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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