Recharge Your Routine: How to Stay Healthy During the Holidays

The December holidays are a time to recharge and unwind, but while your mind might be relaxing, your body is often thrown into chaos. 

New locations, different living spaces, disrupted routines and, for anyone travelling abroad, unfamiliar foods, foreign environments and altered sleep schedules can all take a toll on your health and vitality.   

This mix of travel stress, endless celebrations, and routine disruptions can seriously knock your sleep, immunity, and digestion out of alignment. Thankfully, you can tame this travel triple threat and boost festive season wellness with these helpful holiday tips and simple health habits.

The holidays are ironically exhausting. Even when you’re technically sleeping in, the quality of your slumber can plummet. Sleeping in a strange hotel, a noisy guesthouse, or a relative’s spare room disrupts your natural sleep rhythm, keeping your brain on high alert (a phenomenon called the “first-night effect”), making deep, restorative sleep elusive.

Add afternoon braais that carry on long into the evening, New Year’s Eve countdowns, and skipping your usual bedtime, and your circadian rhythm – your internal 24-hour clock – quickly falls out of sync. This is a form of social jetlag, which can leave you feeling groggy and unrested.

That glass of wine or beer you have with dinner might not seem like much, but even small amounts of alcohol can disrupt your sleep, keeping you from dropping into the crucial REM stage. Heavy, late-night meals also force your digestive system to work overtime when it should be resting, spiking your body temperature and delaying sleep.

The festive season can also overwhelm your immune system. Airports, planes, and other communal transport hubs are petri dishes for viruses and bacteria.

The stress of travel also raises cortisol levels, a stress hormone that can suppress immune function¹.

Long days spent in the sun without proper hydration, coupled with alcohol, lead to dehydration, which can make mucous membranes (in your nose and throat) less effective at trapping pathogens, giving germs an easy entry point.

When you fail to get adequate quality sleep, your immune system takes a further knock as your body can’t produce and mobilise essential immune cells (called T-cells and cytokines) properly². That means when sleep quality suffers, your immune defences weaken, making you far more susceptible to that annoying festive flu or a tummy bug.

The holiday season is a marathon of eating, and your poor gut bears the brunt of it. Shifting from your usual diet to a continuous stream of rich, high-fat, high-sugar holiday fare can overload your digestive system, leading to heartburn, bloating, and painful cramps. 

Experiencing the local cuisine at your international destination of choice can also introduce unfamiliar ingredients and bacteria into your gut, which can result in digestive distress. 

By disrupting the balance of your gut microbiome, the resultant imbalance between good and bad bacteria (known as dysbiosis) is often the root cause of that uncomfortable holiday bloat and other digestive issues, like traveller’s diarrhoea and sluggish bowel movements.

Don’t let the holidays sideline your fun with a mindful approach to festive season wellness. Start with some sleep hygiene by sticking to a semi-regular bedtime, even while you’re on vacation. Use an eye mask and earplugs in new places, and take Biogen Magnesium Glycinate.

Magnesium glycinate is a good sleep support supplement because it promotes relaxation by calming the nervous system³, reducing muscle tension⁴, and supporting melatonin production⁵, helping you fall asleep faster and keeping you asleep longer.

From a digestion perspective, eat mindfully and choose your indulgences. Don’t eat everything offered. Pick the one or two treats you truly love and enjoy them guilt-free, but keep the rest of your meals close to your normal, healthy routine.

When you attend a function or plan to sample exotic cuisines, prep your digestive system and give it added support.

Biogen Alkaline Powder provides essential alkaline minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium and phosphorus alongside a unique homoeopathic blend to support the body’s acid buffering system. This makes it ideal for balancing the effects of an acidogenic diet and lifestyle – common during the festive season – as it promotes optimal pH levels.

Taking a probiotic product like Biogen Supreme Probiotic 9-Strain can help restore your gut’s microbial balance, especially if travelling overseas. This may improve the functioning of the digestive tract, making it another sensible step to support festive season gut health and function. 

Lastly, counter the festive threats to your immune system, consider packing a trio of immune-supporting supplements. Vitamin C is a powerful antioxidant that helps support various cellular functions of the immune system⁶. You can get high levels of this vitamin from Biogen Vitamin C 1000mg to maintain the normal function of the immune system during and after intense periods of stress.

Vitamin D3 is another vitamin that plays a critical role in modulating immune responses and helps maintain the integrity of your protective barriers⁷, while a Zinc Complex is vital for immune cell development and function⁸, which may help reduce the severity and duration of common infections if you do happen to pick up a bug while travelling or celebrating.