Taking a long nap may sound tempting when you're feeling groggy from being sick, but lengthy naps can actually interfere with your night-time sleep routine. If you need a nap, try to limit your napping time to 30 minutes, and avoid napping too close to bedtime so you can still fall asleep at the appropriate time.
Getting extra sleep when you're sick doesn't just give you a few hours of respite from unpleasant symptoms: Sleep is like medicine for the immune system, ultimately helping you make a full recovery from an illness. “Sleep is the only time of anyone's day or night where we have restoration processes happening.
Mental health experts recommend sleeping for roughly eight hours for a healthy adult. The experts attribute lack of sleep to hypertension, diabetes, and obesity. Although sleeping for long hours ( over 10 hours a day) may not be necessary, it is helpful for a sick person.
Rest : This is the time to recharge your body's immune system. Rest and sleep are the best ways to do that.
Restful Sleep
However, when you're sick, your body needs as much sleep as possible to regain its strength. Listen to your body throughout the day. Taking naps is perfectly normal when your sick and highly encouraged, especially if you feel exhausted by the early afternoon.
Doctor's Response. Cold symptoms will go away on their own over time and rest is one of the best ways to help your body heal, so in a sense, you can sleep off a cold. Sleep helps boost the immune system and can help you recover from a cold more quickly.
Fever is part of the immune system's attempt to beat the bugs. It raises body temperature, which increases metabolism and results in more calories burned; for each degree of temperature rise, the energy demand increases further. So taking in calories becomes important. Even more crucial is drinking.
Smolensky says that this immune system activity and the inflammation it produces is not constant, but instead is “highly circadian rhythmic.” As a result, “you tend to experience symptoms as most severe when your immune system kicks into highest gear, which is normally at night during sleep.”
How much sleep is best when sick? When people are sick, they are not likely to wake up feeling particularly rested. One recommendation is to try to add 1 hour of sleep a night to usual sleep times, along with at least one, if not two, naps during the day.
If you're finding that you're hot and clammy one minute and freezing cold the next, help is at hand: Make sure you have plenty of layers available: If your temperature tends to fluctuate throughout the night, make an extra layer easily available that you can pull up and down as needed.
Mild to moderate physical activity is usually OK if you have a common cold and no fever. Exercise may even help you feel better by opening your nasal passages and temporarily relieving nasal congestion.
Don't be tempted to overheat the room because you have a cold. Keep the temperature at a comfortable level (69F – 72F) and bundle up with blankets that can be shoved off if you begin to overheat. The humidity in the room is important too. Dry air can worsen your cold symptoms and parch your nose and throat.
During the deepest phases of sleep, blood flow to muscles increases. Since blood carries oxygen and nutrients, this helps the muscles heal. In many cases, cells are regenerated by this increased flow of blood. Hormones help regulate many functions of the body and are secreted by various glands.
A short nap may help boost the body's immune system. Napping may help reduce stress and the levels of inflammatory cytokines and norepinephrine in the body. Studies suggest that reducing these chemicals with a nap may help restore balance to the immune system.
Losing an appetite is a common sickness behavior, and not eating until hunger pangs hit (even if they are infrequent) is not a bad thing for adults. When sickness symptoms include nausea, vomiting or diarrhea, it doesn't make sense to continually force our bodies to ingest unwanted food, she said.
It's also unlikely that you are able to keep any food or liquids down, so you can't replace what you have lost very easily. This drastic change in fluid volume in your body can show up on the scale. If your symptoms last for several days, the weight change can be pretty drastic.
When you are sick, your immune system kicks into gear. This activation, and the immune battle that results, requires calories beyond your body's “basal” (or baseline) need—causing an appetite increase.
There's no way to cure a cold—or sweat it out. Breathing in warm, moist air can help alleviate cold symptoms, like congestion. Light exercise can increase blood flow, which also might help with congestion. However, there's no quick fix.
This is because of the amount of energy the immune system uses combatting the virus, meaning you may feel exhausted or lose strength in your muscles.
Getting enough sleep has many benefits. It can help you: Get sick less often. Stay at a healthy weight.
The stages of a cold include the incubation period, appearance of symptoms, remission, and recovery. The common cold is a mild upper respiratory infection caused by viruses.