5 Critical Things That Increase Your Immune System Function

Getting sick, or the flu or a cold is the last thing you want to happen in your life – especially when things are going on.

The list of things you can do to prevent yourself being ill is never ending. But here are 5 things you can easily change about your lifestyle to drastically reduce your chances of getting ill – ultimately bulletproofing your immune system.

5 Critical Things That Increase Your Immune System Function:

#1. Sleep More

Getting bad sleep can reduce your life span by 5 years; not too mention it wreaks havoc on your immune system.

I have no idea how people get up every day at 6am after going to bed at 1am. I’m an 8 hours guy.

Since I had recently gotten ill, I slept in a lot. Working from home, running my own business, there was no real incentive to get up early.

Sleeping for 11 hours most nights was a regular thing. Go to bed around midnight and get up at 11.

I’m no sleep expert but I do know this wasn’t good for me. One of the first things my trainer told me was I’m sleeping to much.

Sleeping too long can cause lethargy so I cut my sleeping to around 8 hours and felt better immediately. Now I discovered I had plenty of time to cook a decent breakfast.

Here are some top tips for increasing your quality of sleep:

• Sleep in complete darkness. For those who can’t do this, try an eye mask.
• Sleep in complete silence – earplugs are clutch.
• Have your bedroom as a place to sleep and nothing else. Don’t have a TV in your bedroom, don’t work on your bed, you want to associate bed with sleep.
• Avoid alcohol and caffeine. Avoid large, high-fat meals late in the day. Don’t drink to much liquid before you sleep.
• Don’t watch TV or play computer games before bed. I’m a guy who likes a game of xBox, I know it keeps my brain active long after I’m finished. You want to slow yourself down before you sleep.

#2. Exercise But Not To Much

When I started getting proactive about my health, the first thing I did was hire a personal trainer. I recently read a study that said if you exercise 3 times a week for around 45 minutes, your immune cells become more active. The study went on to say that the women in the study who had exercised had taken half the amount of time of work from being ill.

The average person takes 12 days of work a year due to sickness. Let’s say you were earning £100 a day, that’s £1200 cost to your employer. If your employer paid £300 a year for a basic gym membership, they would be saving themselves an extra £300 a year, based on the study above. As long as you went that is.

It’s important that I point out that if you exercise to much and the intensity of your exercise was to high, that can have a negative effect on your health, coursing your stress hormones to rise which can suppress your immune system activity for up to 3 days. This is shown by the a life span statistics for athletes, those who exercise moderately live 4 years longer than they would have, if they didn’t exercise at all. At the other end of the spectrum, those who exercise to much, live 2 years less than they should.

#3. Reduce Your Stress

This is a major factor for most people. We lead very stressful lives. Ever looked stopped when your feeling really stressful or something bad has happened in your life? Have you noticed that you feel sick, you feel worn down like your about to get a terrible cold.

Today I read that as much as 70% of all illness could be attributed to stress. But why?

Stress, just like to much exercise, causes the body to increase hormone product. Adrenaline and Cortisol drastically increase. Prolonged stress reduces our immune system and makes us much more likely to get seriously ill.

I’m no expert at stress reduction. What I’ve learned to do is just prevent the things that stress me out from happening.

So for example, if seeing a person in your life makes you feel angry or stressed, try to cut them out of your life. If your work is stressful, perhaps you need a change of career. That may sound silly but it’s your health we are talking about.

A few things you can do to reduce stress are:

1. Have a massage
2. Meditate
3. Clear up unresolved problems
4. Have an Epsom Bath
5. Sweat it out in a sauna
6. Have sex
7. Play with a Pet

Don’t argue with idiots. They’ll drag you down to their level and beat you…

#4. Improve Your Diet

Diet has probably the single biggest impact on my health. I’ve often heard friends tell me that they use to get ill all the time but the second they started having an apple a day, or started including garlic in their diet, they suddenly found themselves not getting ill anywhere near as much. Here’s 5 top foods to include in your diet to boost your immunity.

1. Garlic – a super food by it’s self.
2. Ginger – it’s added to a lot of Chinese meals because they lack nutrition.
3. Cinnamon – it’s an antiviral, anti-fungal, and antibacterial machine, so it does more than just boost the immune system — it actually fights the pathogens that cause illness.
4. Green Kale – antioxidant, alkaline, omega 3 & low glycemic load.
5. Wild Salmon – high doses of Omega 3 are proven to reduce the likelihood of you being ill. Also packed with so many other great health benefits.

The easiest way to get omega 3 into our diet is to take a Cod Liver Oil tablet.

Omega 3 is anti inflammatory. Omega6 is pro.

Omega 3 foods are mainly made up of fish, seeds, vegetables, fruit and nuts. Omega 6 is all the processed foods like pizza, bread, cakes, chips etc.  Every single person is going to have a higher Omega 6 diet, however, the more we can do to balance them out the better. If your ill, Omega 3 will help cure it. That’s the “jist” of it. Since learning about Omega 3 and Cod Liver Oil, I read a study that said, people who take a daily Cod Liver Oil tablet will have a third less sick days a year. Costing you around £10 a year, I’d say this was well worth the money.

In March, I started seeing a personal trainer twice a week. The first session we had was 100% about nutrition. He told me, that 90% of putting on muscle and getting into shape is about what you put into your body. One thing he told me to do was to go down to my local health food store and get some Cod Liver Oil.

Those who have high Omega 3 diets, live 5 years longer than those who don’t!

#5. Stop All Your Bad Habits

The easiest thing you can do to improve your health and well-being is just stop the things that harm it. These can include smoking, drinking alcohol, eating processed food, getting into arguments, not washing your hands etc.

Smoking is one of the worst things for your health, we all know that already, but how bad is it? There are over 4,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke and they all have profound and potentially fatal effects on your body. Smoking not only harms your health but everyone around you!

Smokers have on average 34 sick days a year. That’s nearly double the amount of sick days in a study of over 14,000 people!

Health by choice, not by chance.

-David Aston