Washing hands, social distancing, self-isolating -- what else can we do to stay healthy during the Covid-19 pandemic?

Wellness and integrative medicine specialist Prof Marc Cohen has written a poem, which summarises 50 evidence-based activities that will help boost the immune system and relieve anxiety.

"The 50 activities will take you from being wired and tired to chill and fulfilled," said the Australian doctor, who founded the Extreme Wellness Institute in Melbourne.

With degrees in Western medicine, physiology, psychological medicine and PhDs in Chinese medicine and biomedical engineering, he pioneered the introduction of complementary, holistic and integrative medicine into mainstream settings.

Advice taken from a passage of his poem includes "slip into a bathtub, sauna or spa, care for a pet, take up a sport, go on vacation, make your home a resort".

The use of heat such as through hot springs, saunas, steam rooms and hot baths can help address immunity.

"Humans can tolerate temperature that viruses can't. We have a very sophisticated cellular and physiological mechanism for dealing with heat," he noted. "Overheating the body makes the immune system more active, so that it can clear the virus much quicker. If you can go to a state of being comfortably uncomfortable with heat, that temperature is likely to be the temperature that the virus will not survive."

Warm moist air will facilitate nasal mucociliary clearance, which is one of the major defence mechanisms against the virus that lodges in the coldest part of the body.

At home, a warm moist environment can be rendered by a humidifier, placing bowls of water near a heater, or steam inhalation. An Australian traditional remedy is to put eucalyptus or tea tree essential oils in a bowl of boiling water. Then put a towel over your head, and breathe for aromatherapy.

"Using oil with antiviral properties, you can actually help give your body an advantage over the virus, in the place where it first lodges in your body. That's the first line of defence, which is your nose," he said. "The second line of defence is your systemic immune system, which generates fever. You can artificially do that by using heat and that is a really effective way to give your body an advantage over the virus."

The body, however, may fall prey to the virus when people are in fear and stuck in the Fight-or-Flight mode, which makes them fight back or run away from a threat.

"That is a real concern right now as a lot of people are living in fear, and that fear itself will suppress their immunity," said Prof Cohen, who has written Hacks To Relax, listing 10 things that people can do as emotional first-aid.

The poem goes: "Touch all your fingers, wiggle your toes, soften your stomach, breathe through your nose, sigh, smile, swallow, sing, flutter your eyelids and focus within."

"These activities stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system. You need to balance the Fight-or-Flight episodes with Rest-and-Digest episodes," he said. "But people are not getting enough of that. They are wired on adrenaline and sympathetic nervous activation. That exhausts them, suppresses the immune system, and makes them much more vulnerable when they do get the virus and succumb to it."

The Fight-or-Flight response is a primitive survival mechanism that helped our cavemen ancestors deal with danger. The Covid-19 pandemic has led to lockdown that calls for people to go back into their "cave".

"At the moment, we're in an emergency and that's the Fight-or-Flight response. Now, you've gone back into your cave, and you've had the Rest-and-Digest, then you will emerge and see what else you can do in the world," he said.

"The whole world has been forced to go into the Rest-and-Digest mode. We've been forced to go in, and look within, and think what's important to us, what sort of world we want to live in, and what's our contribution. When the global shutdown is released, we will see a whole new world, and that world has to be focused on wellness because the alternative is unthinkable."

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