Understanding how to take care of your physical health can be difficult. With a thousand sources providing you with different tips and techniques for being fitter, healthier, and more functional, it’s no wonder you’re confused about the right way to do it.
One way to stay healthy and keep the process simple enough to understand and implement is by focusing on your immunity. Your immunity is a surefire way to measure your fitness and a much more reliable indicator than superficial or biased standards like beauty or stamina. Learning and implementing effective ways to keep your immune system healthy can help you do so.
But before learning how to keep your immune system healthy, let’s look at what an immune system exactly is. Simply put, the immune system is a part of your body that protects it from harm and helps maintain your physical health. Hence, your ability to stay healthy and resist diseases is called immunity. Your immunity is affected by genetics, environment, and behaviors of the mind and body.
How Immune System Affects Mental Health?
The word disease means a lack of ease. How do you respond if you lack comfort because of anything? You feel frustrated, stressed, angry, and, in the worst cases, depressed. Most physical diseases caused by poor immunity can lead you to experience negative emotions, and some chronic diseases might even sap away your motivation from you.
Learning and practicing the ways to keep your immune system healthy can help you prevent, provide remedies for, or improve many mental health conditions like anxiety, depression, etc.
What Are The Best Ways To Keep Your Immune System Healthy?
1. Eat the right things in the right way
You are what you eat. Your body digests the nutrients you intake and distributes them across your bloodstream. What you eat has a profound effect on your physical and mental health.
Then what to eat to keep your immune system strong and healthy? Vegetables, whole grains, fruits, healthy proteins, natural remedies, and additional supplements can help you ward off most of the health problems that come your way.
Wondering how to maintain a healthy immune system with your eating habits?
Eating your food mindfully can also help you avoid choking, indigestion, and other problems related to your diet. Hence it is one of the most beneficial ways to keep your immune system healthy. Mindful eating also increases the enjoyment of food as you savor your meals, experiencing them through all your senses and having a zen moment while filling your belly.
So, what to eat to keep immune system strong? Recommendations for a healthy diet by WHO include:-
-Reduce your fat intake to 30% of your total diet
-Reduce salt intake to less than 5 grams per day: Salt can harm your health, linked with an increased risk of stroke and cardiovascular problems. Potassium can help you neutralize these effects, but it is recommended to reduce your intake.
-Ensure sugar accounts for less than 10% of your total energy intake and prefer natural sugars to the alternative.
2. Maintain and follow a fixed sleep schedule
Sleep deprivation can lead to distortions in memory, lower insulin and testosterone production, burnout, stress, and an increased risk of cardiovascular problems. Sleep is a natural way for your body and mind to refresh and replenish themselves. While you may want to forgo sleep and maintain your busy lifestyle, sleeping will keep you more functional and be better for you in the long run.
You can also catch up on lost sleep using naps and other self-care techniques to relieve yourself of the negative consequences of an inadequate sleep cycle. The minimum recommended sleep duration for adults aged 18 to 64 is 7 hours.
3. Train your body by exercising regularly
What is the best fitness workout to keep your health and immune system improved? The answer is simple, whatever works best for you. The necessary part is to avoid a sedentary lifestyle and get the required amount of exercise for proper health. According to WHO, the least amount of needed adequate training for adults aged 18-64 is:
-150–300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity; -or 75–150 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic activity; or a combination of moderate and vigorous-intensity exercise equal to the two.
There are a lot of ways you can fulfill the requirement for exercise. You could go to a gym, do calisthenics, or practice running or yoga. Earthing, hiking, and being with nature can provide the sense of calm you need, an escape from the mundane, and an opportunity to exercise in one if you feel like doing so. Many technologies are available that let you exercise at home or wherever you want to, and many new ones are emerging daily.
4. Practice Self-care
Self-care is any activity a person or community practices to maintain their health. These activities include preventive measures such as relaxing to avoid burnout or breathing exercises for stress release. It also means understanding and being more aware of your body rather than just having theoretical information about how health is supposed to be.
You can direct self-care activities toward reducing stress, anxiety, and other mood disturbances. For instance, you can start by laughing more or having a playful attitude to reduce stress. Improving your self-awareness and knowing yourself better is also important to practice effective self-care. Self-care maintains the strength of your immune system as you anticipate and neutralize excess stress on your body and mind while moving toward growth and better health.
5. Cultivate supportive relationships
While cultivating relationships may not seem directly related to improving your immune system, WHO’s parameters clearly show why it is one of the best ways to keep your immune system healthy. According to WHO, health is mental, emotional, and physical but also economic and social. Friends or loved ones are perhaps the most common source of meaning, motivation, and happiness in everyone’s life.
Thus, cultivating supportive and positive relationships can motivate you to take better care of yourself and may fight mental health illnesses like depression and anxiety that drown out your interest and pleasure, leaving you frustrated or removed from your feelings.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, how to maintain a good immune system? Taking care of your diet, sleep, exercise, regular self-care, and cultivating supportive relationships with those around you can help improve your immune system. Now that you’ve learned the ways to keep your immune system healthy, you can further improve your health and physical performance. Motivation and willpower are essential for any improvement you decide to make.
One essential chemical that affects your motivation is dopamine. It controls your motivations, desires, and perception of time(You feel like time passes very quickly while doing something you enjoy). To draw more insights into how dopamine affects your motivation and how you can harness its power for better performance, click here.
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