Walk into a medical doctor’s office and the first question they will usually ask is… What are your symptoms? They want to know what hurts, where it hurts, and how you are feeling. Obviously, there is value to this kind of questioning, but how you feel and how you are actually doing may be two very different things.
As a doctor, when doing an exam, I gather two forms of information. The first is how you feel. Do you have any symptoms? Do you feel pain, weakness, numbness, burning etc. How often do you feel those sensations? What makes it worse? Does anything make it better? How long has it been going on? And we may have you rate your symptoms on a scale from 1-10, with 1 being the least, and 10 being the worst. This kind of information is called subjective, which is how you feel, or how you think you are doing.
The second form of data collected is objective, which is how you are actually doing. This is information that is not dependent on personal feelings or sensations, opinions, or what you think is going on. The physical exam, x-rays, bloodwork, or other testing helps to gather this objective data. It is information that helps a doctor understand what is actually happening within the body. It is super important to gather this type of information because as I stated earlier, there can be, and often is, a big difference between how you feel, and how you are actually doing.
Examples may help make this more understandable. Years ago, my daughter was playing soccer and collided with another girl. She stood up and was feeling some pain, but it wasn’t severe. She felt like she could continue playing, but as she went to step, her knee gave out. In that moment, she did not feel too badly. It turned out that she had completely torn a ligament in her knee (the ACL) which required surgical repair. When the doctor examined her, her pain was fairly minimal, she was able to walk on it, and overall, it did not seem to be too badly injured. This was all subjective information… how she felt. The physical exam indicated that her knee had instability, meaning compared to the other knee, there was laxity in the joint because the torn ligament was not able to support the joint. It was visibly much bigger than the other knee, because of edema, or swelling. And an MRI clearly showed that the ligament had been completely ruptured. All this data was the objective information… how she was actually doing.
The reason it is important to understand the difference between subjective and objective is because they often do not correlate well. There is value in both, but most people primarily use subjective data to guide their lives. The problem with this kind of living is that symptoms tend to show up long after a problem has been brewing. Said another way, problems are often present long before symptoms show up.
If we use subjective information primarily to guide our lives, we end up in big trouble because by the time we know a problem actually exists, it’s often late… and often too late. Health problems are the best examples, as symptoms are often the last thing to show up in a disease process. Think about heart disease and cancer. By the time you know there is a problem, it is often late into the disease process. Arteries have been clogging, and tumors have been growing, for many years before a person even knows that it is happening. By the time there is a symptom, the disease process has been developing for some time.
My point with all of this is to encourage you to step back and analyze areas of your life objectively. Of course, it is important to utilize how you feel, or what you think about things, but you also need hard data. And this is in every area of your life. Your marriage my seem to be okay, but are there underlying issues that have chipped away at the quality of the relationship? You still have a job, but are there behaviors and habits that have diminished the quality of your work? Have you asked your boss or manager to evaluate your current performance to years past? You may feel pretty healthy, but have you had bloodwork or body composition testing done to see how you are really doing? You feel like you are still in pretty good shape, but have you stepped on a scale lately and compared that number to what it was a few years ago? And you are able to pay your bills and make ends meet, but have you been spending more than you make, causing your finances to trend downward over the years? Have you compared your bank numbers today to where they were a few years ago?
How you feel (subjective) and how you are actually doing (objective) can be very different. It usually isn’t a single event that leads to a divorce, job loss, health crisis, or even death. We get tricked into relying on how we feel or think about things, but you must step back from time to time and gather objective data to see how you are actually doing.