4 Ways To Keep Your Immune System Healthy This Fall
The concerns around COVID-19 are not done yet and the fall flu season is upon us.
Now is the time to make sure you’re doing everything you can to keep your immune system healthy so that you don’t get sick.
Think about these 4 Ss when it comes to helping your immune system: Sleep, Stress, Shock, and Support.
Read on to learn more about each strategy and how it’ll help you.
Sleep
Sleep is like the Batman of recovery: the hero you don’t want, but the hero that you need.
It’s unrivalled in its importance in promoting recovery, including keeping your immune system healthy, keeping your brain sharp, and your body functioning well.
Sleep is also challenging to try to tackle because we all have preconceived notions of how good or bad our sleep is and why we just have to accept it as it is. Trying to deal with it as a “bad sleeper” is not a good time, as everything else in your life gets affected.
But I'm not suggesting that you try to completely overhaul your sleep routine with what the latest health guru is saying you need to do every hour of the day to prepare yourself for sleep. There are things that can help, but what helps the most is to start with what you're comfortable doing. If that means just maintaining what you're already doing, that's great.
If you have a change in mind that you want to make and you think it'll help your sleep, try that out and notice how it helps your sleep and how rested you feel. Notice the difference it makes and if it doesn’t seem to be doing much, try to add on something else you feel ready to do.
Stress - Manage It Your Best
We all experience stress in many different ways. Stress is as unique to our life as our fingerprint. Managing stress well becomes not just a practice in following a few steps from a template but to understand and explore your own stressors.
By recognizing our own triggers and reactions to stress, we can better come to respect our need for balance and when it's most essential for us. Whether due to life transitions or unexpected events in your life, we can’t go off of a pre-made plan for managing stress better, unless we’ve thought about it ourselves and created it or shaped it to fit our own needs.
So stress management becomes as much about the give and take as a Jiu-Jitsu match. React to everything you experience so that you can keep pushing toward your ultimate goal of getting everything managed as best as you can.
This is exactly what we do in my stress management success course where I teach you how to apply the steps of making changes in your life and creating an action plan for becoming unstressable.
The next cohort for the course is starting soon and you can join the waitlist here: www.flowacademy.ca/stress
Shock
Use deliberate heat or cold exposure to give your immune system a boost.
Sitting in a sauna feels really good but on top of that, it carries with it some powerful health benefits, including being able to strengthen your immune system and reduce the stress hormone cortisol.
When our bodies are exposed to extreme heat or cold, we are giving it a healthy, acute dose of stress. This triggers many of the systems in our body to be stimulated, including our immune system which builds up under this process.
The same happens to us with cold exposure, like doing a cold plunge. This can be harder for people to want to initiate but it certainly feels invigorating after you’ve done it. And the cold creates a great anti-inflammatory effect to reduce pain and promote healing while also turning up the dial on our immune system.
Research suggests that the best practice for this is doing 3-4 sessions per week for a total of 57 minutes of heat exposure above 80 degrees Celsius and 11 minutes total of cold exposure below 10 degrees Celsius. These numbers may be optimal, but certainly, any amount of shock, even one session per week, is going to make a difference that will help you to stay healthier.
Support
Support yourself and your immune system. During cold and flu season, it’s important to turn to our friends and family for support when it’s needed as a way to feel a strong sense of connection that will help to keep stress levels down. It’s also often needed when we do feel the sniffles coming on and need to be proactive to not get sick any further by letting others lend a hand where we need it.
Furthermore, you can support your immune system and your health through supplements. While these aren’t the first step in good nutrition, there are some nutrients that are important for the immune system that become harder to access through our diet as the colder weather approaches, most notably, colourful fruits and veggies and vitamin D. Supplementing with a greens powder can help to cover a lot of micronutrients that we need to stay healthy and keep our immune system strong, and getting vitamin D through supplementation are virtually essential for Canadians once the summer is over and we’re getting less direct sunlight. This one is extremely important for our immune system so I highly recommend it.
Look to supplement with a scoop of a high-quality greens powder, like Genuine Health’s greens+ every day and 2,000 IUs of Vitamin D3.
What to do next:
Look at what you can do to support your sleep and write down a few ideas of what you’re willing to try.
Book in for a sauna or cold plunge to start deliberate exposure to the extremes that will stimulate your immune system.