhalers can help you manage your medication by recording when you use your inhaler and reminding you when it's time to take the next dose. This makes it easier to remember to take your medication on time and helps you keep track of how well you adhere to your treatment schedule.

What is a Smart Inhaler?

A smart inhaler is, essentially, an inhaler that is designed to communicate with a mobile phone application. This application helps you keep track of important information like your medication schedule and when you are supposed to take your next dose.

A sensor on the inhaler communicates with the mobile application via bluetooth so you can track your inhaler use data in the app. The app records the date, time, and sometimes even the location of each dose you take, and then uses this information to schedule your next dose reminder.

Some smart inhalers use a built-in sensor that's integrated into the body of the inhaler itself. Others, like the Propeller sensor, are more versatile external sensors that you can attached to a variety of different inhalers, including ones you already have.

Smart inhaler technology is useful for monitoring how well you adhere to your treatment schedule over time and for identifying ways you can improve. It also serves as a useful tool for reminding yourself when you last took a dose and for easily tracking how frequently you use your rescue inhaler.

You also can instruct your smart inhaler app to alert you via a phone alarm or notification whenever it's time to take another dose. These digital reminders make it much easier to keep up with a consistent treatment schedule and keep your respiratory symptoms under control.

Some smart inhalers include other helpful features, such as high pollen and pollution alerts or the ability to sense if your forget to bring your inhaler with you when you leave home. As the technology continues to develop, the range of helpful tools and features available via smart inhaler technology will also continue to grow.

What Kinds of Smart Inhalers are Available?

The variety of smart inhalers on the market today is somewhat limited. However, the technology seems to be catching on, and there's sure to be a wider variety of smart inhaler sensors and applications available in the coming years.

It's important to note that most smart inhaler sensors are only approved for use with specific types of medications and inhaler types. Before choosing a sensor, you should double check the manufacturer's website and the device specifications to make sure that it will work with the types of inhalers you're prescribed as well as the type of mobile phone you use.

Here are the two most popular smart inhaler technologies that are approved for use in the US:

• Propeller Smart Inhaler: An external sensor that you can attach to a wide variety of inhalers. Currently available for free to most people from the Propeller website.
• Adherium Hailie Smart Inhaler: An external sensor that you can attach to the following inhalers: Ventolin, Symbicort, ProAir, and Flovent. Available from the hailie.com store.

These products are not yet available in the United States or are currently in development:

• FindAir: Currently only available to purchase in Europe, this external sensor works with more than ten different types of metered-dose rescue inhalers. You can purchase this sensor (if you live in one of the approved European countries) and check to see if it works with your inhaler by visiting their website.
• Teva ProAir: In development
• 3M Intelligent Control Inhaler: In development

Why Should People With Asthma and COPD Consider Using a Smart Inhaler?

Despite the importance of the medication, too many people with COPD and other respiratory diseases take their inhalers for granted or struggle to keep up with their daily doses. However, experts believe that smart inhaler technology can make it easier for patients to comply with treatment and keep their symptoms under control.

Your Inhaler is Your Lifeline

First of all, every person with COPD should understand how vital their inhalers are for managing their disease. Inhaled medications are quick-acting, versatile, and effective, in large part because they deliver medication directly to your lungs, and they form the cornerstone of just about every COPD treatment plan.

Most people with asthma and COPD use inhalers for both long-term symptom management and for short-term relief from breathlessness and other respiratory symptoms. When you use your inhaler as your doctor instructs you to, it can allow you to breathe better, live better, and—in the case of people with COPD—even live longer than you could without your medication.

However, better breathing and disease control isn't the only reason that medication is important. Keeping up with your treatment schedule is vital for living a healthy and fulfilling life.

When your symptoms are controlled via medication, it makes all sorts of activities easier. This includes basic tasks that are important for daily living, like cooking, cleaning, and walking to get around.

Using your inhaler as directed can also allow you to exercise better and live a more active life. This makes it easier to live a healthy lifestyle and keep your body strong, which is vital for mainting your mobility and your quality of life when you suffer from COPD.

Because of this, it's extremely important to keep up with your medications and use your inhaler exactly as your doctor instructs you to. However, while this seems simple in practice, many patients fail to use their inhalers correctly by using them improperly, inconsistently, and frequently missing doses.

Most People with COPD Do Not Use Their Inhalers As Directed

Unfortunately, an alarmingly large number of COPD patients don't use their inhaler correctly or as often as they should. This is often the result of ignorance, laziness, poor training, or a simple lack of proper diligence in keeping up with treatment.

In fact, studies show that up to 70 percent of people with COPD use improper inhaler techniques, which can significantly affect how well the medication works. Other studies estimate that only about 50 percent of people who are prescribed inhalers use them as frequently as they should.

This is important, since not using your inhaler as directed can severely affect your ability to manage your disease and your symptoms. For example, if you have COPD and don't follow your treatment plan exactly, you risk having worse symptoms, more exacerbations, and even quicker lung function loss.

Here is a list of some of the potential consequences of not adhering to your medication schedule:

• Increased risk of death
• Increased risk of quicker lung function decline (COPD)
• Increased risk for exacerbations (COPD)
• Increased risk of your medication not working
• May make it more difficult to effectively control your symptoms and manage your disease
• Makes it difficult for your doctor to evaluate your current medications and treatments accurately

Unfortunately, lackluster treatment compliance is commonplace in patients with chronic diseases like COPD who need constant, life-long treatment. It can be difficult and tiresome to adhere to a strict medication regimen for so long, which is why many people with COPD and other respiratory conditions become more careless and apathetic about about their treatment over time.

Studies also suggest that COPD patients are less likely to take their medications when they're feeling better and have fewer symptoms. However, it's not okay to skip a scheduled dose just because you feel like you don't need it; it's just as important to use your inhaler when you're feeling good as when you're feeling bad.

Many people with COPD have to manage several different types of medication at once, which is another reason why so many patients find it difficult to stick to a consistent regimen. It can be particularly difficult to manage multiple medications that vary significantly in type; for example, some COPD patients have to use supplemental oxygen, multiple kinds of inhalers, and pills you take by mouth.

Keeping all of these different medications straight can get confusing, and it can quickly get complicated when you have to remember schedules, correct dosages, and proper technique for half a dozen different types of medicine. It can be especially difficult to cope with when you're dealing with anxiety or life gets so busy that you want to avoid anything that heaps on extra stress.

That's why smart inhaler technology has the potential to be so useful for people with asthma and COPD; it can relieve some of the logistical burden that comes with managing your health. It can keep track of your medication schedule for you and remind you to take each dose so you don't have to shoulder the responsibility alone.

In this way, experts believe that smart inhaler technology can help people with respiratory conditions better adhere to their treatment plan. With the assistance of a smart inhaler app, you're less likely to miss a dose and more likely to comply with the medication schedule that your doctor prescribes.

Taking your medication on time and as instructed is vital for preventing exacerbations, keeping your symptoms stable, and living the best life that you can. Because it can help you comply with your treatment better, using a smart inhaler may even improve how effectively your medication works to manage your disease.

Research Suggests that Smart Inhaler Technology Really Works

Experts have advocated for this kind of medication tracking technology for many years as a way to improve treatment compliance. Although the technology is still new, early research on the effectiveness of smart inhalers have come up with optimistic results.

One study from the Cleveland Clinic found that people with COPD who used the Propeller smart inhaler were significantly less likely to be hospitalized, with a 35% reduction in the number of hospital visits compared to the year before. While this study was small, including only 39 patients, the results are promising and suggest that smart inhaler technology can actually improve patients' health in addition to improving medication adherence.

Additional encouraging research comes from studies of asthma patients, including one study that looked at the Adherium Smartinhaler. This study found that patients who used the smart inhaler technology had a variety of positive health outcomes, including better medication adherence, fewer hospitalizations, and fewer doctor's visits needed.

How Smart Inhalers Can Benefit People with Asthma & COPD

Now that we've explained how smart inhaler technology can help people with asthma and COPD in general, let's take a closer look at what a smart inhaler could do for you. In the next sections, we'll discuss in more detail some of the specific benefits that smart inhaler technology has to offer.

Smart Inhalers Provide Convenient, Effortless Reminders

By working in tandem with your mobile phone, smart inhalers can send alerts to you directly through your phone. That way, you can get convenient reminders you to take your medication no mater where you are.

And because the smart inhaler records your medication schedule and the last time you took a dose, you don't even have to set the reminders yourself. The smart inhaler app can schedule your next dose and set up an automatic alert to let you know when the right time comes.

These reminders follow you wherever you go and make keeping up with your medication schedule as simple and effortless as possible. This is much more convenient, and potentially much more reliable, than keeping track of your schedule on paper or having to set manual reminders on your phone.

Smart Inhalers Can Prevent Missed or Repeated Doses

It can be difficult to remember the last time you used your inhaler when you have to use it multiple times a day. When you do something so often and it becomes part of your daily routine, each instance tends to blur into the next it's hard to tell them apart.

This can make it difficult to remember on your own the exact time you took your last inhaler dose. It can put you in the difficult position of wondering, “Did I use my inhaler already today, or am I remembering the time I used it yesterday?”

It's especially easy to lose track when you have to use more than one inhaler, as many people with asthma and COPD have to do. You might find yourself wondering, “Did I already take my maintenance inhaler? Or was it my quick-relief inhaler that I used earlier this morning?”

Human memory just isn't very reliable, and mis-remembering your last dose could lead you to to take an extra dose on accident, or skip a dose because you falsely believe you've taken it already. This can be dangerous when you rely on your medication to help you breathe and manage your respiratory disease.

Fortunately, smart inhalers eliminate this uncertainty by automatically keeping a record of each and every time you use your inhaler. That way, you can always check the app to see when you took your last dose and remind yourself which inhalers you've already used that day.

This can be particularly useful for people with mild cognitive impairment, a condition that affects your memory and makes it difficult to remember small things like what you did this morning. Mild cognitive impairment is extremely common in people with COPD, and especially patients with severe hypoxemia (low blood oxygen levels).

Smart Inhalers Can Help Reduce Treatment-Related Anxiety

It can be extremely stressful to adhere to a strict medication regimen with multiple medications that you have to take at certain times each day. Having to keep multiple medication schedules in your head and remember things like when you last used a certain inhaler can take up a lot of mental space.

What's more, when you have a chronic disease that requires constant management, forgetting to take your medication can have serious consequences. Because of this, the fear or missing a dose or not being able to keep up with your treatment regimen can turn in to a major source of anxiety.

However, smart inhalers can help relieve some of that worry by doing some of that remembering and scheduling for you. By tracking your doses and reminding you when to use your inhaler, it can take some of that extra weight off your mind.

In this way, using a smart inhaler frees you from the need to arrange manual reminders and constantly keep your inhaler schedule in your head. This can free up mental energy for other important things in life and make your daily treatment regimen less stressful to manage.

Smart Inhalers Can Help Make Your Treatment More Effective

A large number of people who use inhalers find it difficult to take their medication consistently on their own. This leads to missed doses, doubled doses, and otherwise using your inhaler differently than your doctor recommends.

This can significantly reduce the success of your treatment and cause your medication to be less effective than it otherwise would be. Most personalized treatment plans are carefully designed to help you manage your symptoms in the best way possible, but they only work if you actually do what your treatment plan says to do.

Luckily, smart inhaler technology can help you keep track of your medications and how well you're sticking to your treatment plan. By helping you follow your medication schedule that your doctor prescribes more diligently, it can help you manage your symptoms better than before.

You and your doctor can also use to your smart inhaler app to review the full record of every single time you've used your medication, which is much more accurate than using your memory alone. This allows you to look back and see exactly where you've gone wrong and what you can do to better follow your treatment plan.

Smart inhaler technology is also a useful tool for monitoring how you use your as-needed rescue inhaler for short-term symptom relief. An accurate record of how frequently you use your rescue inhaler is valuable data you and your doctor can use to track the severity of your symptoms and watch out for when your symptoms get worse.

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Some smart inhaler apps also record your location when you take a dose, which can be especially valuable for tracking your rescue inhaler use. In some cases, you may even be able to use this information to pinpoint a certain place or situation that triggers your respiratory symptoms.

All of this information can give you valuable insight about your health and your inhaler use habits that you can use to learn how to better control your symptoms. It also allows your doctor to evaluate the effectiveness of your medication more accurately and make tailored adjustments to help you better manage your disease.

Conclusion

If you have asthma or COPD, doing everything you can to adhere to the medication schedule your doctor gives you is essential for your health. That means knowing how to use your inhalers, when to use each inhaler, and what he correct dose for each medication is.

While this can be a lot to manage, it can be easier when you have practical tools like smart inhaler technology to give you a hand. Smart inhalers can save you a lot of time and mental energy managing your medication, freeing you up to enjoy your life without the constant worry of missing a dose.

When you take your medication properly, it can improve your symptoms, your quality of life, and your overall well-being in a number of significant ways. It can not only make it easier to breathe, but it can also help you maintain the energy and oxygen levels you need to live an active and healthy life.