Greening up your cold
This is a first hand account of how to green up your cold. As I write this, I’m sitting in my bed surrounded by tissues, tea, and two dogs snoring soundly despite my incessant sneezing and coughing.
So, what do I mean by greening up your cold? Well, as I commented in a previous post, being sustainable is about making choices – that includes choices when you’re in bed with a cold.
1. Blowing & Coughing are good! That’s right. This is your body’s way of expelling the cold/flu virus from your body. Choose your body’s natural ability to fight colds over pharmaceuticals whenever possible. I don’t recommend using cold medicines as they can actually extend the length of your cold as they suppress your body’s ability to heal. Also, did you know that a few known side effects of cold medicines are elevated blood pressure and heart rate as well as the jitters?
Instead, treat a cough with herbal tea (or just hot water) with a teaspoon of local honey and a squeeze of lemon. It really does work. If you have to treat the cough, look for natural remedies such as lozenges that help ease a cough without suppressing it. As for congestion and a runny nose? Blow baby, blow! And here’s where I had to make a choice. I realize that tissues use trees and add to our landfill, however, the idea of hankies during a cold does nothing for me. Now, I’m not a germaphobe, however, the idea of wet, virus ridden hankies lying around for a few days is not appealing to me. Yuk. I have tissues in the house that contain recycled content (100% to be exact) but my nose is not loving them at the moment. So, I made the choice to pick up some tissues with lotion. Yeah, so shoot me. I don’t get sick often and well, I don’t appreciate looking like Rudolph in April.
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Like a lot of folks, my family is sticking pretty close to home this summer. While we’re not traveling to exotic locales around the globe (does Idaho count???), we still want to have some adventures. We still want to have some FUN!
