How to Not Get Sick

Ah, the New Year. A great time to drink, stay up late (and/or screw up your polyphasic schedule), eat tasty food, and generally kneel down and beg all handy bacteria and viruses to infect your ass.

I, for example, was fed like a few Queens yesterday, skipped a nap* and had some b33r.

In honor of how smart we all are about our health during the holidays, here are some things you can do to Keep from getting sick, even in spite of yourself. (Though obviously I have to note that eating right and getting plenty of water and enough rest–for your value of “enough”–are of course a better idea!)

1. Eat some garlic. Preferably raw. It’s good at fighting off bugs and is a general supportive tonic for your body. Eating lots of garlic (and to a lesser extent onion, ginger, chiles, and other such foods) right when you first feel an illness can really shorten it, too.

2. Take your vitamins. Yeah, it’s a band-aid if you’ve been unkind to your system already, but sometimes band-aids help. If you can get ahold of some superfood of some kind, that’s a good idea too — you want to make sure your immune system has every drop of fuel it might need.

3. Make this cheap and easy ginger tea, which is good for pre-illness as well as during an illness to shorten it. (Ginger helps with nausea, fevers, sinuses and generally flushing bad stuff from the system.) Get fresh ginger, real lemon juice and honey (raw, if you can). Boil a mug of water, add about 1″ of the ginger root, steep for a couple minutes (2-4, usually, or whatever suits you), add honey and lemon juice to taste. Drink 3 or more times a day, before and during illness, for best results.

4. Yarrow is very good for staving off illness, too, even after you’ve begun to feel it. It tastes nasty as a tea ingredient or tincture, however, I recently stumbled across a suggestion for making it into a syrup. I don’t often make syrups, but it’s not hard, so maybe I should try it more often! Add some other healing herbs like astralagus, comfrey and mullein if you have them too. I also hear great things about black elderberry syrup as a flu-preventative — I’ve never tried it, but you can buy it in most health-food stores.

5. Kill nastiness in your environment by burning camphor resin or heating a medicinal-grade essential oil like rosemary, eucalyptus or tea tree.

6. Take a relaxing herbal bath — the heat and the relaxation themselves will help boost your immune system and whatnot, but adding some good supportive herbs gives it more oomph. (Add herbs by simply making a strong tea of them and putting it in your bath.) Good herbs for this are ginger (of course), astralagus, yarrow, cayenne (just a little!), echinacea, and probably quite a few others too. It’s a bath, so experimentation is fairly safe. ;)

Everyone stay healthy this year and may your resolutions — polyphasic or otherwise! — either work out, or teach you something cool by failing!

-PD

* The result (tell me this isn’t brilliant): I took my evening nap as normal after missing the afternoon one due to family stuff. Got busy at night and actually stayed up a little late by accident — only about 15 minutes. Got up at 4a.m. to the first alarm, feeling okay; yawned and stretched and puttered a bit. But then I talked my beer-addled self into believing that I’d be more comfortable if I made up that extra 15 minutes of sleep by setting just one (the quietest one) of my three alarms for a quarter-hour hence and going back to sleep. Yeah. Didn’t even sniff that alarm going off, and woke up at seven.
argh.
Well. Because I’ve done this before (the oversleeping, not the being-wide-awake-and-talking-myself-into-oversleeping-anyway), I know that, whereas I would have been fine all day if I’d gotten up on time, NOW I’ll be tired until I get a few naps in. >.< And I was doing so well! Darn these holidays! ;)