Living Your Best Life with MS? Examination of the National MS Society's Everyday Matters Program

Background: Everyone has their own idea of their best life. For people living with MS, the idea of that “best life” can change due to the challenges of having a chronic and unpredictable disease. As MS can lead to significant implications for mental and physical functioning, needed are interventions teaching positive and empowering strategies. Interventions aimed at cultivating positive feelings, behaviors and emotions have resulted in significant enhancement in well-being and decreases in depressive symptoms. Implications for the MS population may lead to improved ability to better face disease specific life challenges. In response to a void of proactive programs, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society developed Everyday Matters: Living Your Best Life with MS.

Objectives: To empower people living with MS to live their lives through the use of positive psychology.

Methods: Over the course of five sessions the program aims to increase participants’ knowledge about positive psychology and how to apply these tenets to addressing the everyday challenges of living with MS.

Results: Current data is from pre (254), post (209), and 3-month follow-up surveys (164) with 12-month surveys being actively collected. Baseline sample shows majority PwMS (80%), diagnosed <5 yrs (34%), RRMS diagnosis (70%), and 41% reporting sometimes experiencing depression. Paired sample t-test run on pre and 3-month responses showed significant increases in satisfaction with life scale (SWLS; PwMS* & CP; *t(119) = 5.04, p< .05); confidence in MS symptom management (MSSE; t(112) = 2.30, p< .05); positive/optimistic outlook (*PwMS & CP; *t(126) = 5.91, p< .05). Additional findings include usage of positive psychology, MS related resources and an action plan.

Conclusions: Everyday Matters is one of the few MS-specific programs being offered using the principles of positive psychology to assist in addressing life challenges. Results demonstrate evidence of program success in multiple outcomes. Specifically, improved satisfaction with life at 3-months is encouraging as this construct has been correlated to mental health and may lead to improved quality of life (Pavot & Diener, 2008). Additional implications of increasing positive constructs are better medication adherence, less morbidity and increased longevity (Cuffee et al., 2012). The Society has created an effective positive psychological intervention for the MS population, improving both MS specific and general positive constructs.