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13 Best Common Cold Remedies that will Make you feel better

Here’s some of the best common cold remedies that will Make you feel better

You need to try some of these best common cold remedies! Because colds aren’t going away anytime soon. You need to learn how to manage them so you can live.

I shall not die of having a cold. I shall die of having lived.

~ Willa Cather ~

Yes. You know those symptoms. Sore throats, cough, congestion. You just don’t feel like yourself. You feel tired and fatigued.

Like you just want to stay in bed and just let the world go by. I know what that’s like for sure. I think we’ve all suffered from the common cold and our life, but that’s really all it is. It’s a common virus that you can try to prevent, but sometimes the more that you try to prevent it, the faster it comes on.

But the good thing is that there’s the best common cold remedies that I’m going to share with you today to help you get living faster.

Listen to the Podcast:

13 Common Cold Remedies that will help you feel better

No one has time to be sick

You can guess how I feel about being slowed down with the common cold. I despise the common cold.

I have deadlines, a family to take care of and when I feel congested and tired and more than breaks my heart to feel that way when my little girls are asking me to play with them and mommy is just, mommy can’t breathe.

It’s tough. I know the feeling or just just trying to live life, trying to go and socialize or you have work to do. You know it’s hard to, you know when you feel tired and run down and you can’t breathe, it’s hard to feel like you’re going to go on living, but you are. So today I’m going to share with you 13 proven best common cold remedies that you get to try at home.

Are you doing these things to prevent the common cold?

I’m going to dive right into these, but first I want to tell you about a little checklist that I created for you around ways to prevent the common cold.

I will tell you that we don’t have cold or sick in our family very often. You know, probably once a season. It comes on strong and especially when the kids are in school, you know there’s lots of germs and lots of kids who, who suffer from it more than my little kids, but my farm kids do get it. They do get the common cold too.

So it’s only a matter of time, but there are ways to help you get going a little bit quicker and even included in some ways to prevent it for next time and prolong the virus from reaching your body.

12 Tips for Preventing the Common Cold

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    Please, Get Some Rest!

    This is very hard for me to do because I have two little girls. I have some businesses, I have animals that need fed. And only so little time. It’s tough, but sometimes you need to simply lie low sleep. Let the world move on because when we’re not getting our rest, our body, our immune system, it starts to get sad and so we need to build a backup. The best way to do that is with some rest you can take a nap or go to bed early.

    A lot of times, I do the go to bed early thing and I let my husband put the girls to bed and do all the evening rituals. That’s what works best for me. I have a hard time sleeping during the day, taking a nap when they’re in the house. So going to bed early is what works best for me.

    If you don’t have a partner, if you’re all by yourself, then you just need to look at your day and figure out some time to when you can take a little rest, get the most important things done, like the animals fed, and then go rest. You know, it’s whatever you have going on.

    I definitely would try to cancel interactions with people if possible, just because sometimes that wears us down to it might be a good idea to cancel those things. Especially they won’t want to be around you if you feel like you don’t feel good or if you feel like you can’t breathe. I don’t really like it when people are like, “Oh, get away from me, I’m sick.” So that’s a very good excuse to not be around people when you feel sick. That’s number one. Just take the time to rest if you can.

    Take Care of Your Sinuses

    When the virus attacks your body, it attacks your sinuses too, which is basically how we breathe there – Our nose and all the way down to our throat. So let’s try to open up those sinuses. I have a few little ideas that that have worked well.

    First, any kind of saline spray that you can spray up into your nose. It releases good bacteria, it’s a salt water basically, and it helps to break up that mucus so that you can breathe through your nose.

    There’s also a product known as a neti pot, which is basically a pressure washer for your sinuses. It helps you to breathe better, it’s easy to use, and basically you just get it warm and shoot it up your nose.

    There’s a lot more sinus type care that I’m going to share with you, but those two products you put right into your your nose and it helps. It’s the first round of of medicine to your sinuses and it really helps them break it up.

    Put Good Things Into Your Body

    Okay. Number three is to eat well or drink well, good nutrition. So anything with lots of vitamin D, vitamin C. You need about 2000 grams of vitamin C a day.

    Many people will just simply take vitamin C pills. You can do that as well as drink some elderberry juice or orange juice. Chicken soup is really, really nice. The broth and the chicken soup kind of acts as a soother for your sore throats. Plus it’s delicious. So what’s not to like?

    Whiskey, Anyone?

    All right. The fourth one might not be so popular, but it’s something that my mom always brought up. I don’t know if did this for me? Maybe she did, but she always talked about her grandpa using whiskey as a common cold remedy, mainly for sore throats. So any type of whiskey. And so moonshine, wild Turkey, uh, those kinds of alcohol. She said he would make like a hot toddy and some of you might still do this.

    It’s an old remedy from back in the day that our grandparents used and it’s kind of been passed onto us. Again, I’m really not a fan of whiskey so I don’t think I’ve ever done this. But if you like whiskey or you have some on hand and nothing else, it might not be a bad idea. You only need like a shot glass full or less and you just sip it a little bit. Let it go down into your throat and it’s supposed to soothe your throat.

    Other Home Remedy Mixtures Grandma Used to Make for Colds.

    Something to try some more things to try are some not so secret concoctions. You know, when you ask people what they do for their cold remedies, there’s a lot of different answers for some natural concoctions that might be worth trying. The first one is Apple cider vinegar and water.

    Now that just doesn’t sound good at all, but it’s acidic. So it’s gonna act as a good remedy because it would break up that phlegm. And also maybe release some good bacteria to work on your sinuses as well.

    The other one is hot water, lemon and honey. And we all know that honey is very good, very nutritional. Lemon is acidic. Both of these remedies are acidic, Apple cider, vinegar and lemon. So you can probably guess what it’s that they both kind of work in the same way. It’s one part of each that you mix up and just sip it very slowly. Heat it up for even more power and soothingness.

    And you know what? Let me know what you think of that along with the alcohol one too. Let me know if that worked for you. You can comment in the show notes or leave it as a review in Apple podcasts.

    Take a Hot Shower or Bath

    The next one is my favorite thing to do when I have a cold – Take a very hot shower or bath. And the idea of this is that the steam from the shower or bath is going to help break up that mucus affecting your sinuses. It’s going to help clear your head just because it’s going to break up all that gunk that’s in your sinuses and your body.

    First of all, I shut the door to the bathroom. Then, I turn the water on as hot as it will go and the steam from that shower or bath, I can feel it start working. It’s amazing. It just starts working immediately and then I get in and I just stand in there. I let the water run down on the back of my neck, which is a prime spot for the buildup of phlegm as well. Kind of all the way around your neck and your throat.

    It’s are all prime spots for the common cold to build and to be affected.

    If you have a very small baby, steam works great for clearing up their airway. This is also something that I did when both of my babies were infants. I would just go in to the bathroom, shut the door and I would turn on the hot shower. Then, I would just sit on the toilet seat and I would hold my baby. The steam from the shower would actually help my baby breathe better.

    So just a little tip from a mom of an infant baby who you can’t really put in the shower. I mean both of my girls were very, very young when they first had their first colds and I was really nervous about it.

    I was really scared that they were going to get more sick or that they wouldn’t be able to sleep. So, I did held them in my steamy bathroom and now I do it with every one in the family every time they have a cold.

    Sea Salt Solution

    The next one is sea salt swabs. Sea salt is a really good natural remedy for the common cold. If you have any sea salt lying around, you can do a saltwater wash or swab the inside where your sinuses are. And also your nose. The sea salt acts as a remedy. It breaks up the phlegm and helps you to breathe a lot better too.

    Kind of similar to the saline spray that we talked about earlier. This one, it’s sea salt. It just dissolve it in some water, warm water, the wa the warmer, the better and just kind of swab it in and your nose and wait for the magic to happen. All right.

    Essential Oils – Thieves

    If you’re into essential oils, this might be for you. Any vitamin essential oils.

    Thieves is one that is really popular with everyone who uses essential oils. I’m not really an essential oil user, but this one came up a lot when I was asking around.

    Just kind of rub it on the back of your neck, the front of your neck, under your nose and it acts really well as a diffuser of the common cold.

    Vick’s Vapor Rub

    One other product I use is Vick’s vapor rub. There’s other vapor rubs you can buy that are said to be a little more natural than Vick’s. You can make your own with bees wax, which I’ve had homemade bees wax vapor rubs but you just can’t go wrong with Vick’s.

    I mean it is just the bomb for me. I put that on after my hot shower and it just makes a ton of difference. It helps me go to sleep. It’s just amazing.

    They also make a Vick’s for babies so it doesn’t have like the main common ingredient or as much of it. When I was nursing my little babies, it would be hard for them to breathe through their nose if they had a cold. So I would put some of that Vick’s right on my chest and they could breathe that in and it would break it up. It was like magic. They could nurse better that way.

    Growing up, my mom always had me put Vick’s on my feet and then put socks on. And just something about your feet, the sensitivity of your feet that makes it all the way up to your sinuses is pretty much amazing. The human body is so cool and I mean the fact that you could put something on your, that you could treat your feet with something and it would affect your sinuses. How cool is that?

    And it’s all your brain. It’s all your brain doing that work, doing, doing the computerizing, the telling of between the feet and the brain that says, “Hey, you got something on your feet.” I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s going to help. Treat this cold that we’re fighting. So it’s kind of a neat way to think about it.

    Drink Water

    Another tip is to stay hydrated. Are you drinking enough water? You know, that’s one thing that maybe a lot of us don’t think of. For one thing, our throat is sore, so a lot of times like for me, we don’t feel like drinking or eating anything because of how our throats feels, but we still have to be drinking our water, staying hydrated more than just juice and tea. We really need to stick to that water.

    You can put some fresh lemon into your water as a little extra boost of vitamin C and that helps a lot. You can also use other fruits and vegetables infused into your water.

    Choose Immune Boosters to Eat

    Along with that is to eat some immune boosting oranges. You can put oranges in your water, put orange slices in Greek yogurt. Yogurt has that good bacteria that’s going to come in to your body and fight that infection and fight that virus that’s invaded your body.

    Bananas are really good source of potassium, which also is a immune boosting nutrient.

    And finally tomatoes, there’s, there’s a lot, there’s a bigger list of these, but as a tomato grower myself, I am glad that it made this list. Tomatoes are fruit that have lots of vitamin C and lots of good nutrients. Good old tomato juice is actually really great for colds.

    If you have that canned in the basement or, or in your fridge, tomato juice is a really good source. If you don’t want to eat anything, maybe drink some tomato juice and see if that helps you.

    Run a Humidifier

    The next is a humidifier is to run a humidifier. Humidifier will help because when the air is cold, it gets dryer and it actually is cold air. And this is because cold air holds less moisture than warm air. So your nostrils get dry and your skin are more prone to the viruses, the cold viruses. And if you’re already sick, the dry air can worsen a sore throat.

    You can also leave a bowl of shallow water out near a heat source and the water will evaporate and slowly humidify a room.

    Work Hard to Prevent the Common Cold from Spreading

    And finally try to prevent your common cold from spreading. The first is to take care of you. Rest, wash your hands, disinfect, use Kleenexes and throw them away. Take clean, keep your space clean, keep your home clean. Don’t spread the cold virus to others and those are the best way to do that. It’s spread through germs, through touching, kissing, all of that, so that is the best way to get a handle on those symptoms and to keep them to keep them at a standstill right where they are

    What is nothing is working?

    The common cold is fairly simple to manage, but you must take care of yourself first. That is first and foremost.

    The common cold will last no longer than two weeks. If your symptoms are lasting longer than two weeks, you probably need to call your doctor. Nothing is working and you are just still miserable.

    If your symptoms worsen or you develop new symptoms, worse symptoms such as a higher fever or something else, you might have another type of infection and not the cold.

    If you have a sore throat or fever higher than a hundred degrees for longer than three days, then it’s probably more than just the cold and you probably need to be to go to your doctor and get looked at.

    Finally, intense chest pain and shortness of breath. Those are not the common cold and you should probably go check that out as well.

    Wrap Up + Where to Find the Podcast

    So friend, I hope that this has helped you to battle the common cold and be victorious. If you know of somebody who needs to hear this episode, please share this episode with someone you love, someone you care about.

    You can share via this show notes page – just copy and paste the link or there’s some handy social share buttons up at the top that you can just simply share to Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

    Also, if you love this episode and you want to hear more, I have almost 120 episodes now of the Rural Women Inspired podcast, so if you don’t want to miss another episode again, please head over to Apple podcast and subscribe. Leave us a five star review. We would love that.

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    ~ Much Love ~

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