Stress Management + Cold Prevention
I’ve had a lot of projects due at the same time recently and not coincidentally, I came down with a cold – sore throat, sneezing, runny nose, stuffy head. I took several doses of Airborne a day (the best tasting immune boosting product in my opinion – it’s not too strong), went to bed early and the cold ran its course. It was a shorter than average cold, thanks to Airborne?
A report on NPR says immune boosting elixers such as Airborne have little effect on colds, but new studies have found that those who have more stress, are twice as likely to get a cold.
From NPR’s interview with researcher Sheldon Cohen at Carnegie-Mellon University:
In one study, Cohen and his collaborators interviewed 400 healthy adults about how stressed out they are. They asked questions such as:
— Do the demands you face exceed your ability to cope?
— How anxious, angry, or depressed have you felt over the last week?
“After we administered the questionnaires,” says Cohen, “we exposed the people in the study to one of five viruses that cause the common cold.”
Cohen’s team then tracked the volunteers for six days and found that those who had reported higher levels of stress were twice as likely to catch a cold as those who were less stressed out.
This correlation has held up in two follow-up studies. Cohen has also evaluated long-term stressors such as marriage problems or the loss of a job.
“So the longer the stress lasted,” says Cohen, “the greater the probability that the participants exposed to the virus would actually catch a cold.”
So, it looks like you can take Airborne and have a shorter cold or practice stress management and perhaps not even get a cold….
Hmm, a stress-free life would be nice. Too bad that’s impossible, ha ha. I get the NPR story but having taken Cold-fx all winter and not getting the office bug, my own personal study suggests that it is doing something!