Cold Protocol
None of the following is medical advice or particularly scientific. It’s just what I, an expert cold-haver, have found to work.
- Sleep/forced rest
- Most important: the instant you feel that “Why am I tired? Am I getting sick?” feeling, get in bed. I’m convinced prophylactic forced naps have saved me from days of symptoms.
- Yes, whatever time of day it is. Yes, it’s tedious. But get in bed, and close your eyes, and just park it.
- Try to sleep. But if you can’t, just lie there in torpor. Let your body send its calories to your immune system.
- Sometimes the forced rest kills my cold on the first day before it ever takes off. If it does take off, I only continue the forced rest until my symptoms have peaked, which is usually after a day or two. After which I just focus on good night sleep.
- If symptoms are keeping you from sleeping (at any time of day), don’t be afraid to use symptom-relieving drugs: Vicks, cough drops, Advil, belt of whiskey (joke), whatever. No, they’re not treating the cold, but the sleep they enable is.
- I recommend unbundling combo drugs like NyQuil. I usually just want the antitussive, which you can buy separately, to let me sleep, while the antihistamine it’s bundled with reduces my sleep quality.
- Most important: the instant you feel that “Why am I tired? Am I getting sick?” feeling, get in bed. I’m convinced prophylactic forced naps have saved me from days of symptoms.
- Zinc acetate lozenges
- Suck on 80+mg per day of zinc acetate lozenges
- That’s ~4 of the ones linked there. Yes, they’re big.
- Zinc acetate is supposedly better than gluconate, but both are probably fine.
- Suck, don’t swallow. Zinc works as an antimicrobial in your throat. The goal is to coat your throat, not supplement your diet.
- Zinc will make things taste funny for ~1 hour after the lozenge dissolves, so don’t use right before meals.
- Suck on 80+mg per day of zinc acetate lozenges
- Any nasal spray
- I’ve tried plain saline, xylitol, cofirx, iota carrageenan, and nitric oxide/enovid. They all seem to work equally well, and all beat not using one.
- I’m pretty sure they’re just acting as lightweight nasal irrigation, not providing a benefit from an active ingredient. You can also do full-blown nasal irrigation with a neti pot or similar, but my compliance is higher when I can just spritz throughout the day and while on the move. And I’m not going to neti pot in e.g. an airplane bathroom (and pray nobody else is).
- Similar to the lozenge logic above, I get best results when I coat as much surface area inside my head as possible. Lean back after you spray, tilt your head hither and yon, and spread it around in there.
- I use them ad libitum, though some have usage guidelines.
- I’ve tried plain saline, xylitol, cofirx, iota carrageenan, and nitric oxide/enovid. They all seem to work equally well, and all beat not using one.
- Careful with cough drops
- Great for acute relief while the cough drop is in my mouth, but I find any brands that aren’t the OG Ricola honey ones make the symptoms worse than before once I’ve finished the cough drop, which leads to a chain-smoking-like spiral of always needing another lozenge.
Feel better soon!