If you find yourself getting colds frequently, or just feeling run down, it’s natural to want to find support or a solution. For some of us, it’s a professional hazard, from teachers and nurses to customer service and hospitality, frequent interactions with the pubic often means more exposure to germs. So how can we protect ourselves?
Though our daily lives present immune support challenges, paying attention to how we take care of ourselves daily often has the biggest impact. From ensuring quality sleep and proper nutrition to reducing stress when are where possible, we can naturally support our immune system.
Quick Links
- What Does Immune Support Actually Means
- The Foundations of Health and Your Immune System
- How Does Stress Affect the Immune System?
- Sleep and the Immune System: Why Quality Matters
- Nutrition and the Immune System
- Sleep, Stress, and Nutrition Don’t Work Independently
- Where Do Vitamins and Immune Support Supplements Fit?
- When Immune Support Means Talking to Your Doctor
What Does Immune Support Actually Mean?
Before we get into what support means, it helps to take a step back and consider why your immune system might need support in the first place.
Simply, your immune system protects your body against germs, bacteria, viruses, and disease. Immune support helps strengthen these natural defenses. But how do you do that?
Immune support includes the daily (yes, daily) behaviors and lifestyle factors that help your immune system function at its best. This means that when you’re healthy, you build habits that keep it healthy (nutrition, exercise, stress reduction, etc.), and when you’re not feeling your best, you support your immune system through hydration, rest, and nutrition.
The Foundations of Health and Your Immune System
You don’t build anything without a foundation, and a strong base lets any structure withstand more pressure. Your immune system is similar. It’s built to withstand pressure, but often we, unconsciously, assume that its existence alone is enough.
We expect our immune system to withstand a daily barrage of germs, bacteria, viruses, and more, regardless of our sleep, nutrition, and other habits. In this way, it may support us, but we can also strengthen its resilience with our daily habits.
Whether it’s our health, which we often take for granted until it’s compromised or gone, or our immune system, we need to support them by reinforcing the foundations that keep them strong. The good news is the foundations– nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress management, and hydration– help promote overall well-being and keep our immune system strong, and small incremental changes can help us improve these habits and boost our immune system.
This is increasingly important as we approach seasonal colds, more time indoors, days with less natural light, holiday stress (and changes in our eating habits), and other challenges to our health and wellness that typically accompany the change of seasons.
The first step to supporting your immune system is understanding the foundations of health that have the biggest impact on it and how small changes to daily habits can support immune function.
How Does Stress Affect the Immune System?
If you’ve ever heard someone tell you to reduce stress, then you know how easy that is (hint: it isn’t). Stress is a part of life, unfortunately, and on some days, completely unavoidable. However, it’s not a single stressful moment that weakens your immune system. Again, let’s take a step back.
When you’re stressed, your body releases hormones to help you respond effectively and efficiently to a perceived threat or challenge. More specifically, epinephrine and norepinephrine, more commonly known as adrenaline and noradrenaline, trigger the fight-or-flight response. They increase your heart rate and mobilize glucose for energy. Similarly, cortisol, another stress hormone, regulates the stress response by managing blood sugar, blood pressure, and inflammation.
These stress hormones are great for a short-term response to a stressor, like needing to fight or run. However, when stress persists for weeks or months, those hormones can significantly affect your immune system and its ability to respond to infections and inflammation.
As you likely know, stress also makes it harder to stick to other routines, like sleep, proper nutrition/regular healthy meals, and exercise and workouts (or feeling too tired to do them), so the problem compounds.
It’s easy to see how stress can affect overall health, especially your immune system, when it impacts so much.
Signs Stress May Be Affecting Your Overall Health
They say comparison is the thief of joy, but it’s also not the best way to gauge if stress is affecting you. Everyone responds to stress differently, so what it looks like in one person may be very different from how you experience it.
Stress might:
- Impact your ability to sleep, from falling asleep and staying asleep to waking up feeling tired
- Cause more frequent headaches
- Disrupt digestion or create gastrointestinal distress. The mind-gut connection is real!
- Make you more irritable or emotional
- Make you feel drained (no energy mentally, physically, emotionally)
- Make you more susceptible to colds or illness
Of course, these may signal other issues as well, so monitoring your stress level and reducing it through movement, meditation, time with loved ones, or hobbies can help. However, if these persist and interfere with your ability to complete daily routines and tasks, it’s better to discuss these concerns with a doctor rather than assume it’s stress.
Sleep and the Immune System: Why Quality Matters
Stress typically affects sleep, but even if you’re not stressed, low-quality sleep can still affect your immune system. In fact, research from the National Institutes of Health found that prolonged sleep deficiency changes how your immune system functions, impacting its ability to respond to germs and fight infections.
While how long you spend in bed matters, it’s quite possible that the person who sleeps 8 hours and the person who sleeps 10 are getting the same amount of quality sleep. If your sleep is light or regularly interrupted, especially in a way that impacts how you feel when you wake up, it may be important to look at sleep hygiene and find what’s getting in the way of uninterrupted quality sleep.
What Gets in the Way of Quality Sleep?
As we mentioned already, stress is usually a big obstacle to quality sleep, but it’s not the only one. Sometimes, it’s easy to discover the problem: noise, an overloaded schedule, or even exercising or eating too late.
However, other factors might include:
- Inconsistent routines, such as changing your sleep and wake time frequently, as with shift work
- Caffeine, especially later in the day, can make falling asleep difficult
- Alcohol may seem like it helps sleep, but it actually disrupts sleep patterns and reduces high-quality REM sleep.
- Screens, including your phone, laptop, or the TV, emit light that convinces our brains we should stay awake and makes it harder to fall asleep (even if we’ve convinced ourselves of the opposite)
- Health concerns like chronic pain, sleep apnea, and even some supplements and prescription medications
Improving sleep quality is difficult without first understanding why it’s hard to fall asleep or stay asleep. For some, it means removing these challenges, while others may need further investigation into potential sleep disorders.
Nutrition and the Immune System
It’s no secret that your diet and nutrition impact your health. Recommendations for a nutrient-dense diet aren’t just about weight management or energy.
Protein and nutrients, including vitamins A, C, and D as well as iron and zinc, play important roles in immune function and, perhaps more importantly, deficiencies can impact your body’s ability to respond to immune threats.
Contrary to your grandmother’s advice (or even popular advice such as “an apple a day”), no one food will keep you from getting sick. Instead, varied, nutrient-dense foods will support your immune system over the long term.
How to Focus on Nutrient-Dense Foods
When we say nutrient-dense, what we mean is foods that provide the macro- and micronutrients your body needs to perform at peak. If you struggle with meal-planning and advance prep, that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on nutrition.
Consider these practical steps:
- Eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables to get a range of vitamins and nutrients. Fresh, canned, and frozen options can all make meal prep easier.
- Build meals around protein-rich foods like lean meats, fish, eggs, beans, or tofu.
- Include whole grains, nuts, and seeds to round out meals or add variety to salads and more.
This doesn’t mean you need to change every meal. Not every plate will be perfect, but when you look at your diet over the week, look at where you could add more variety. One good tip to consider, especially with fruits and vegetables, is to eat with color variety in mind.
Sleep, Stress, and Nutrition Don’t Work Independently
Just as no single food will keep you healthy, focusing on one while largely ignoring the others won’t work either. Sleep, stress, and nutrition are interconnected aspects of immune health.
After all, we know stress can keep you awake; we know that after a night of poor sleep, we don’t make the best food choices; we know that if you’re grabbing quick sugar to keep you going after poor sleep, you’re not getting the nutrients you need. It compounds pretty quickly and easily.
Supporting immune health doesn’t have to start with everything at once; instead, consider your biggest concern, what needs the most attention, and start there. Try a meal plan. Try a consistent bedtime (and wake time) routine. Try screen-free time in the evening. Try a new stress relief technique or hobby.
Focusing on one of these may help others fall into place as well, but each on its own is a health improvement and immune-supporting choice.
Where Do Vitamins and Immune Support Supplements Fit?
Let’s start here: Immune health is built upon sleep, stress reduction, and nutrition. No pill can make up for a lack of sleep, an inadequate diet, or a nervous system constantly overloaded.
Similarly, immune support on a label doesn’t mean it prevents illness. However, there are specific reasons you may want to look towards immune support supplements and vitamins.
Vitamins and Minerals
Vitamins and minerals are meant to supplement a healthy, nutrient-dense diet. Lab work can reveal what you may be lacking nutritionally, and supplements can fill the gap. In this case, for your immune function, look at vitamins A, C, and D as well as zinc.
It’s also important to remember that more is not better and higher doses not only don’t “fill a gap” more quickly, but they can also do harm. Talk with your doctor about what you might need, how much, and whether it will interfere or overlap with something you’re already taking.
Herbal Supplements and Teas
If you’ve ever wandered a health food store or even the pharmacy aisle at your grocer, you’ve likely seen countless products, including herbal supplements, boasting immune benefits. Some of these, like echinacea, have been studied for their ability to stimulate white blood cell circulation and relieve common cold symptoms, but more research is needed.
Traditional wisdom is also well documented, often for centuries, but understanding which herbs, preparations, and concentrations are used is key. Learning to read supplement labels is an important skill for deciding whether something might help, but consulting your doctor about which herbal supplements to take is a better call.
When Immune Support Means Talking to Your Doctor
When you get a cold or feel run down, many people turn to the internet or the supplement aisle at the pharmacy/grocery store. Hoping for a quick, easy fix, a small tweak to your morning routine, is normal.
If you’re invested in healthy routines– quality sleep, a balanced diet, stress reduction– and you’re still getting sick more often than is usual for you, infections are persistent and recurring, or you just can’t seem to kick it, it may be time to look beyond support and talk to your doctor.
In some cases, persistent, severe, or difficult-to-treat concerns can point to larger problems. Also, talking with your doctor can help you find root causes and address problems including:
- Excessive fatigue, weight changes, or recurring symptoms
- Where and when medications may be impacting your health (or one another)
- Want to begin supplements or vitamins but don’t know where to start or what to take
- Notice your symptoms are not improving, even with changes to your routines
A naturopathic doctor is trained to review your symptoms, health history, medications, diet, and, if needed, lab results. They can use this information and these tools to identify nutrient deficiencies or other issues, then develop an individualized plan tailored to your lifestyle and what your body needs.
As always, if you have serious symptoms, including difficulty breathing, chest pain, severe dehydration, confusion, or rapidly intensifying symptoms, seek medical attention immediately.
The naturopathic doctors at Canby Clinic are here to help you better understand how the foundations of health support your overall wellness, body, and immune system.
We’ll start by looking at how you’re managing movement, nutrition, hydration, sleep, emotional health, and more to discover where we can make lifestyle changes to improve how you feel. Our healthcare membership makes regular appointments and ongoing conversations possible and predictable, especially when it comes to cost.
Whether you’re looking for immune support or overall well-being, we’re here to help. Contact us to schedule a free 15-minute meet-the-doc appointment or schedule your next appointment!