Maintain Good Immune System for Commoner

Summarized Version

Immune system is the most important body system to ensure of our health. While maintain a good immune system can be tricky but it can also be cheap and easy to ensure it's at the optimize level. Here are some tips tips to maintain your immune system.

1. Get more exercise weekly even if you are doing light one.
2. Frequently wash and dry your hand to prevent bacteria or germs sticking with you and anything you touch.
3. Get sufficient amount of sleep is most important one.
4. Consume less sugar and sweets whenever possible as it lower down body immune ability.
5. Keep drinking water all the time even if you are not thirsty.
6. Clean your tooth brush at least once a week.
7. Clean your bedroom and work place frequently.
8. Eat more fruits in a daily basis.

Maintaining a good immune system might be insufficient sometimes, you can also consider boosting immune system to a much better level.

1. Consume Probiotics that are available as supplement, dairy products such as milk, or youghurt.
2. Add in garlic in your food or put up a habit to eat more garlic
3. Get a shot from any preferred hospital or clinic.
4. Eat Vitamin C tablets or pills daily.
5. Use sanitizer to ensure you have a clean and bacteria-free environment.

Full Details

Immune system, basically the most important defense system in our body to fight illness and diseases, we know that it's crucial for us to avoid suffering from cold & flu, and to take us away from all kind of uncomfortable situation that irritate us really much. Including stopping us from any of our preferred activities and the food we like.

I'm not a person who spent lots of time reading articles and seeking ways to make my immune system to go all the way to the top and maintain at its best so that I will never fall sick and no illness can get near to me. If you are just a commoner like me, we don't need to do that to maintain our immune system and make sure we are at the optimized level so that we can carry on our daily life with fine condition.

The list below are part of people usual lifestyle, it's not something that you need to spend great effort to blend it into your lifestyle and habit, and you don't need to spend tons of money. If you notice, it's something really common that you can find it exist in your daily life as you browse through the internet or look into some books or magazine regarding healthy lifestyle. So here goes:

1. Get plenty of exercise on weekly basis. You don't need to be any serious athletics, or someone who has great passion into certain sport. It's best to choose a preferred sport like badminton, basketball, swimming, or etc, and practice it few times a week. At the minimal, doing some light exercise in your house helps too. You don't need to sweats too much to call yourself exercising, and you can setup a list of 3 to 5 type of exercise you to perform, get it done in about 10 to 15 minutes and that's it. For exercises that you can perform in your house without much trouble, you can refer to 10 ways you can exercise at home without any equipment by FitWatch.
   
   
2. Wash and dry your hand often, especially you just back from outside. Sometimes you might not recall it but you could have push open the door with your palm and you wouldn't know how much bacteria are attached right into your palm by doing that. Or, you might have lean on the wall while waiting for the lift to go to the floor you want, and you touch on your clothes or pants without recalling what had your clothing in touched with. So practice washing your hand with soup or sanitizer often can kill most of the bacteria and leave nothing bad at your home and workplace. Dry them off soon too because bacteria can attached to wet area easily if your hand are not dried after washing it.
   
   
3. Get at least 7 to 8 hours of sleep. we all know that we need sufficient sleep, but the problem is sometimes we give excuses not to get that amount of sufficient sleep especially we think it's alright since we can still make through the day anyway. But take note on this, if we are talking about immune system, insufficient sleeping time and incorrect sleep time is a major factor that bring down our immune system and defense ability. This is why we easily felt sick when we didn't get proper sleep continuously for few days. Apart of that, we shouldn't consider sleeping from 3am to 11am still consider proper sleep. It is sufficient but our body system begin repairing our body tissues from 12am to 2am. So bear that in mind and begin your sleep at that time. For more information about getting better sleep if you find it hard for it, you can refer to the tips to stop delaying & get a goodnight sleep.
   
   
4. Reduce sweets and sugar intake. This was surprising for me at first, but I slowly to understand that when we consume excessive amount of sugar, our white blood cell being to lose the ability to defend against virus and bacteria. At that time if any virus or bacteria attack our body system, we will fall right into illness. It's like, taking certain amount of sugar will "shut down" our immune system for a period of time. The larger the amount of sugar we consume, our immune system down for a longer period of time. Therefore, it's advisable to control yourself from taking sweets, since it doesn't give any benefits other than a short pleasure at the tongue. And avoid any drinks with high sugar amount especially soft drinks and commercialized fruit juice.
   
   
5. Drink lots of water all the time. Place a bottle of water right on your work desk, your study table, or your bedroom table. Make sure you drink it time by time even if you don't feel thirsty. But I'm only talking about plain water, and not soft drinks, fruit juice (unless you sure it's without sugar or other unnecessary ingredients in it), or other flavor drinks. Water serve as a supporting mechanism for immune system to fight and neutralize toxic that goes into your body. The more you drink, the more you able to detoxify the bed things accumulate in your body. You don't even need to purchase any expensive detox drinks at all by practicing a good habit of drinking water in a regular basis.
   
   
6. Take care of your toothbrush. Not only that it's easy to have bacteria accumulate in it especially if you didn't not completely dried it off after you used it, brushing tooth on a daily basis expose your toothbrush to bacteria that stay inside your mouth from food and any external source everyday. When the bacteria are left uncleaned in your toothbrush for a long period, you get higher chance to take back the same bacteria into your mouth and they can invade through your throat. So it's best to sanitize your toothbrush at least once in a week to make sure it's free from unwanted stuff.
   
   
7. Clean your room and work/study desk often. This can be troublesome if you have a busy or lazy lifestyle. But if you really want to maintain a good immune system, cleaning your room and work/study desk at least once a week can ensure you are living at an environment that is clean and free from bacteria for a long period of time, apart of look and feel more tidy. Especially your bed, bed mites and bacteria can stay for a long period and invade your body when you are asleep. That's the time when your body is at it's lowest performance so you will become defenseless against such attack. Just make sure you have a good wash of your bed sheet, blanket, and other related item on your bed, and then dry them up under the sun for a few hours. Do this once in a week, and you can sleep on a bacteria-free and comfortable bed.
   
   
8. Take fruits often. It's actually not that hard to consume at least an apple after your meal. I usually buy a pack of oranges that consists bout 10 of them for RM12.90. After each meal, I would get a small plate and a knife, cut an orange into four pieces, and finish them up in two minutes time. Adding the preparing time and washing up the plate and knife, it takes less than 5 minutes. So no mater how busy your lifestyle is, taking less than 5 minutes to take some fruit give you wide range of benefits. Also, RM12.90 wouldn't consider much for a week since I usually buy fruits from supermarket. If you want something cheaper, you can go to the morning market during weekend for cheaper price and larger portion.
   
   

Boosting & Improve Immune System

If you really hate the feeling when you got ill and serious about getting your immune system to the top notch, the list above is not enough because it only tune your immune system to a fine level where you can fight over any ordinary invaders, but not the powerful one. In case you find yourself ill too often even though you sure that you had practice some or most of the list like above, you probably need to go for something further that involve more consideration and effort.

1. Take Probiotics. Probiotics are live bacteria or yeast that believed to improved healthy. You can have a detail read about Probiotics from WebMD. Basically, Probiotics comes with various type of health benefits and one of the biggest benefits is the improvement and maintaining a strong immune system. You can get it from either supplement or dairy product such as milk and yoghurt. Supplements such as pills and tablets can cost you around RM30. But my concern is the effect of pills or tablets might differ for each individual. You can also consider going for milk powder that can last roughly a month if you consume every day, or yoghurt for once in a week.
   
   
2. Eat more Garlic. I used to dislike garlic because of its taste, but change my mind after learning the massive amount of health benefits it can provide. Garlic is extremely effective to fight cold and cough because of the natural ability to kill bacteria. You may or may not know, it had been decades when people use garlic for all type of food and health purpose, as well as a common food for immune system boosting. Try to get yourself more chances to consume onion, especially if you are making your own food. To get its best effect, it's recommended to eat it raw. It can taste really awful if you eat it raw and plain, here some tips to consume raw garlic in better ways.
   
   
3. Take a shot yearly. I don't have much information about this one. You will need to look into what type of common shots people usually take monthly or yearly to provide them a strong immune system and to improve body condition to fight off virus and bacteria. This is probably the most expensive method but usually is the most effective one.
   
   
4. Take Vitamin C daily. While fruits consist of certain amount of vitamin, you might want to be a bit of more hardworking to take vitamin C daily to ensure you get the right amount of nutrition on a daily basis. Fruits from local market are good, but might not be sufficient because according to some articles I read long time ago, fruits are usually harvest when they are in shape but not at the time when it's mature. In another words, those fruits have not sustain great amount of nutrition when they got harvested. This is to ensure that the fruits are still fresh and not getting spoil too early when they reach the market, and also causes lacking of the right nutrition in fruits. This is why Vitamin C pills is necessary. I tried several brand of Vitamin C pills and they taste the same for me. You can get them minimum at RM15, and you get to choose among tons of brand if you go to Watson or Guardian.
   
   
5. Use sanitizer. The three type of sanitizer that I concern are mainly for hand, bed and toothbrush. You can place a hand sanitizer on your work desk or any table you usually perform your work at. When you back from outside or if you frequently touch with any other object, use it frequently; You need to wash and clean your bed sheet and blanket every week, and use sanitizer once in a month to greatly clear all bacteria that stick to your bed over time. You can do it once in a month. For toothbrush, it's easily accumulate bacteria because you are re-using it at least once everyday. Every time you use your toothbrush, new set of bacteria attached to it and it won't be easily cleared on its own. Using sanitizer on your toothbrush once a week will ensure that you worry less on getting more bacteria attached into your mouth every time you use it. So using sanitizer with the right schedule can greatly reduce bacteria. Even if you don't fall sick, you can at least ensure least bacteria and fungal entering your body.
   
   

Read more...

Stop Delaying & Get a Good Night Sleep

Elixir or miracle is what everyone searching for deep in their heart. Thou people usually don't have any practical move and hunt for elixir in this world but people still wishing it. If god grant you any wish you desire, you might ask for elixir. Of course it's depending on which type: wealth, peace, health, fame, love, happiness, young, immortal.... Well, list down as much as you could. People spent life searching for their elixir but never to notice that they are having it and using it everyday. Yes, that's the first word you see in the title: Sleep. It's the elixir that I'm talking about where you need it and need to learn how to use it properly to obtain the type of elixir as mentioned above. Except immortal, of course.

What's so great about sleep? We gone through it too many times in our life and we also being nagged by our parent about getting good sleep make you more energetic and healthy yadah yadah yadah.... Of course those nags, books that emphasize sleeping lead to good health, articles guiding people how to get good sleep and much more are definitely true, there is no need to doubt that because many people had gone through all those as well as many people did the opposite thing and as a result, everyone get to experience the reality and truth of sleep and recovery, and we know how powerful or murdering sleep is.

I had dilemma in adjusting my sleep long time ago, and it persist for a really long period and there is no absolute cure for that after a long time. I wanted to sleep at 12pm. I lie down on the bed try to think nothing, just close my eyes, not moving even abit but that's definitely result in failing to sleep. I tried several times forcing myself to lie on the bed for entire night until the next morning, and I still haven't sleep for a little while. I just getting more tired, really tired, feel like turning into a zombie on the next day, but I still couldn't sleep (later I learn that lying on the bed for whole definitely lead to such result). Even if I feel slightly sleepy before that, I still failed to sleep when I finally go to the bed. Such dilemma and torturing going on and on and, fortunately, natural remedy eventually came to me as I change my lifestyle because I could not take the zombifying life anymore. That's one main key I need to empahsize here: lifestyle is one major key for proper and good sleep.

Sleep could be a challenge, due to both willingness and unwillingness reason from both physical and mental. For those who had problem sleeping at night would understand this. Especially if you gone through the suffering of trying to adjust your sleep time so that you will be able to sleep peacefully every night, you somehow feel that sleeping early and sleeping well just doesn’t make sense. Probably no one able to do that. But you might or might not heard this, there are people who able to set their sleep time before 12am, and fall into good sleep when the time struck. Is that possible, yes it is.

Mentality is one great control for you to get a good sleep. When you failed that, or you let your mentality go wild and uncontrollable, there goes your good night sleep. But our lifestyle in Malaysia easily provide us too many reasons not to rest early, instead you should do something else. If you are outside, there are 24 hours mamak or Mcd for you to chat with friends until no time, you can also enjoy in the pub or club until late night, or early morning. If you are at home, there are tons of friends who have not sleep or doesn't want to sleep, so they waiting for you at Facebook chat, Whatsapp, Wechat, and etc. Even if no one else looking for you, there are Facebook, Youtube, forum, and unlimited source of other site that make you want to explore and stay up for it more. That's it, if you are serious about getting a really good sleep and change your life for better, this is the thing that you totally lose it: self control.

After such a long statement and line of sentences up there, getting good sleep is all about having self control in your lifestyle. Without that, having the best method and knowledge for you to get a good sleep is equivalent to nothing.

Rather than searching for ways to improve your sleep and all sort of methods to ensure you can get a good sleep, I'm urging you to train your self control ability. Not only you need the knowledge, you also need to have the power and strong will to practice the knowledge and attain the final result with your own will and effort. So here goes, below are the things you need to know about self control and ensure you able to practice a good lifestyle, and more importantly allowing yourself to practice a good sleeping habit.

1. Set your sleeping time and obey it when time struck

We always tell ourself to sleep at a certain time like 11pm, 12am, 1pm.... then when the time comes we tell ourself to wait a little bit more and when we realize, it's way pass the targeted sleeping time and we curse ourself for failing that. And we repeat the same thing very soon. If you try to consider deep enough, it's not about how much work you had left, how people want to chat with you, how great the music is so it's hard to stop, how dramatic the video is and you must know more as soon as possible.... You are giving away your free will and being a slave to these excuses, all made up by yourself and only to yourself.

2. Setup a "Sleep-Ready Operation"

A "Sleep-Ready Operation" is a practice where you set rules on what need to do and what's not to do few hours before your sleeping time struck.

First you need to set a time period. Usually you can give yourself between one to three hours before your sleeping time. Then you need to clearly list out the things that you need to do, like listening to soft & relaxing music, drink a cup of warm milk, write diary/blog, meditate, think about happy things, and etc; and also list out the things that you need to avoid like listening to loud music, doing work, trying to perform problem solving, watch drama, playing games, drinking coffee, and so on. To make this more effective, it's best to clearly list out your period of "Sleep-Ready Operation" and the list of dos and don'ts in a piece of paper, and stick it to a place where you can always see it. So that you can remind yourself of this rule. I used to think that I can just remember everything in my mind and execute the plan accordingly, but human mind is really complicated and there are a lot of confusion with it, so it's better you used a safety measure to ensure a good result.

This is something you need to slowly learn and practice by experience because you might not know what's best for you at the moment. Some people might find it having a cup of warm milk right before sleep can make them feel easier to sleep, but some people might feel really full and hard to sleep after having a cup of warm milk. So you probably want to consider if you are suitable to have the cup of milk right before bed, two hours before bed, or not having any of it. After all, setting up this operation required lots of learning of your own body, and feeling the type of behavior that your body can accept. So take your time and consider what could make your body feel better before sleep in a long run process.

3. Change/Control your before-bedtime activity

Watching drama that still has lots of episode after that can be the major problem that delay your sleep. It can also make you resist to sleep even if you are really sleepy because the storyline make you can't stop "chasing" it. I can understand that feeling because I had experience numerous time for this. So here is the trick, first convince yourself: "There is always tomorrow", so there is no point trying to watch all episodes as soon as you can. Moreover, trying to force yourself to awake when you feel really sleepy is really unhealthy. I used drama as an example, but basically it's the same as long as it's something that make you addict to it and you force yourself not to sleep because of it.

What you can do about your preferred bedtime activity is either changing it to another time or putting a great restraint on it. Let's use drama as an example, you can either change the time of watching drama during daytime or few hours before the crucial time when your body need to prepare to sleep, or make sure you watch one episode and shut down your PC or laptop right after that. Do not, i mean DO NOT click and play the next episode.

When you are able to identify and avoid any activity that could delay or affect your sleeping time, your feel more willing to sleep and you can sleep much better when combining with the next tips.

4. Fill up your ideal bedtime activity

There are always list of things that can make you feel relaxing and calm, you need to identify what are those things and check out what you feel like you want to do before bed.

Of course it's impossible to do everything that can make you feel relaxing, and you don't need to practice all of that. Just pick one or a few things that you feel like doing before bed, best to choose something that can provide you the thinking that you had established something instead of something that make you feel like you should stay awake and complete them.

Some people found listing down their worries in a diary or notebook helps them to relief their worries and anxiety and feel less burden, so they can get to sleep better. This is one example of training yourself to put down something rather than getting all your worries to sleep with you.

So the key to pick your ideal before-bedtime activity is about allowing yourself to put down anything at the moment and then focus on a peaceful sleep.

5. Create a unique sleeping theme at your bed

If you like hello kitty to sleep with you, get one and put it on your bed. This is no kidding. Your room might or might not have it's own theme. Some people make their bedroom as their working place. You can have many different things or theme in your own room, but at least avoid turning your bed into one.

If you have anything you feel good to sleep with, like a nice looking mattress, bolster, soft toys, or etc, spend some money to improve your sleeping experience. This is a good investment for a long period (unless the price is too absurd for that particular item that you want).

When you have a nice bed that you feel really comfortable, you eventually give yourself more reasons to get more early sleep because our mind usually request our self to go for whatever that make us feel comfortable. To add more for feeling comfortable, you should be more hardworking to tidy up your bed often and clean your blanket & mattress once a week.

Again, setting a specific theme at first might not give you the best feeling as this required multiple experience to get you to the best sleeping feeling. You can experience with a theme and then try to feel if there is anything missing. You probably need to Google for different type of bedroom decoration or theme and see what's make you feel good. Or changing the position of all items on the bed once in awhile. So bear in mind that feeling is the main key that helps you to determine what's best for yourself.

Lastly, keep everything in control

Self control is the major thing to make everything as mentioned above works, remember what's stated before the first tips? When you had everything well scheduled, what you need to do next is to make sure you practice your schedule and train your own self to make them work as expected. As a summary of what you need to do to practice a good night sleep, there are a few thing you need to bear in mind.

First, when you done considering a list of schedule and action that helps your to sleep better, you need to list everything down in a piece of paper. If you don't do this, you risk forgetting a few parts or most of your schedule. When the time comes, you get higher chance of forgetting what you need to do at the certain time. Write it out as clear as possible so you just need to follow the schedule according to the paper. That's one thing you need to train yourself at this step. And then you need to consider carefully and review on the list to know if those are the best for you. As time goes by, you might find certain activity is not right and you want something else that can make you get into better sleep.

Second, train yourself to follow exactly what stated in the paper, and DO NOT change it at will. When you think there is a need to change what you stated in the paper, find the right peaceful time and think really carefully on the reason why you should change it. Because simply changing it at will is equivalent to simply changing your career just because you don't feel like you like it, rather doing so after deep consideration. We are not going to talk about how serious about changing our path just because we don't feel like it, but it is indeed causing a huge problem in your life if you change your path by depending on pure feeling.

Lastly, on the contradiction of self control, you need to learn and train yourself to fight addiction and unhealthy desire that delay your time, basically on everything. This is referring to all those activity that keep you awake at the time when you are suppose to get to bed. In case you have not realize, the practice of self control to train yourself to be conscious on what you really want to do and control event that you know it should not be there or should have more restrain in it is a difficult practice that not only helps you to get a better sleep, it's also something that help in many different aspect in your life. It's all about decision making and learn to achieve your target with practical & effective measurements. So this practice is not only to provide yourself a good sleeping experience, but also beneficial in your daily life when you are learn to set better target for your life improvement.

Read more...