Hand Sanitizer Prevents Cold and Flu

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At this time of year, you can’t avoid them: the co-workers with sniffly noses, fellow commuters with chest coughs or the spouse with a stomach bug. Cold and flu season is here.

Though you can’t avoid sick people, you can avoid catching their cold or flu. You’ve heard that prevention is the best medicine and that regular hand sanitizing plays an important role. But just how effective is hand sanitizing when it comes to virus prevention?

Hand Sanitizer as Flu and Cold Prevention

Better than hand washing alone

There are two ways to catch a virus, through breathing contaminated air or by touching a contaminated surface and then your face. You can’t control what air you breathe, but you can control whether viruses stay on your hands. Hand sanitizer is incredibly effective at eliminating those viruses. For a study in BMC Infectious Diseases, a group of office workers used hand sanitizer at least five times each day. The research shows that these employees were then two-thirds less likely to contract a virus than workers who regularly washed their hands but did not use hand sanitizer.

The most important step for prevention

Hand sanitizer works, but aren’t there other ways to prevent cold and flu? Diet, exercise and other lifestyle factors are important, but nothing stacks up to clean hands. In an article on Real Simple, Dr. Susan Rehm, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases says that hand sanitization is “number one, two and three on any list of ways to prevent infection.”

How to use hand sanitizer to prevent cold and flu

The devil’s in the details. To ensure you’re eliminating all of the germs you pick up, follow these steps when using hand sanitizer.

  1. Use enough to saturate your entire hand. A small amount won’t do. Be sure you’ve covered the front and back of your hands, in between your fingers and your nails.
  2. Keep rubbing for 30 seconds to kill all active germs.
  3. Make sure the sanitizer dries completely. Do not remove excess sanitizer from your hands. Instead, keep rubbing until all of the hand sanitizer is absorbed.

How to Combat The Winter Blues

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The winter blues go by another name: seasonal affective disorder (SAD). While only two to three percent of Canadians will experience severe depression during the winter months, another 15 percent will experience mild SAD. Beyond that, many of us forfeit our favourite activities during the winter months — socializing with friends outdoors, taking nature walks, visiting the beach — leading to boredom and a sense of loss.

Fighting the Winter Blues

So what can we do to combat the winter blues or the boredom that arises when we pack away our summer hobbies?

How to avoid the winter blues

Catch some rays. The sky may be gloomy and grey, but you can find sunshine in other places. Try adding a light box or sunlight lamp to your desk or bedstand. Research shows that exposure to daylight produces chemicals in the brain that act as mood boosters.

Go outside. Physical activity and nature are both mood boosters. Unless there’s a cold weather alert, it’s safe and healthy to spend time outdoors during the winter. Take a snowy hike, strap on some ice skates or take up a winter sport, like skiing.

Plant something. House plants are natural air purifiers and mood enhancers. In the winter months, we tend to spend a lot of time indoors, making clean indoor air even more essential to our health. Staying happy during winter requires staying healthy. For powerful air filtration, try spider plants, aloe or English ivy.

What’s your favourite way to combat the winter blues?

Decluttering Your Digital Workspace

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A cluttered space makes a cluttered mind. To free up your focus, it’s important to regularly tidy your physical environment. But even the cleanest workspaces can fall victim to another sort of chaos: digital clutter.

Decluttering Busy Digital Workspaces

How many times have you misplaced a computer file or weeded through thousands of documents to find the right ‘Untitled’ document? It’s time to free up some space, declutter your digital realm and make your day-to-day tasks more seamless.

How to declutter your digital space.

Start with your desktop.

  • Drag lone documents into folders. If you have single documents or images on your desktop, assign them to the appropriate folders.
  • Create parent folders. For example, four folders — payroll out, employee account information, employee vacation remaining, employee sick days remaining — could be dragged into one folder called ‘payroll’.
  • Download a zen wallpaper. A calm ocean or forest scene will remind you to keep your space tranquil.

Tackle your documents.

  • Delete, delete, delete. Identify doubles or documents you no longer need. Yes, this means opening all of those ‘Untitled’ documents to either delete them, or rename them before assigning them to appropriate folders. This can be a daunting task, so…
  • Start with the old. A helpful trick for getting rid of those files you don’t need. Open folders and sort by date, starting with the oldest. Odds are, you don’t need that memo draft from five years ago. Psst, this is also a helpful way to clean up your email inbox: go to the oldest page, select all and delete.

Clear out your downloads.

  • Select all. Most of the images and files we download are of temporary use, or get re-saved into other folders. Is there anything in there you need? Drag out individual files, but you’ll notice there aren’t many worth saving. Then, select all and delete.

When you’re done, keep your space clean. The next time you create a document or download a file, assign it to its proper place before logging off.