What are the benefits of improving immunity?

The most direct benefit is that you will have to worry less about your health by half, and you can easily avoid many of the sins that others will suffer. During the flu season last winter and spring, half of the department of the Internet company where I worked was so sick that I couldn't get out of bed. There was a girl in the copywriting team who loved to run half-marathons and rarely ate anything. She only had a dry throat for two days and didn't even take two cold medicines before going to work normally. Not to mention how enviable she was.

Don’t think that your immunity is only limited to preventing minor illnesses such as colds. You may get hives every time the season changes, you may have diarrhea after eating a few mouthfuls of cold drinks, or a small wound may bleed for several days and become inflamed. Most of these trivial problems are related to your weak immunity. In the past two years, I stayed up late for three months working on a project. A small cut on my arm with a utility knife took two weeks to scab, leaving a light brown mark. Over the past six months, I have adjusted my schedule and played badminton two nights a week. Last month, I was scratched by the cat at home and the superficial wound healed in three or four days without even leaving a mark. The difference is really obvious.

Nowadays, there are many voices on the Internet saying that the higher the immunity, the better. They advocate taking sky-high-priced health products and taking immune globulin to "maximize immunity." In fact, this perception is problematic. There has long been a consensus in the academic community that if the immunity is too strong, it will attack the normal tissues as foreign invaders, inducing autoimmune diseases such as lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis. What we call "improving immunity" actually refers to adjusting disordered and low immunity to a stable normal level. It is not that higher is better.

In the long run, people whose immunity has been stable for a long time will not only have a lower risk of chronic diseases such as high blood pressure and diabetes when they get older, but even if they get sick or need surgery, their recovery speed will be much faster. My grandma is 82 years old this year. She has a regular schedule all her life. She goes to the community park to practice Tai Chi for half an hour every morning. Last winter she suffered a fracture and had surgery. She was able to walk slowly with a walker one week after the operation. Even the attending doctor praised her recovery speed as that of many 60-year-olds. This is due to her good immunity all year round.

To put it bluntly, immunity is like a 24-hour security team in your body. You can neither be lazy and let viruses and bacteria come in to cause damage, nor can you be too excited and smash things and accidentally injure your own people. You may not feel its existence at ordinary times. Only when something goes wrong do you know how much trouble a solid immunity can save.