Rest assured, there are several things you can do this year to build your immunity naturally and to help you and your family make it through the season happy and healthy. The key to staying healthy and to avoiding these nasty bugs is to strengthen your defenses, primarily your immune system, so that your body can fight any virus as it enters the body. Here are some powerful ways to boost your immune system and prepare you and your family for this flu season.

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1. Add Some Sunshine

Researchers are quickly catching on that Vitamin D may be the secret to avoiding the cold and flu. Vitamin D plays an important role in strengthening your defense system to better fight any invading viruses and bacteria. Unfortunately, it is also the number one vitamin deficiency in Americans. Compounding the problem if the fact that Vitamin D is produced when the body gets adequate levels of sunshine, so naturally, even less is produced in the winter months. It has recently been hypothesized that this could be one major reason for the increase in cold and flu cases during the winter season.  Because of this, it’s important that we have alternative ways of getting this powerful immune-boosting vitamin. One great source of Vitamin D is cod liver oil. In addition to the Vitamin D it offers, it’s also a great source of Vitamin A, which is an immune system superstar, and Omega 3 fatty acids, which holds significant health benefits for the heart, brain, skin, and much more.

2. Fighting Fire With Fire

Your immune system is your body’s number one defense when it comes to fighting off the cold and flu. Further, it’s estimated that 80% of your immune system resides in your digestive tract, so it’s vital to keep your digestive system healthy when trying to avoid getting sick. Thankfully, our gut is filled with a large amount of “good” bacteria, or flora, that help fight all the “bad” bacteria and yeasts that are trying to find their way into our system. Because of diets high in refined sugars, frequent antibiotic use, and everyday stress, most people do not have a healthy balance of good versus bad bacteria, leaving one more vulnerable. As we head into cold and flu season, now is a good time to restore the proper balance in the gut by taking a probiotic before each meal through the winter months. Probiotics can be found in any health food store in the refrigerated supplement area. An excellent whole food source of probiotics is kefir. Kefir has significantly more “good” bacteria than yogurt and is much easier for your body to digest.

3. Get Moving

Most of us are very aware of all the amazing benefits exercise has on our overall health and well-being. Few of us, however, know that exercise is one of the most powerful ways to boost the immune system. Not only does exercise improve the circulation of white blood cells throughout your body, but it has been shown to increase the production of natural killer T cells, which are essential for maintaining an optimum immune response. The amount of exercise required to obtain an immune boost is relatively low, 20 minutes of brisk walking 4-5 times per week has been shown to significantly improve the body’s immune response. This is also a good opportunity to get a little bit of sunshine to stimulate Vitamin D production.

4. ‘An Apple a Day…’

When it comes to fighting cold and flu, it is essential to decrease your sugar intake. Sugar has devastating effects on the immune system, and the fact that Americans consume an average of 2-3 pounds of sugar per person every year spells bad news come cold and flu season. Not only does sugar increase the production of hormones that suppress the immune system, but refined sugar also needs micronutrients to be metabolized. This requires your body to use stored vitamins and minerals, further harming your defenses. On the other hand, eating a wide variety of fruits and vegetables will make sure that your body is getting all of the vitamins and minerals that are essential to the fighting off the cold and flu. Each and every fruit and vegetable is packed with thousands of phytochemicals. No supplement could ever match the power of eating whole foods. Regardless of what vitamin and mineral you take, it should always be as a supplement to a diet high in fruits and vegetables.

5. Keep Balanced

By now, we all know that stress is bad for us. However, relatively few of us are aware of how stress actually impacts the health of the body. When we experience stress, the natural balance of the body is affected in ways we could never imagine. In fact, stress takes an enormous toll on the immune system. For this reason, it is important to find ways to bring the body back into balance. Meditation, prayer, exercise, and yoga are all great ways of taking care of yourself and keeping stress levels low. Chiropractic adjustments also have a significant effect on the nervous system, creating balance, helping to restore the body’s natural healing potential.

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As winter gears up, get proactive. By implementing these five simple tools, you can dramatically increase your ability to make it through the season without ever having to miss a day from work or school. So this year instead of making a trip to the doctor’s office, make it to your local health food store and see how good you can feel even during the winter months.

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Let’s take a look at stress from a different perspective. Not only is stress not bad, it’s required for growth, and can help you achieve things you never thought possible. Consider exercise. When a person lifts weights, he or she puts more stress on the muscles and the bones of the body. And despite the damage that the muscles incur as they are broken down during the weight lifting process, the body quickly repairs the damage and returns the muscles to a healthy state that is even stronger before.

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Likewise, the body begins to lay down more calcium in the bones, creating stronger healthier bones. In fact, regular weight lifting has been shown in numerous studies to be one of the best ways to prevent osteoporosis. Further, studies have shown that when you work out only one muscle group, all of the muscles in the body benefit. Thus by working out you arms, the muscles in your legs also become more toned. In this case, putting stress on the muscles and bones results in a stronger healthier body. In the same manner, cardiovascular exercise strengthens the heart.

The immune system is another great example of how stress results in greater health. Whenever the immune system is challenged by a bacteria or virus, such as the cold or flu, it’s forced to step up and defend against the foreign invader. Once the threat has been removed, the body maintains what is called an acquired immunity. The body is in fact now immune to catching the same strain of virus again. Once again, the body was stressed, it rose to the challenge, and it came away stronger and healthier than before.

In this same way, all of life’s trials and tribulations, all of the challenges thrown our way, provide opportunities for growth. In fact, they’re a prerequisite for growth. If one where to remove the stress, then much of the motivation to strive for success would be removed as well. Therefore, the real test is not stress itself, but in how one responds to it. Merely experiencing stress is not unhealthy. Stress does become a problem, however, when one remains stuck in the pattern. The body is never given a sufficient opportunity to heal, nor do we seize the opportunity for personal growth. Instead, the body remains, in a state of fight or flight, just trying to survive.

The key to every crisis is how one perceives it. The fight or flight response is triggered in the body when an event is perceived as a threat. This response, however, is interrupted and changed when one takes the time to find the silver lining present in every challenge. By doing this, one is able to maintain a state of inner calm and balance, despite what is going on in the outside world.  From this state, one is often more capable of responding, instead of reacting, and finding the hidden opportunity to learn and love.

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Life is often stressful and overwhelming. However, it’s also constantly presenting opportunities, frequently in the form of a crisis, for us to grow beyond what we ever thought possible. In every situation, crisis, or challenge, there lies a blessing to return to a greater state of wholeness, a state that could not have been experienced any other way. In this way, stress serves as a catalyst for growth and healing. When you take the time to truly find the benefit or blessing in every crisis, you transform the challenge into an opportunity to unfold into the unique and amazing person you were always meant to be.

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We live in a society that highly values the qualities of the analytical, logical, and the purely “rational” point of view. The educational systems emphasize math and science, while cutting art and music programs. Despite the great value of analytical thinking, overemphasizing it comes at the cost of losing out on another amazing part of our being. To think linearly helps us to progress, move forward, and complete tasks. However, it is from our creative side that we develop vision. Without vision, we have no idea where to progress to, both as individuals and as a society. Because we grow up in a culture that generally does not value creativity, we tend to suppress it. This leads many adults to believe that they are not creative at all.

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Where Creativity Originates

While nobody is quite sure where consciousness arises from, we have determined where it resides. The brain is the medium through which consciousness travels. To simplify things: math, logic, and analytical thinking are left brain dominant activities. Creative functions such as music, art, and the ability to see things as a whole, as opposed to parts, are right brain dominant activities. Most of us spend a significant amount of time in left brain dominant thinking, solving problems from a very linear perspective. This becomes necessary early in life in order to be successful in school, and later, at work. If this does not come naturally to a person, they tend to struggle in public education systems and never really get the opportunity to cultivate their creative nature. We tend to get stuck in left brain dominant thinking in order to be successful, at least by society’s standards. In order to spark creativity, it is therefore necessary to escape this pattern of thinking and one of the most effective ways of doing this is to force our self out of the left brain momentarily.

Moving Into Your Creative State

One of the most effective means of stopping the constant chatter of the left brain is vigorous exercise. Whether it’s running, swimming, cycling, riding an elliptical, or simply an intense walk, it doesn’t matter. The key is finding an activity that is intense enough to force you out of your current pattern of thinking. The beauty of this approach is you will know if it is working or not. If you find yourself exercising, and you’re still thinking about the past days events, your current to-do list, or something somebody said or did to you, that’s the cue to pick up the pace. The goal will be reached when you are forced to focus on the physical activity you’re participating in. Once this state is reached, space will be created for inspiration, creativity, and new ideas to begin bubbling to the surface. Vigorous physical exercise helps your creative process by forcing you out of left brain dominant thinking. In addition, exercise improves blood flow, while increasing oxygen to the brain. The brain therefore functions more effectively and efficiently when one exercises regularly. Studies have also shown that exercise increases specific chemicals in the brain such as dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and glutamate, not only improving cognition, but also helping to decrease depression. Exciting new research shows that regular exercise can even lead to the creation of new neurons.

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Motion is Life

Motion is essential for life. In fact, it’s the essence of life. The less motion we experience in our day, the less life we experience. Like the saying, “a rut is only a few feet from the grave,” many of us are stuck in the routine of getting up, driving to work, sitting at a desk, driving home, sitting on the couch, and then going to bed. Not only is this bad for the body, but it leads to stagnation in our thought process. Not only do we perform the same activities everyday, but we think the same thoughts, as well. When you increase motion in your life by exercising, you will begin to expand your mental and emotional range, becoming more able to experience a broad range of emotions. This will allow you to view things from a more holistic perspective, further deepening your creative abilities.

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Each day presents itself with more to do and what seems like less time to accomplish it in. In fact, it’s rare today to find someone who isn’t struggling to balance time, money, work, and family, all while attempting to maintain their own needs, health and wellness.

We’re bombarded by stress from every direction, ranging from physical inactivity to constant anxiety about money, career, and relationships. Adding to the stress are all the toxic products we expose our body to through what we eat and drink because we don’t have time to prepare a healthy meal. Eventually, our stressful life leads to physical, mental, and emotional imbalances.

An estimated 90 percent of all doctor visits are for stress-related aliments. Evidence shows that today’s biggest health challenges are cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity – all conditions that are often linked to living in a state of constant stress. This constant stress and lack of balance will almost certainly lead to some form of pain or physical condition for which we need to seek medical advice. In this way, pain can actually be a blessing because it creates awareness that our body is out of balance and needs a change.

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Thankfully, stress is not so much a result of what is going on in our life as it is about how we perceive those things. The beauty here is we have some control over how we perceive the world around us. Many highly-effective modalities exist to help bring balance back to the body. We can seek to balance the nervous system through chiropractic adjustments, the meridians through acupuncture, or the blood chemistry using nutritional supplements, herbs, and homeopathic remedies. Exercise and mindfulness are also effective ways to return balance to the body, thus restoring health physically, mentally, and emotionally.

But one of the most powerful ways to return balance to the body is through the constant practice of gratitude. By beginning to see everything in our life as a blessing and learning to become grateful not only for the wonderful things in our life, but also the most challenging, we can begin to dissolve the “charge” associated with a stressful situation. Changing worry to gratitude dramatically affects the way our body responds to stress.

Robert Emmons, Ph.D., and professor at the University of California, Davis, has written the first major scientific study on gratitude, its causes, and potential impact on human health. In his work entitled Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier. Dr. Emmons concluded that “grateful people experience higher levels of positive emotions such as joy, enthusiasm, love, happiness, and optimism, and the practice of gratitude as a discipline protects a person from the destructive impulses of envy, resentment, greed, and bitterness.”

Further benefits of practicing gratitude include an increased ability to cope with stress, a stronger immune function leading to quicker recovery from illness, and an increased feeling of connectedness, which helps to improve relationships.

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Love and gratitude are two of the most powerful of healers. By looking for the blessings in every person and event in our life, we will begin to dissolve feelings of fear and guilt, bringing more ease and well-being to our body and mind.

In his book The Gratitude Effect, Dr. John Demartini recommends beginning and ending your day with a “gratitude” journal. Even spending just a few moments each day in a state of gratitude can have a transformational effect on our lives. Living this way helps us replace fear, anxiety and worry with joy, happiness, and peace, resulting in a healthier and more balanced body and mind. Let’s face it, stress is here to stay, so we must learn how to better adapt and respond to it.

Try spending a few moments a day practicing gratitude and see how your life can be transformed.

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