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Every winter people ask me what they should do to get over colds and flus. In the past I’ve written long lists of all sorts of interventions, including numerous herbs and supplements. I still think those things are useful (and I’ll share a revised list later in the article) but 12 years of parenthood has helped to evolve my thinking on the matter. Having daily contact with small humans who think nothing of sneezing directly into my mouth, I know that exposure is inevitable.
If I now had to rank the value of immune-supporting interventions, number one would be REDUCE YOUR ACTIVITY. I know it’s kind of like announcing that tonight’s dessert is prunes.
Most people either don’t want to slow down or don’t feel they have the time to slow down. But I believe that being always engaged takes a big toll on us, both physically and psychologically. And there’s no supplement that comes close to the restorative value of REST.
So learn to recognize your first symptoms of infection. Maybe it’s a certain quality of lethargy – you’re tired in a way that feels different from just a poor night of sleep. Maybe it’s a sore throat or just a tickle. Maybe it’s a headache or a stiff neck. Maybe it’s a runny nose while you still feel otherwise fine. When you notice this, it’s a message – not just that a foreign critter has taken up residence in you, but that you are out of sync with what your being needs. If you honor this message and reduce your activity immediately, you will almost never get sick.
“Reduce your activity” implies a few different things. Most often it means: sleep. If you check in – you can close your eyes and ask internally, “Should I sleep now?” – you’ll be able to feel if the answer is yes. Often, when you perceive your first symptom of infection and you respond by taking a nap, you’ll wake up and that symptom will be gone. Easy.
But if you’ve been feeling like you’re constantly staving off infections or you’re always operating at less than 100%, reducing your activity may mean lessening your overall expenditure of energy. For optimal health it’s good to aim to consume less energy than we generate. That may sound overly simplistic, and it can sometimes be hard to gauge, but it’s basic economics.
If you generate lots of energy through ample deep sleep, high quality food, loving and supportive community, spiritual practice, and other forms of nourishing self-care, you can burn more energy without needing to tap into your reserves. If you don’t sleep much and/or it isn’t restful, if you don’t eat great food (or you have digestive problems that impair your ability to extract the nutrients from it), if you don’t engage with community in a supportive way, etc., you will have less energy available to you, and unless you curb your activity level, your immune system (and other systems) will flag.
Besides reducing your activity, you can support yourself even more by tuning in when you slow down and asking, “What needs my attention?” Our susceptibility to infection is often higher during times of transition – such as transitions between seasons – because there’s a demand for attention and adaptive energy. If we don’t give any direct attention to finding our balance amidst change, we’ll unconsciously expend more adaptive energy to restore balance. Or, said in a more positive way, if we proactively slow down and tune in during challenging times so that we’re able to recognize how to adapt, we save energy in the process and usually avoid getting sick.
When you reduce your activity at the first sign of a cold, you can avoid getting sick and that’s good. But I’d really like to encourage you to voluntarily slow down even when it’s not motivated by the desire to avoid something unpleasant. This practice actually yields real, tangible, measurable improvements in calmness, happiness, and life satisfaction. So don’t wait for that sore throat.
Now, I said I’d tell you some of the other interventions I recommend for colds and flus. They’re grouped for simplicity.
Dietary:
- Avoid sugar (it suppresses immune function).
- Eat lightly and stick to whole, natural, unprocessed, and easy-to-digest foods (which usually means cooked).
- Drink plenty of room-temperature or warm fluids (water, broth, electrolytes, tea).
- Almost all aromatic herbs (such as thyme, mint, ginger, garlic, oregano, sage, etc.) have immune supportive effects, so use them liberally in your soup and tea.
- Make it easy for your body to get the nutrients it needs with a minimal expenditure of energy.
Lifestyle:
- Don’t touch your face. Just make a rule with yourself that you don’t put your fingers in your ears, eyes, nose, or mouth unless you just washed them.
- Keep the surfaces you touch clean (cell phone, computer, counters, door knobs, sponges, etc.)
- Stay warm. Research shows there isn’t much truth to the longstanding notion that cold weather makes us sick – at least not in a direct way – but it does play a role. If you’re feeling too cold, chances are you’re using adaptive energy to keep yourself warm, and this means less energy that’s available for immune function. Also, cold weather is usually dry too, and dry mucus membranes are less effective at trapping viruses. Finally, viruses are more stable, and therefore survive longer on surfaces, in cold weather than in warm.
- Reduce stress.
- Get enough good-quality sleep.
- Get acupuncture and massage.
- Exercise (not when you’re actively sick though)
Supplements:
- Whatever you do, do it fast. Almost all immune-enhancing supplements have the best chance of success when taken at the absolute first sign of illness.
- Herbs: There are lots of great immune enhancing herbs, and many are specific as to when and how they’re best utilized. It’s beyond the scope of this article to get into those specifics, so I encourage you to consult a trained herbalist or do your own reading on the nuances of these herbs, but here are some of my favorites: lemon balm leaf (gentle anti-viral), echinacea root (I like the tincture form best), umckaloabo root (umcka for short), osha root, olive leaf, fresh ginger, andrographis (exceedingly bitter, so best taken as a pill), elder berry and flower, and the Chinese pill formulas Yin Qiao [Yin Chiao] and Gan Mao Ling.
- Mushrooms. Nearly all edible mushrooms have immune enhancing properties. Some of the most potent include: ganoderma (reishi), maitake, shiitake, coriolus, chaga, agaricus blazeii, turkey tail (trametes), agarikon (fomitopsis), lion’s mane, and mesima. I believe these strengthening fungi are best taken before you get sick, but they can also be taken while you’re sick (especially if it’s a prolonged illness).
- Vitamin D. I generally recommend 35 units per pound of your body weight as a maintenance dose, though for myself, I double or triple this when I’m fighting an infection.
- Vitamin A has anti-viral activity in high doses, though it can be toxic to the liver over time and it isn’t safe for pregnant women. For non-pregnant individuals with healthy livers, you can take 100,000 to 200,000 units of vitamin A for the first several days of an illness. Often a single big dose is enough to stop an early infection.
- Vitamin C is a great, safe immune enhancer. All forms are useful, though I prefer the kind that’s bound in a layer of fat for better absorption. This is sometimes called “lipospheric” or “lypospheric” vitamin C. A similar form is known as ascorbyl palmitate. I recommend about 500 mg of vitamin C per hour when actively fighting an infection (or just below the dose that gives you loose bowels).
- Zinc lozenges, specifically in the form zinc gluconate, has been proven to reduce to the duration of a cold. It’s best to suck on one slowly, repeatedly throughout the day. The downside is that, especially on an empty stomach, zinc can give you a stomach ache.
- Glandular extracts. If you don’t have a problem with animal products, some have potent immune supportive effects. They are mostly derived from otherwise discarded organs from the meat industry (beef, pork, and lamb), except in the case of the company Standard Process which raises them on their own century-old organic farm. The most common glandular extract for immune support is thymus, the gland in your chest that produces T lymphocytes. Some of the products my patients have had the most success with include Pro-Boost, X-Viromin, and Congaplex.
There are two last points I want to make. One: when you start to feel better, keep taking good care of yourself and reducing activity for at least one more day. A major rookie move is to respond to the message from your body, see positive results, and then jump right back in to high activity and crappy diet, just to get hit hard with a relapse you can’t immediately clear.
Two: nothing wastes energy like fighting with reality. I’ve been able to sail through a cold by focusing inward, finding my feelings of resistance to being sick, and letting them go. I believe anyone can do this. Think about your illness and notice the feelings in your body – particularly the lack of ease. Often there will be a feeling of tightness, tension, or bracing somewhere, or some other unpleasant feeling that isn’t due to the virus itself, but to your reaction to it. If you just keep bringing yourself back to your body and letting go of this resistance, your whole experience of being sick can change. Let your cells do the fighting, not your mind.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => Colds, Flus, and the Incomparable Value of Rest and Calibration
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Last week I discussed our tendency to get attached to a single point of view, and how this often keeps us stuck. When we recognize the validity of other perspectives – and allow that both sides are within us (and also in our adversaries, be they real or imaginary) – this helps to neutralize the issue. For a deeper and more thorough exploration, we can look at the two sides of an issue intersected with the push and pull of desire and fear (or attraction and repulsion). It’s a process Leslie Temple Thurston simply calls “squares.”
Here are some examples. If you find them challenging, I encourage you to work through them. If not, I hope they help you understand how the exercise works and lead you to the patterns that are relevant to you.
In this first example, we’re looking at the intersection of desire and fear with that of being in control versus out of control. Wanting control is a primary human motivator. A great many of our upsets can be traced to an underlying fear of being out of control. But pursuing control may amplify the belief that we’re not in control. This can be a tricky catch-22 to work with. So if you have a strong desire to be in control (upper right quadrant), you’d do well to address yourself to the fear of being out of control (lower left). These are easy for most people to access.
Can you think of a situation that arouses the fear of being out of control? Holding that in mind, what happens in your body? Can you feel some physical unease? What happens if you don’t resist that feeling? What happens if you even invite it to be felt with your whole being, willingly allowing it spread over you? And what happens when you imagine opening yourself, like opening a closed fist that contains a butterfly, and let it peacefully depart? If this process diminished the intensity of the feeling, but not completely, try doing it several times in succession. For more on this form of body-centered releasing, check out our book, Freedom.
Less obvious – but not uncommon – is the fear of being in control (lower right quadrant). If you’re in control, does that mean whatever happens is your fault? Maybe being in control feels like too much responsibility. If control issues are significant for you, I encourage you to do the process described in the last paragraph with the idea of situation in which you are in control. What comes up?
Last, there’s the desire to be out of control (lower left quadrant). Though this may seem totally foreign to someone who’s rigidly clenching around every aspect of life, there’s always a hidden part that yearns for the relief of being out of control. Anyone who’s ever been to a college party at the end of finals has witnessed plenty of desire to be out of control.
Try visiting with all four quadrants and journaling about how each state exists in you. You might also have fun with the following variation – desire and fear of independence versus dependence.
This is a major dynamic in kids and adolescents, and it’s not helped by the fact that parents often give mixed messages. On the one hand, we may be telling our kids to stay attached to the family, don’t try to get your needs met by your inept peers, and keep coming to us for support and advice. On the other, we’re telling them to grow up, do more things for themselves, get themselves ready for school, figure out their homework, and navigate new situations with minimal guidance. When we see them shifting their attachment from the family to their peers, we often mistake this for independence, when they’ve actually become dependent on peers for approval and direction.
It's probably easy for them to access the desire to be independent, even if it’s scary, because our society puts so much value on it. If we can help them recognize the other three quadrants, it may help to neutralize some of the inner and outer forces, and allow them to be accepting of where they are and comfortable with striking a balance.
Of course these dynamics don’t necessarily end when adolescence does. We may find ourselves struggling with the dimensions of dependence and independence in our adult relationships, and when handicapped, ill, or elderly. Exploration and peacemaking with these states may support a peaceful resolution.
Be well,
Peter
P.S. If you find this exploration interesting, perhaps you’d enjoy guiding others through processes like these. Check out the Dragontree Coaching Program. In the advanced Illuminator training, we go even deeper into these processes.
[post_title] => Meeting the Part of Yourself That Wants to Be Out of Control
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Countless medical studies have shown just how dramatically our beliefs influence our health. People who believe they’re getting a new drug or treatment can experience improvements in mood or profound relief from pain – even when they’re in the placebo group. Our beliefs can alter how toxins affect us. And on the “nocebo” side of the equation (a negative placebo effect) we can even generate signs and symptoms of diseases we don’t have.
In one Japanese study, subjects known to have a strong reaction to poison ivy were told that one of their arms was being rubbed with poison ivy. Yikes! But researchers actually touched them with the leaf of a harmless plant. Every participant broke out in a poison-ivy-like rash.
The subjects were told that their other arm would be rubbed with a harmless plant. Instead, the researchers rubbed real poison ivy on them! But only two out of thirteen people had a reaction to it.
We can make ourselves sick and we can make ourselves well. The key is the incredible power of belief. It’s been thoroughly and indisputably proven, yet few people consciously exploit this magic on a regular basis. I’d like to change that.
As a start, I suggest we practice observing positive belief every time we put something into our bodies.
When you eat, try getting yourself mentally and emotionally enrolled in a positive expectation about how you’ll be affected by it. Admire the food. Tell yourself it’s going to be deeply nourishing. Your body is going to efficiently extract the nutrients and deliver them to all your tissues. It’s totally reasonable to expect that it will support clear thinking, high energy and mental calm, glowing skin, efficient digestion, optimal organ function, strong immunity, etc.
For best results I recommend building your expectations for a minute at the beginning of the meal, remembering this from time to time during the meal, and then happily anticipating the benefits after the meal.
You might even try bringing your attention inward, visualizing the nutrients being absorbed through your intestines and flowing into all of your cells, and telling yourself, “I allow myself to receive the fullest, most complete health benefit from this food” – or whatever words feel natural to you.
What happens when you say to yourself or a dining partner, “I feel really good from this food. My body thrives on good food. I can already tell that this meal is exactly what I needed”?
This should be even easier to do with supplements, herbs, and drugs, since you’re consuming them with a specific healing purpose and outcome in mind. Don’t forget it. Tell yourself as you swallow them (or apply them, if topical) that they’re going to do what they’re intended to do, that they’re perfectly compatible with your body, that the benefits are already starting (whether you can feel it or not).
If you make a practice of priming yourself to expect good things you’re significantly more likely to experience good things, to notice the good things, and to be grateful for them.
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => Expect Good Things: A Practice for Getting the Most Out of Food, Medicines, and Supplements
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Every winter people ask me what they should do to get over colds and flus. In the past I’ve written long lists of all sorts of interventions, including numerous herbs and supplements. I still think those things are useful (and I’ll share a revised list later in the article) but 12 years of parenthood has helped to evolve my thinking on the matter. Having daily contact with small humans who think nothing of sneezing directly into my mouth, I know that exposure is inevitable.
If I now had to rank the value of immune-supporting interventions, number one would be REDUCE YOUR ACTIVITY. I know it’s kind of like announcing that tonight’s dessert is prunes.
Most people either don’t want to slow down or don’t feel they have the time to slow down. But I believe that being always engaged takes a big toll on us, both physically and psychologically. And there’s no supplement that comes close to the restorative value of REST.
So learn to recognize your first symptoms of infection. Maybe it’s a certain quality of lethargy – you’re tired in a way that feels different from just a poor night of sleep. Maybe it’s a sore throat or just a tickle. Maybe it’s a headache or a stiff neck. Maybe it’s a runny nose while you still feel otherwise fine. When you notice this, it’s a message – not just that a foreign critter has taken up residence in you, but that you are out of sync with what your being needs. If you honor this message and reduce your activity immediately, you will almost never get sick.
“Reduce your activity” implies a few different things. Most often it means: sleep. If you check in – you can close your eyes and ask internally, “Should I sleep now?” – you’ll be able to feel if the answer is yes. Often, when you perceive your first symptom of infection and you respond by taking a nap, you’ll wake up and that symptom will be gone. Easy.
But if you’ve been feeling like you’re constantly staving off infections or you’re always operating at less than 100%, reducing your activity may mean lessening your overall expenditure of energy. For optimal health it’s good to aim to consume less energy than we generate. That may sound overly simplistic, and it can sometimes be hard to gauge, but it’s basic economics.
If you generate lots of energy through ample deep sleep, high quality food, loving and supportive community, spiritual practice, and other forms of nourishing self-care, you can burn more energy without needing to tap into your reserves. If you don’t sleep much and/or it isn’t restful, if you don’t eat great food (or you have digestive problems that impair your ability to extract the nutrients from it), if you don’t engage with community in a supportive way, etc., you will have less energy available to you, and unless you curb your activity level, your immune system (and other systems) will flag.
Besides reducing your activity, you can support yourself even more by tuning in when you slow down and asking, “What needs my attention?” Our susceptibility to infection is often higher during times of transition – such as transitions between seasons – because there’s a demand for attention and adaptive energy. If we don’t give any direct attention to finding our balance amidst change, we’ll unconsciously expend more adaptive energy to restore balance. Or, said in a more positive way, if we proactively slow down and tune in during challenging times so that we’re able to recognize how to adapt, we save energy in the process and usually avoid getting sick.
When you reduce your activity at the first sign of a cold, you can avoid getting sick and that’s good. But I’d really like to encourage you to voluntarily slow down even when it’s not motivated by the desire to avoid something unpleasant. This practice actually yields real, tangible, measurable improvements in calmness, happiness, and life satisfaction. So don’t wait for that sore throat.
Now, I said I’d tell you some of the other interventions I recommend for colds and flus. They’re grouped for simplicity.
Dietary:
- Avoid sugar (it suppresses immune function).
- Eat lightly and stick to whole, natural, unprocessed, and easy-to-digest foods (which usually means cooked).
- Drink plenty of room-temperature or warm fluids (water, broth, electrolytes, tea).
- Almost all aromatic herbs (such as thyme, mint, ginger, garlic, oregano, sage, etc.) have immune supportive effects, so use them liberally in your soup and tea.
- Make it easy for your body to get the nutrients it needs with a minimal expenditure of energy.
Lifestyle:
- Don’t touch your face. Just make a rule with yourself that you don’t put your fingers in your ears, eyes, nose, or mouth unless you just washed them.
- Keep the surfaces you touch clean (cell phone, computer, counters, door knobs, sponges, etc.)
- Stay warm. Research shows there isn’t much truth to the longstanding notion that cold weather makes us sick – at least not in a direct way – but it does play a role. If you’re feeling too cold, chances are you’re using adaptive energy to keep yourself warm, and this means less energy that’s available for immune function. Also, cold weather is usually dry too, and dry mucus membranes are less effective at trapping viruses. Finally, viruses are more stable, and therefore survive longer on surfaces, in cold weather than in warm.
- Reduce stress.
- Get enough good-quality sleep.
- Get acupuncture and massage.
- Exercise (not when you’re actively sick though)
Supplements:
- Whatever you do, do it fast. Almost all immune-enhancing supplements have the best chance of success when taken at the absolute first sign of illness.
- Herbs: There are lots of great immune enhancing herbs, and many are specific as to when and how they’re best utilized. It’s beyond the scope of this article to get into those specifics, so I encourage you to consult a trained herbalist or do your own reading on the nuances of these herbs, but here are some of my favorites: lemon balm leaf (gentle anti-viral), echinacea root (I like the tincture form best), umckaloabo root (umcka for short), osha root, olive leaf, fresh ginger, andrographis (exceedingly bitter, so best taken as a pill), elder berry and flower, and the Chinese pill formulas Yin Qiao [Yin Chiao] and Gan Mao Ling.
- Mushrooms. Nearly all edible mushrooms have immune enhancing properties. Some of the most potent include: ganoderma (reishi), maitake, shiitake, coriolus, chaga, agaricus blazeii, turkey tail (trametes), agarikon (fomitopsis), lion’s mane, and mesima. I believe these strengthening fungi are best taken before you get sick, but they can also be taken while you’re sick (especially if it’s a prolonged illness).
- Vitamin D. I generally recommend 35 units per pound of your body weight as a maintenance dose, though for myself, I double or triple this when I’m fighting an infection.
- Vitamin A has anti-viral activity in high doses, though it can be toxic to the liver over time and it isn’t safe for pregnant women. For non-pregnant individuals with healthy livers, you can take 100,000 to 200,000 units of vitamin A for the first several days of an illness. Often a single big dose is enough to stop an early infection.
- Vitamin C is a great, safe immune enhancer. All forms are useful, though I prefer the kind that’s bound in a layer of fat for better absorption. This is sometimes called “lipospheric” or “lypospheric” vitamin C. A similar form is known as ascorbyl palmitate. I recommend about 500 mg of vitamin C per hour when actively fighting an infection (or just below the dose that gives you loose bowels).
- Zinc lozenges, specifically in the form zinc gluconate, has been proven to reduce to the duration of a cold. It’s best to suck on one slowly, repeatedly throughout the day. The downside is that, especially on an empty stomach, zinc can give you a stomach ache.
- Glandular extracts. If you don’t have a problem with animal products, some have potent immune supportive effects. They are mostly derived from otherwise discarded organs from the meat industry (beef, pork, and lamb), except in the case of the company Standard Process which raises them on their own century-old organic farm. The most common glandular extract for immune support is thymus, the gland in your chest that produces T lymphocytes. Some of the products my patients have had the most success with include Pro-Boost, X-Viromin, and Congaplex.
There are two last points I want to make. One: when you start to feel better, keep taking good care of yourself and reducing activity for at least one more day. A major rookie move is to respond to the message from your body, see positive results, and then jump right back in to high activity and crappy diet, just to get hit hard with a relapse you can’t immediately clear.
Two: nothing wastes energy like fighting with reality. I’ve been able to sail through a cold by focusing inward, finding my feelings of resistance to being sick, and letting them go. I believe anyone can do this. Think about your illness and notice the feelings in your body – particularly the lack of ease. Often there will be a feeling of tightness, tension, or bracing somewhere, or some other unpleasant feeling that isn’t due to the virus itself, but to your reaction to it. If you just keep bringing yourself back to your body and letting go of this resistance, your whole experience of being sick can change. Let your cells do the fighting, not your mind.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => Colds, Flus, and the Incomparable Value of Rest and Calibration
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