Secrets of People Who Do Not Get Sick

Hand Washing

During cold and flu season, clean hands are everything.

People who are careful to wash their hands multiple times during the day may reduce their risk of influenza by up to 18 percent. You can either wash your hands frequently during the day or avoid touching your face with your hands to reduce your risk of catching an upper respiratory infection.

Since it is easier to wash your hands than it is to make sure you never, ever touch your face with unwashed hands, most people get better results from simply washing their hands more often — which should include handwashing after spending time in public spaces during cold and flu season.

Even if you don't wash your hands, however, the longer you can go without touching your face, the less likely it is you will come down with an infection. Only 22 percent of cold viruses survive on hands that have not been washed for an hour, and a mere three percent of cold-causing viruses can live on contaminated fingers for 24 hours. If you can go a full hour without touching your face after touching a contaminated door knob, TV remote, or household surface, you may not come down with anything. The problem is that most people touch their faces several times a minute.

If you can't wash right after you know you have had contact with a contaminated surface, at least make an effort to avoid touching your face, especially your nose or eyes. Medical researchers at the University of Virginia in the USA found that many surfaces are contaminated with cold viruses when just one member of the household catches a cold, including 75 percent of door knobs, 57 percent of refrigerator handles, 50 percent of TV remotes, and 80 percent of bathroom faucets. These are the surfaces that are most likely to need disinfectant.

Flu viruses are more persistent than cold viruses. Even eight hours after someone with a flu sneezes on most household surfaces, 100 percent of the viruses are still capable of causing infection. Droplets of saliva or mucus from a flu-infected person can survive up to 24 hours on latex or rubber gloves.
 

Sleep

With just a brief search on the internet, you can find references to insomnia as a contributing cause of diabetes, high blood pressure, depression, anxiety, and even cancer. It should not come as a surprise that lack of sleep is also a contributing factor for colds and flu.

In 2009, scientists at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh found that getting any less than seven uninterrupted hours of sleep every night tripled the risk of catching a cold. If you have trouble falling asleep during the winter months, try resetting your biological clock by getting one to two hours of bright light (either outdoors or from a lamp) every morning. Blue-enriched light during the day is helpful for resetting your internal clock so you fall asleep sooner at night, but uninterrupted sleep requires a room with no light at all.

No study has found that getting more rest will necessarily stop you from catching a flu. Getting more rest once you have come down with symptoms of the flu, however, significantly accelerates recovery.
 

Two More Ways to Prevent Colds and Flu

Keeping hands clean and getting enough rest are very important to staying healthy through cold and flu season. Two more simple changes in lifestyle can also prevent you from getting sick nearly as often.

 

Fresh air

If you live in the United States and you have had house guests from Europe, you may have been surprised by their opening their bedroom windows even in the coldest winter weather, either just a crack or wide open, letting subzero air into your house.

While it is true that Europeans often have their winter heat provided by the city in which they live and Americans never do, opening the windows on a cold winter day is not just a lack of consideration for your heating bills. It's a traditional way of preventing colds and flu.

One of the most important things getting some fresh air can do for your winter health is to take you away from all the places where cold and flu germs hide. For that 15 minutes to an hour you are taking a brisk walk outside, you aren't inside where all the cold and flu viruses can infect you.

Letting a blast of cold air into your house can have mixed results. If you live where temperatures during cold and flu season are often just above freezing, a chilly draft can actually make you more susceptible to infection. But a blast of really cold winter air, below about 0 degrees Farhrenheit or -20 degrees Celsius, can kill the viruses that cause colds and flu.
 

Relaxation

Russian scientists have accumulated a great deal of clinical and experimental evidence about preventing winter colds and flu. After all, some areas of Siberia are ice-bound for up to eight months of the year, and colds and flu can devastate productivity in the workplace if preventive measures are not pursued early in the winter.

The advice of most Russian scientists is that reducing stress will reduce susceptibility to the symptoms of the most common wintertime upper respiratory infections. Getting enough relaxation does not keep you from coming down with a cold or flu, but it does reduce your body's production of stress hormones like cortisol. Lower concentrations of stress hormones in turn reduce the body's production of inflammatory cytokines, and there is less fever, muscle pain, and sore throat, even though the numbers of viruses in the body remain similar.

What can you do if for some reason you just can't relax? During World War II, Russian doctors recommended the use of teas and tinctures of a plant known as Eleutherococcus senticosus, or Siberian ginseng (now marketed as "eleuthero" in the USA). This herb helps the central nervous system respond to stress with just enough stress hormones, not too much, and greatly reduces the risk of colds and flu.

There is just one caveat for users of eleuthero in flu and cold prevention. If you are in the early stages of male-pattern baldness or women's hair loss caused by polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), don't use eleuthero. It contains chemicals that cause the body to conserve testosterone, sometimes accelerating male-pattern hair loss.