No cure so you gotta rest. Nose is stuffed so you gotta mouth breathe. Throat is dry from mouth breathing. Dry throat makes it painful to swallow. Pain keeps you from sleeping and recovering. Lack of sleep leads to worse symptoms like piercing headaches. Need to rest to get rid of the headaches. Headache and swallowing is too painful to rest properly. Lack of rest perpetuates headaches, nose congestion, dry throat, painful swallowing.

What is this BS

  • blarghly@lemmy.worldEnglish
    181·
    14 hours ago

    I’ll say from personal experience, I found out that my body is actually awesome at responding to colds - I just don’t let it.

    Storytime - for pretty much all my life, I’ve had what I considered a pretty normal and functioning immune system. I would get a cold, feel how you felt for a few days or weeks, mostly just power through, and then I’d be back to normal.

    However, in college I took 6 months off to hike the Appalachian Trail. This was great for a lot of reasons, but one thing I noticed (which everyone around me agreed on when I mentioned it to them), is that I’d pretty much stopped getting colds. For reference, trail life is not at all sanitary. Daily showers and grooming are the stuff of fantasy. Washing your hands after you take a shit is rare. If you frequent the small lean-to shelters along the trail to sleep (as I did almost every night), you will be sleeping shoulder to shoulder with other hikers with similar levels of hygiene. And it’s not like we are somehow not catching and transmitting pathogens to each other. Every year, things like the flu or norovirus will rip through the hiking community, leaving 100 mile stretches of trail where you’ll walk past dozens of hikers groaning in their tents (haphazardly set up just feet from the trail), with a pool of vomit just outside.

    But the whole time I was on the trail, I never got a cold. As long as I wasn’t sick sick, I felt very generally healthy. Why?

    Well, the life I was living was very different than my normal life. I think I am decently healthy in my normal life. I eat a healthy diet and exercise regularly. But on the trail, I had a lot more things going for me.

    • I slept a lot, in sync with my circadian rhythm. 8pm was widely agreed to be “hiker’s midnight”, since about 15 minutes after the sun went down, all the hikers would start feeling sleepy and decide to go to bed. I would usually knock out instantly, and then wake up at first light, groggily peer out my tent at the coming morning, take a piss, then roll back over and sleep for another hour or two.
    • I was getting a lot of exercise. This exercise was rarely particularly strenuous, but every day I would wake up, shoulder my pack, and walk about 15 miles.
    • I had a phone, but had no backup battery bank, mini solar charger, or anything like that. Cell reception in the hills typically oscillated between bad and nonexistant. So my phone almost universally lived in the bottom of a stuff sack inside my backpack. I would take it out maybe once every couple days to listen to a song or two before turning it off again to conserve prescious battery life in case of emergency. Partly this helped because it meant that I wasn’t staring at a bright phone screen when I should be sleeping. But more than that, I think it helped because I wasn’t constantly feeding my brain a stream of nee content. I spent almost my entire day, every day, hiking in the forest in silence with no distractions. All I had to entertain myself was noticing the environment around me, occassionally checking my map and digital watch to calculate how far to the next stream/shelter/trail junction/town, and whatever thoughts came up in my head.
    • I spent pretty much all my time breathing fresh air. Most of the time I was in rural land with very little air pollution, and even when I did approach population centers, they tended to be, at most, medium-sized towns.
    • When I wasn’t hiking or camping alone, I was hiking and camping with other hikers. Trail life tends to dissolve the differences in class, age, national origin, political affiliation, religion, or anything else. Everyone shares a common interest - life on the trail - so conversation tends to flow easily. Trail talk tends to center around things hikers think about - food, water, miles, towns, shelters, gear, other hikers, weather, poop. Outside the rare individual who gives off bad vibes, everyone is welcome and welcoming, creating a general sense of community and support.
    • I had a well defined goal, obvious steps to take to achieve it, and made progress every day. The goal: walk to the northern terminus. The plan: wake up, break camp, walk. Every day, I could lay down in bed and look at my map, celebrating the progress I’d made, seeing how much closer I was to some landmark like a town, a mountaintop vista, or a significant mile marker. With a clear goal like this and few other distractions, my sense of time dialated significantly - the present moment became paramount. The next few and previous few miles were all that mattered. Yesterday and tomorrow were significant markers in my mind. But the town I was in 3 days ago, I felt I hadn’t seen in years. And when I started the trail? What I would do when I finished? That was another lifetime.

    All these things, I think, contributed to my physical and mental health. And doing so, they either (a) improved my immune system enough that the common cold was stamped out long before my body had to create congestion to deal with it, or (b) my immune system wasn’t overreacting to a relatively minor threat, and was simply taking care of these minor viral infections in the background without bothering me

    • orgrinrt@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 hour ago

      Probably worth mentioning, that the benefits of this can be reaped in part just by being and walking in nature every day. Especially on the mental health side, in some places of the world, I think it’s a general concept called “forest bathing” or similar.

      I’ve never done a hike longer than 100km, which means I’ve never been on the trail for more than a few days at a time.

      However, I’ve noticed the same effects ever since I started doing that more frequently. I’m much less prone to falling properly sick than any of my friends or family, whenever my partner falls ill, I typically go through a mild similar thing in a few days time, but often survive without even fever, when they can be bedridden for weeks, even. I might get some signs of a flu or whatever, but so much milder. It’s not unusual that I just entirely skip being sick at all, even mild symptoms, even if my entire household is struggling in bed with fever. And I tend to be the caretaker then, so ample opportunity for the bugs to pass on to me, constantly.

      And every time I realize I’m falling unusually sick, I realize that it’s been some months since my last hike.

      And if I just keep doing a hike or two biannually and otherwise visit the forests or the lakes or whatever at least once a week, even if just briefly due to stress and work and all, I am so much less prone to proper sickness, but having any sickness at all in general too!

      So this is mostly for those who read the OP I’m responding to and thinking, it’d be nice to afford 6 months of a vacation — you need not! It works, even if this is just an anecdote, with fewer efforts and much more casual execution too! And it has been studied a lot, although take it with a grain of salt because I haven’t stored any of the studies/papers of the abstracts I’ve read just passing by thanks to my adhd curiousness.

      I think the consensus is, nevertheless, that there are provable, observable benefits of being in nature, even if just a bit at a time, even if not all that frequently. But I’m not a researcher or work in these kinds of fields, so just be wary that I might be overselling or even misrepresenting it. But I feel fairly confident in saying so.

    • Arancello@aussie.zone
      3·
      12 hours ago

      Loved reading this. I found exactly the same on the long hikes I’ve done. Havent done Apalachian trail, but have done The Camino, Francigena, Kumano Kodo.