There are many ways to stay well and to speed your recovery if you do get sick -- from practicing common-sense healthy-living strategies to picking up supplements and alternative remedies that have stood up to scientific scrutiny.
Healthy Holiday Tips 2011 –
(1) Get enough sleep, exercise and cut down on stress.
(2) Lack of sleep can do a number on your body's ability to fight off illness and can make it harder to respond to bugs once you've been exposed to them.
Restricting sleep to four hours a night in a group of patients given flu vaccine cut their immune response by more than half.
The subjects recovered after sleeping for 12 hours for several nights.
(3) Sleep deprivation reduces the number of cells the immune system keeps on hand to fight off infection, and increases inflammation in the body, another immune buster.
Adequate sleep is between 7.5 and 8.5 hours a night.
(4) there’s really good evidence that even commonplace stress can affect your immune response sufficiently to enhance the risk of illness."
(5) Using flu and pneumococcal vaccines, the couples have shown that stress reduces the body's ability to respond to infection. This likely happens because immune cells have receptors for stress hormones like adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol.
(6) Try and figure out what's most important so that you're not feeling stressed by simply the overload of the number of activities and the events you're supposed to attend.
