Avoiding sickness is the number one piece of advice I have for staying healthy. Yes, I know. This is pretty obvious and seems like it goes without saying, but so many people do not take the simplest steps to avoid getting sick, and that greatly impacts your health. Looking at the obvious reasons why this would impact your health, the first is that it makes you feel under the weather, and often that comes with body aches, headaches, fevers, and sore throats. Secondary impacts of these symptoms are things like being unable to exercise, lacking concentration, and losing nutrition because of eating less (this often happens to me when I am sick because I lose my appetite). All of these make you less healthy and can even have long-term impacts if you do not deal with your sickness correctly.

But my issue is that people do not seem to try to prevent sickness. They go around not caring if they become ill. This was obvious to me this past week when it became freezing up here in State College. The 65-degree weather the week before had everyone breaking out their shorts and T-shirts, but obviously, in whipping winds and 20-degree weather like we had this past week, shorts and a T-shirt are not acceptable. I then ask, why did I see multiple people walking outside in this outfit while I was walking in sweats, a sweatshirt, and a massive coat, still freezing to death? As a kid, and even now, I still hear my mom yelling at me to make sure I am wearing enough before I go outside on a cold day, and yes it’s annoying, and sometimes I did not/do not listen to her advice, that fact of the matter is that we really should follow it. But why should we follow this again?

Being cold lowers the immune system of the body, making your chances of getting sick increase. It also makes it harder to recover from sickness if you are battling one while being in the freezing cold wearing nothing. So seriously, don’t be that person. I understand doing it in 6^th grade. We all did it. But now we should understand that it is important to be healthy, and putting yourself in an unnecessarily risky situation for getting sick only serves to harm you.