The immune system is one of the most remarkable parts of your body. Our own personal shield against harmful invaders like bacteria, toxins, and viruses.
Your immune system has been developed over millions of years to fight so many diseases and infections. It’s a complex system that includes white blood cells, a lymphatic system (including lymph nodes and vessels), the spleen, the thymus, and bone marrow. Without these, you’d constantly be down with multiple illnesses, unable to effectively fight them.
During divorce, your immune system can take quite a battering and not be efficient as it should be. The constant stress and anxiety weakens your body’s immune response, lowering the amount of white blood cells and raising cortisol levels.
Keeping your immune system boosted is important, so check out some of ways you can do this below –
1. Drink lots of water
Everyone knows water is important for the body, but many don’t actually keep their body topped up on the drink. Most forget or are too busy to remember to fill up their glasses.
Your immune system is heavily dependent on your blood being able to transport immune cells around your body. The blood plasma is 90% water, meaning that staying hydrated boosts your immune system. It also helps support all the immunity biochemical pathways in the body.
More water = a better immune system.
Go read our article on how to ‘up’ your water intake. You’ll find some great ways to remind yourself to drink water!
2. Get plenty of sleep
Good, peaceful, and plentiful sleep is vital for an optimal functioning immune system. Lack of sleep has a negative effect on the immune system because the body is more prone to infection and recovers slower from infection. During sleep, our immune system repairs our body and improves our antibody responses to illnesses.
All in all, getting more sleep = a healthier and happier body.
It can be difficult to get to sleep when going through stressful periods in our lives, so try out some meditation or deep breathing exercises to relax your mind and body. Use our articles on these subjects to help you out!
3. Eat healthy food
It can be difficult in this day and age to make sure you’re eating a balanced and healthy diet, especially if you’re unsure where to start. A good diet rich in fibre, prebiotics and probiotics will encourage the good bacteria in your gut to flourish. Foods rich in zinc (nuts, beans, cereals) and vitamin B12 and B6 (meat, fish, eggs) aid in the production of immune cells in the body.
There are many ways to start eating healthy and without putting a dent in your wallet.
For help getting a healthy diet for cheap, look out for our next article on ‘Cutting costs whilst keeping healthy.’
4. Keep your gut healthy
Your gut forms a large part of your immune system and is full of millions of bacteria. It’s important to eat healthy unprocessed food, fibre rich food and drink lots of water to maintain a healthy gut full of good gut bacteria and reduce inflammation of your gut. Foods such as almonds, garlic, and probiotic yoghurt promote good gut bacteria. Thoroughly chewing food and eating smaller frequent meals also helps reduce pressure and avoids overwhelming your gut.
5. practice yoga
Yoga helps reduce inflammation in the body, lower the level of stress hormones circulating around the body, and encourages the lymphatic system to remove toxins.
Go read our articles on yoga to help you begin your journey with this method of relaxation and exercise.
6. meditate
Meditation has a peaceful and calming effect on the body, thus helping your immune system and reducing inflammation in your body. It can help you through stressful periods in your life by refocusing your mind and allowing you to remain peaceful, leaving your immune system working efficiently and at full capacity to protect you.
Go read our article on how to get started with meditation!
7. Exercise everday
Making time for exercise is a great way to boost your immune system. It might seem like the last thing you want to do but the feel-good feeling you get after a session can boost both your immune system and improve your mental health.
Moderate intensity exercise helps with the circulation of immune cells around the body, allowing the body to detect illness faster. Exercise also helps you sleep better, sleep deeper, and increases your intake of oxygen through the lungs.
8. Do 5 minutes of deep breathing exercises every day
Deep breathing increases the amount of oxygen rich blood in your body and helps boost the immune system by reducing anxiety and stress and boosting sleep.
Read our article on deep breathing exercises to help you get started.
9. Make sure your vaccines are all up to date
Vaccines imitate diseases and infections in our bodies, thus encouraging our immune system to make antibodies to fight these diseases and infections. Our immune system will remember how to do this in the future should we get ill. When you are up to date with all your required vaccines, your immune system will work to its optimum by producing antibodies as soon as we fall ill.
10. Take vitamins everyday
Vitamins play a huge part in supporting and enhancing the immune system. Some have more impact than others but all of them have some role whether specific or non-specific. Vitamin C prevents infections, vitamin E (a strong antioxidant) helps fight infections, and vitamin D supports the immune system.
Go read some of our articles on vitamins and their benefits to get a better idea of what they do! Consult with your doctor first before consuming any vitamin products.
If you have any more tips we might’ve missed, share them on our forum or social media, let us know if any of these have helped you!
DISCLAIMER
Before you start any new diet, health programme, exercise routine, and ingest or topically use any oil, vitamin, mineral, product or compound, it is very important to consult your doctor, therapist or do a patch test to make sure you do not have any adverse reactions.
We do not offer any form of medical or psychological advice. The information in our wellbeing articles are offered for educational purposes only. Our wellbeing articles are not intended to diagnose, treat or prevent any disease. Thank you.
