5 Self Care Tips for Winter and a DIY Sore Throat Tea
Note: I wrote this back in October and preparing for two festivals took up all my time. So please excuse the back to school talk as it’s almost Christmas break now!
It’s been a month since kids have gone back to school, the trees are turning red, orange, and yellow, the days are getting darker and we are all spending more time inside. With that extra time inside, it inevitably means more time getting sick.
As homeschoolers we have managed to skip over most of the back to school yuck. However, we have many friends who are in school, who have come home with the sniffles and a cough. Inevitably the parents get sick too. Which is a bummer! As a parent, getting sick means you still have to do all the things in your normal day, but you have to do them with half the energy while coughing, sneezing and sniffling.
But I’ve got your back, with a few super easy tips to support your immune system and keep you feeling great even when someone sick does come around. These tips will also help if you do start to feel a tickle in your throat or the tell tale sneeze that your body is saying “I’m fighting something off, time to get ready!”
(Note: I am not a medical professional. The tips below are for educational purposes only and meant to encourage further learning for your own health path. )
5 Self Care Tips for Winter
Drink lots of water. I know this one is so obvious. But pretty much everyone I know and people who come to me as community herbalist don’t drink enough water when I ask them how much they drink a day. (And no coffee and black teas don’t really count. They are drying and astringent. They often act as a diuretic as well making you flush out as much water as you put in. That can be a good thing, but only if you need to get rid of excess water.) Get yourself a quart size mason jar and drink at least three of those a day. Keeping your mucosal linings hydrated and keeping your blood volume up will go a long way to supporting your immune system in doing it’s job of scanning for bacteria and viruses and taking them out before they take you out.
Get Sunshine everyday. This one is a biggie! Getting early morning light between the hours of sunrise and 11 am or so is really important. Your body needs Vitamin D and it’s much better to get outside and let your body synthesize it’s own vitamin D. Now, If you live where it’s often cloudy in the fall and winter this can be a pie in the sky dream. In that case, I would still get outside, but also try adding in a high quality vitamin D supplement so you don’t become deficient. Getting outside in fresh air does a world of good. I would add to this tip to open your windows everyday for at least ten minutes to change our the air in your house.
Get good rest. Your body is like a battery, it needs to recharge everyday. Part of that recharging is getting rest so that important internal organs can do their job of filtering toxins, removing dead cells and bacteria to the gut and repairing any damage to skin or muscles that occur during the day. For example your liver does it’s most important work of filtering your blood, somewhere around 10-12 at night . If you are awake at that time and say drinking coffee to stay up and get something done, it won’t do it’s job as completely, which will leave you feeling depleted in the morning. Over time lack of solid sleep can be a drag on your nervous system and your immune system, and both of these can open the door way to getting sick.
Avoid eating lots of sugar. Ok, I know this one sounds absolutely impossible during the holiday season, but it’s not. Sugar suppress the immune system. So if you are eating large amounts of it everyday as in sugary breakfast foods, plus cookies at lunch, plus a soda and an ice cream after dinner with a few Halloween candies thrown in, you might as well be telling your immune system to take a hike. Which is the very last thing you want. Try having having just one treat a day instead of a treat at every meal. If you go to a party and your know their will be cake and cookies, try to avoid as much sugar before and after the party as you can. No one wants to say no thank you to that chocolate whiskey cake or the handmade tiramisu.
Take echinacea or elderberry tincture everyday. This is a pretty easy one. Take a dropper full once a day of either tincture as way to support your immune system in doing it’s job. I take my own home grown, tinctured echinacea every time I know I will be around a lot of people say at a grocery store or a school event, or a party where we’ll be mostly inside. Both plants are awesome immune support plants. Some people respond better to one than the other. I have one friend for whom it triggers a TNF-Alpha storm and makes him feel sick. So he takes echinacea instead. My mom swears by the elderberry tincture I gave her. My kids much prefer elderberry syrup. Try both and see what works best for your body.
I hope some of these tips are useful. These are things I do everyday to stay as healthy as I can during the busiest time of the year. Now, on to the recipe!
Sore Throat Tea Recipe
Alright, so you’ve been doing all the 5 tips and some virus or bacteria still got the best of your immune system and now you’ve got a sore throat. Well, I’ve got a really nice simple sore throat recipe for you.
Slippery Elm or mallow is the main ingredient that is soothing to irritated tissues. They are both moistening herbs, which help coat the mucosal lining of the throat, soothing dry and irritated tissue. Cherry bark is an antispasmodic herb that soothes muscle twitches so if you have cough accompanying that sore throat, cherry bark is your friend! The fennel or licorice is cooling and sweetening. I prefer fennel to licorice this one is really a matter of preference. Lastly, the sweet orange peel is for flavor and a little added vitamin C.
Ingredients:
2 parts slippery elm bark or mallow root
1 part wild cherry bark
1/2 part fennel or licorice root
1/2 part sweet orange peel
Directions:
Just like my DIY Spiced Tea recipe, this recipe uses parts. If you want to make a single pot or cup of tea just use teaspoons as your measurements. If you want to scale up use cups or bowls however much to want to use.
Measure all the ingredients into a bowl. Mix well and then transfer to a glass jar with a good lid and store in a cool dark place.
To make your cup of tea, boil water and steep the tea for 10-15 minutes. Longer is better with barks as they take longer to infuse into the water. Drink as needed.
