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Common Habits that are keeping you sick.
Whenever we start to feel sick, we gravitate towards articles and remedies to boost our immune systems. But what if you unknowingly have bad habits that lower your immune system?
There are a lot of things that we do daily that can actually lower our immune systems, and keep us from being healthy.
Most of these things you wouldn’t think could have any effect on your immune system!
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Healthy living isn’t just about taking supplements, exercising, and eating well.
Making sure that we are cutting out BAD habits from our lives is also essential.
Here are 7 bad habits that most of us have, that can greatly lower your immune system and keep you sick.
Sedentary Living
Lazing around isn’t just bad for your muscles and your waistline.
Having a sedentary lifestyle can actually make you sick.
There are a lot of downsides to living an inactive lifestyle including: poor blood circulation, muscle weakness, inflammation, possible hormone imbalance, and a weak immune system.
Try to get up and moving for at least 30 minutes a day!
Working out is not only good for your mental health, but it can help boost your immune system and blood circulation, keeping you feeling your best.
Related Content: How to boost your immune system naturally
Anxiety and Stress
Stress is meant to protect us from danger, but too much stress can wreak havoc on our minds and bodies.
When we are overworked, overtired, worried and are trying to do too much, our bodies get worn down and have a hard time functioning.
Our immune systems can be severely weakened by stress.
When we are stressed, our bodies create a hormone called cortisol. This stress hormone causes your fight or flight reaction.
When you are constantly stressed, the hormone levels don’t drop and go back to normal, which do a lot of damage including suppression of the immune system.
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Try to lower your stress levels.
There are a lot of good ways to lower your stress levels, including meditation, exercise and talking out problems you are facing.
I have an article called 9 Easy ways to quickly relieve stress, follow the link to see some great ways to manage stress in your life.
Not getting enough sleep
Lack of sleep is just the worst, for many reasons.
It may be one of the most common habits that lower your immune system.
From staying up too late, to waking up with your newborn multiple times a night, there are a lot of reasons we don’t get enough sleep.
Sleep is your body’s way of rebooting.
When your’e asleep, your body can repair itself from being sick, a hard workout, or overwork.
If you don’t get enough sleep, your body isn’t able to fix itself.
When your’e asleep, your body both produces and releases a protein called Cytokines.
This protein helps to fight infection and inflammation, making sleep an important part of boosting your immunity.
If you cant get enough sleep at night, try to make it up with short naps!
Loneliness
Did you know being lonely doesn’t only make you feel horrible, but is actually bad for you?
Loneliness has the same effect on the body as the stress hormone, or fight or flight response.
Being lonely can cause a higher white blood cell count in the body, causing inflammation.
When your body has excess inflammation, it can cause all sorts of health problems, ranging from Asthma to some types of Cancer.
Try your best to be around other people, even just through video chat.
Making the effort, even if it’s uncomfortable, to surround yourself with community is a good first start to not feeling lonely anymore.
Reach out, and maybe you will even find some great new connections along the way!
Over-training
I know we talked about not being sedentary earlier, but overdoing it is just as bad.
When you push your body too hard for too long, you are doing more hard than good.
There is research that shows competitive athletes can be more susceptible to getting colds and upper respiratory infections that recreational athletes.
This is because they go long and hard when it comes to swimming, biking and running, and exercises that are tough on your body if you go too long.
90 minutes or longer is usually too much, especially if you are not breaking to refuel.
Moderate and consistent exercise is very good for you though!
Working out for 30 minutes daily will actually be enough to keep your metabolism burning, and increase your motivation.
More than that, after 30 minutes of exercise, your body’s ability to keep responding to your workout decreases.
That means that most of your gains will actually be within the first 30 minutes anyways.
Doing a fitness program like P90X3 or Morning Meltdown 100, both 30 minute daily exercise programs, can help you to feel your best and forget the rest.
Eating too much sugar
Yet again, something that causes inflammation.
It seems like everything has sugar in it.
But eating things that are particularly high in sugar like desserts, sugary coffee drinks (like frappacinos, mochas and lattes), and carby foods can cause our immune systems to suffer.
There is some research that shows eating 75-100 grams of sugar per day can really damper your body’s overall immune function, and ability to protect itself.
If that seems like a lot, know that some soda’s have over 39 grams of sugar per can.
Related Content: How to break a sugar addiction
Smoking
This is one of those things that is just bad for a lot of reasons.
Smoking is not only horrible for your lungs, but can greatly hurt your immune function.
Smoking tobacco has shown to increase your risk for pneumonia and influenza, because it lowers your immunity.
It also lowers your antioxidant levels, and since it damages your lungs, it makes it harder to fight off a cold once you have one.
Cutting the habit…
All of the things listed above are bad habits. Ditching these will over time really help you to take better care of your health, and increase your body’s immune function.
Do your best to stay in good health, and make the changes you need to better protect yourself.