How to Rebuild Your Immune System

Rebuilding after traumas and losses can deplete our immune system. Stressful jobs, multiple moves, job changes, family or work drama, financial challenges, military service, or caring for someone disabled can drain our immune system. Any of these situations may contribute to chronic stress, especially if they happen close together or at the same time.  These situations can cause a need to rebuild your immune system. How to rebuild your immune system may be one of the important initial steps you take when rebuilding your life after a traumatic event or an unexpected loss.

In this post, we’re going to discuss the importance of rebuilding your immune system, how to rebuild it, and how to maintain it.

Why Rebuild the Immune System

I like to keep things simple. If you have been through physical and emotional traumas and unexpected losses, those kinds of situations can cause you to be in a fight or flight survival mode for the length of the event that you’re going through. Along with that comes other things like difficulty getting to sleep and staying asleep, loss of appetite, difficulty thinking clearly, time missed at work, bills stacking up with less pay to cover them, etc. That’s a huge amount of stress.

Significant stress and ongoing stress can wear you down and leave you dragging, which makes it harder for you to pick up the pieces and move forward to rebuild your life after a traumatic event or loss. According to cancer prevention experts, a strong, healthy immune system is critical to preventing cancer which can be caused by ongoing stress. Now that you know why you need to rebuild your immune system, let’s talk more about how to do that.

Rebuilding Your Immune System

The more you can strengthen your body during non-stressful times, the more likely you are to recover quicker when a traumatic event visits your life. You can start by getting good sleep every night on a regular basis (on nights when there have been few stresses in your life). Also, walking daily, doing aerobic exercises, or jumping on a mini-trampoline are great stress busters. These will help you sleep better and help de-stress your body. In other words, be proactive doing what you can to take care of your body when the times are less stressful. That way, when the high-stress periods show up, your body will be better able to handle them. It makes sense, doesn’t it?

Also, staying hydrated with plenty of water and eating a healthy diet will work in your favor before, during and after the stressful times hit. When my friend was hospitalized and I was at his bedside, I took fruits, veggies, and healthy snacks with me to the hospital. While at the hospital, I saw so many visitors who were stressed out and sipping sodas, eating candy and potato chips. That kept them energized and feeling full, but those snacks had no nutritional value for a tired body or a depleted immune system.

Fruits, veggies, protein shakes, smoothies, sandwiches, Vitamin C and Vitamin B supplements (especially B stress formulas) will do a better job at replenishing the body. These vitamins will help support the adrenal glands in stressful situations. You can also buy supplements formulated to support the adrenal glands in stressful times.

A great immune system builder that I use is a specific Beta Glucan product that I have reviewed in another post. The reason I started using it was due to Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever that came from tick bites. I see a significant immune system improvement when I use it. While researching information on alternative cancer treatments for individuals who had cancer, I learned that the cancer doctors who offer alternative options to traditional cancer treatments also highly recommend this product to their cancer patients to boost the patients’ immune systems. A strong immune system is key to preventing and beating a cancer diagnosis.

Maintaining a Healthy Immune System

Getting the immune system strong and then maintaining it may take a while depending on your situation and the amount of chronic stress and sleeplessness that you’ve had in your life and what’s currently happening in your life situations. Has anyone ever told you to eliminate stress? How do you do that and then maintain it?

Suppose you’ve been working two jobs, caring for a family as a single parent, or maybe caring for a disabled person, trying to exercise regularly, and finding that there’s not enough money to stretch to the end of the pay period. Oh sure, eliminate stress, right? That’s hard to do because you’re in survival mode. So looking for ways to decrease your stress in those situations becomes an important factor to your long-term health. When you consider how to decrease your stress, you will find ways to make that happen. You first need to make a list of what stresses you now and what calms you. Then make a plan to increase what you need and to decrease what you don’t need.

You might find that you need less stressful people in your life. The kind of friends and acquaintances who are caring and calming rather than filled with drama and selfishness. It’s great to enjoy lunch with people,  but when they are constantly having drama and are focused only on themselves, who needs that? Situations like that will not decrease your stress, so it’s best to keep your distance from people who increase your stress level. Oh, and decreasing or eliminating contact with friends who have lots of drama will definitely decrease your stress level because they won’t be calling to share all their drama.

Do you think that you need to find a new job that’s less stressful in order for you to maintain a healthier immune system? Sometimes that’s the case. Switching jobs isn’t always easy, but well-thought-out it can do wonders for your life in decreasing chronic stress and improving the health of your immune system.

Conclusion

Traumatic events and losses will occur in life, so the best coping strategy is to purposely work at keeping a healthy immune system and low stress or stress-free life. In this post, we’ve talked about the importance of rebuilding your immune system, how to rebuild it, and how to maintain it. Now it’s up to you to do the day to day work on making that happen. You can do it! Figure out what you need and want and get to work on it.

Click here to read my REVIEW on Beta 1, 3D Glucan to find out how to help your depleted immune system.

 

Thank you for sharing!

6 thoughts on “How to Rebuild Your Immune System”

  1. Who knew that stress was such a big factor in your immune system?! I sure didn’t, but it is definitely something I will be evaluating now. thanks so much for this, I really learned a lot!

    Reply
    • You’re right… we typically reach for more caffeine when we’re tired, rather than what will help us in a healthy, long-term way. The more stress we have, the more likely we are to need additional supplement support so we can sleep well at night. That’s when our bodies heal best—especially our immune systems. Thank you for stopping by my site!

      Reply
  2. You have really given me something to think about. Many of us don’t realize what stress and traumatic events can do to our bodies. We just know we are stressed out and even though we know stress is causing us to not sleep well, not eat right or not letting us focus, we still don’t think about what we can do for our bodies in order for it to be able to handle it better. We look at it like a side effect of stress, not that it is harming our body.
    I know I didn’t think about it until reading the information you have provided. We should know to take care of our bodies or it cant take care of us.
    I also agree about the company we keep. I won’t bore you with the details but, it isn’t the company that I keep. It is the situations that some of the local children (my daughter’s friends) have to go through. You get involved because you listen to them while they are there, and you just can’t not think about it or worry.
    My older children cause me enough stress, I don’t look for friends that will do the same.
    I will definitely start trying to get some fresh fruits and veggies and coax myself into eating them instead of not eating when I am stressed. I can also walk more on our treadmill. I get some exercise taking care of our animals, but I am sure it isn’t enough.

    Thank you for your help.
    Lee Ann

    Reply
    • Glad you found my post helpful, Lee Ann! I’m sharing what I’ve learned the hard way on my own journey so it hopefully resonates with and helps others who visit my site. In past years, I used to reach for sodas with caffeine, then decided to find better ways to treat my body. In fact, if you click here you can read about another way to strengthen your immune system during difficult times.

      I hear what you’re saying about your children’s friends. That sounds like there are situations that are a concern. Hopefully, you know some local organizations, agencies, or counselors that you can share with their parents when the opportunity arises. Continuing to be a safe place for your childrens friends to visit must be a huge help to their friends—especially if they may not have stability and love at home. What an angel you are! 🙂

      Reply
  3. I am doing intermittent fasting and I would like to add fruits, veggies for rebuilding my immune system. What time would it best to eat them for someone like me?

    Reply
    • Intermittent fasting is a great tool. I would suggest adding fruits and veggies to boost your immune system in the morning or early afternoon. Based on my experiences of juicing fruits and veggies, I’ve found that some of the stress-reducing, immune system boosting fruits and veggies might rev up your system a bit and prevent you from getting a good night’s sleep if you juice them or eat them close to bedtime. For that reason, I would stick to earlier times in the day, since losing sleep will definitely not help to rebuild your immune system. Also, I have used juicing before and after workouts too. Depends on the kind of workout you’re doing and your sleep schedule. Thanks for stopping by my site! 🙂

      Reply

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