Energy · 4 min read ·
Sleep, movement, food and daylight: the levers that keep your defences ready, even in your busiest weeks.
If you have 30 seconds
- 1Sleep is the first lever: 7-8 hours in a properly dark bedroom.
- 27-8,000 steps a day, protein at every meal and veg in different colours keep them strong.
- 3After a long, hard effort, eat straight away; constant stress and evening drinks pull them down.
How do you boost your immune system when it feels low? Start with 7-8 hours of sleep in a dark room, move every day without overdoing it, put protein and vegetables on every plate and ease off stress that has run for weeks. Repeated week after week, these habits keep your immune system ready.
Autumn arrives and you catch everything going round, right in the week of the board meeting. I see it a lot in the people I work with: defences don't drop at random, they dip in the months when you sleep less and push harder.
Low immune system: what are the signs?
The clearest sign is frequency: you get ill more often than before and take longer to recover.
- One cold after another. You get better, and soon it starts again.
- Cold sores that come back. They turn up in your busiest spells.
- Tiredness that won't lift. Your energy is low even on days without meetings.
What causes a weak immune system?
More often than a vitamin, what's missing is sleep and recovery: the time your body needs to rebuild its defences.
Sleep matters most. At night your immune system turns its forces towards fighting viruses, helped by melatonin, the hormone of darkness. In one comparison, a single night of four hours' sleep cut the activity of natural killer cells, the ones that clear out viruses, by around 70%.
Then there's stress. Cortisol that stays high for weeks puts the brakes on your defences, and loneliness adds inflammation. And there's your gut, home to 60-70% of your immune system: what you eat either feeds it or upsets it.
Your defences rebuild while you sleep.
How to strengthen your immune system, day by day
Protect your sleep in the busy weeks. Seven or eight hours, a properly dark room, phone out, same bedtime even on Friday.
Move every day, without overdoing it. Moderate movement raises your defences; long, extreme efforts can lower them. Aim for 7-8,000 steps and two strength sessions a week. With a temperature, training waits.
After a long effort, eat straight away. A half marathon or the long Sunday ride: as soon as you finish, have carbs and protein. In one comparison, eating straight afterwards protected the defences; the same meal an hour later didn't.
Protein and colour at every meal. Antibodies are made of protein: 20 to 40 grams a meal. Alongside, vegetables and fruit in different colours, with the fibre that feeds your gut flora. If the label lists hydrogenated fats, as margarine does, leave it on the shelf: they can lower your defences.
Get into the daylight. In autumn the sun drops, and so does your vitamin D. In one comparison of athletes, those low in it caught more colds and sore throats, and kept them longer. Your GP measures the level; meanwhile, 15-20 minutes of sun on your face and arms when it's out.
The evening drink, and other people. Alcohol weighs on your defences and cuts into the hormone of darkness, so in busy weeks, one glass with dinner at most. Dinner with friends, though, helps: company eases stress.
The mistake almost everyone makes. Reaching for orange juice or an immunity product the day your throat starts to tickle, and leaving the short nights and the weeks without a break as they were.
Try this
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Test yourself
Three days before the board meeting, your throat starts to tickle. What do you do?
At the end of winter, count your colds and compare them with last year's.
