Last week, after four and a half years of successfully dodging it, my husband and I got hit by the covid bullet. Not too badly, and Paxlovid helped to reduce our symptoms more rapidly (at the cost of, yes, a very unpleasant metal taste that came and went for five days), but it nevertheless wiped us out pretty hard. A week after first testing positive, I still don’t quiiiiiiite have a negative test result, and I am still sleeping far more than I used to.

This experience prompted me to experiment with two things that — per the mission statement of these posts — could possibly be of use to others. Big asterisk this time, which is that I’m about to pass on Internet Medical Advice, and we all know what that’s worth . . . but hey, this at least one comes with PubMed citations? It’s also stuff that in most cases will, at worst, do you no harm, which puts ahead of some of the other Internet Medical Advice out there.

The straightforward one first: melatonin. A friend linked me to this study, which says that in addition to helping address the sleep disruption caused by covid, it may — more studies are needed — actually do something against the virus itself, up to and including making vaccination more effective. Since I got absolutely shitty sleep the first two nights I was sick, I figured that if all it did was help me sleep better, I was already ahead, and if it did more than that, bonus! It made a massive difference in my ability to rest, which is good for healing all on its own. (I did, however, have to check for potential interactions with the small mountain of other medications I was taking. The only real flags were that it + dextromethorphan, aka cough suppressant, might make me extra drowsy — oh no, don’t throw me in that briar patch — and that ritonavir, one of the components of Paxlovid, might make the melatonin less effective.)

The slightly less straightforward one comes from this blog post, which collects sources in support of a certain antihistamine protocol. The short form is that combining two classes of antihistamine — one found in most OTC anti-allergy medications, and one found in most OTC acid controllers — may improve your chances of full recovery and reduce the risk of long covid, improve the symptoms of long covid, and (weaker evidence here) even lower your chances of catching covid in the first place. There’s more explanation there if you’re interested, along with the specifics of the protocol.

Take all this with a grain of salt, of course (provided there are no negative interactions between salt and any other medications you might be on). IANA doctor of any stripe, your own personal medical situation might include factors that make one or both of these a bad idea, and all of them need more study. But in my case, there was no compelling reason not to try them. Whether they helped against the virus itself, I don’t know — but at least I got some better sleep out of it.

Fifth in a series of random posts on things that might be of use to others, with the usual disclaimers that nothing works for everybody.

A friend recently clued me in to the existence of Covixyl, a nasal spray that — as the name suggests — was developed in response to the covid pandemic, but which actually has much broader use. Rather than being a vaccine, it physically binds to the cells in your nasal passages, making them inhospitable to respiratory viruses. Two sprays up each nostril give you up to six hours of protection.

Studies on its effectiveness are still few in number, but they are distinctly encouraging. Even if it’s only a 60% reduction in risk of respiratory infection (which is the number I saw somewhere; can’t find where now), that’s still a lot less risk. About the only downside I know of is that the first ten to twenty seconds after you use it are uhhhh kind of literally eye-watering — this stuff does sting a bit! But it’s fairly affordable: $19 for one bottle, which they estimate will last you a month, or you can get it cheaper if you buy three ($54) or six ($100) bottles at a time.

I’m about to go on vacation, and I’m absolutely bringing this stuff with me. I’ll still be masking in high-risk situations like crowds, but having this as a second line of defense will make me feel a lot more sanguine about being able to enjoy the trip.

Fourth in a series of random posts on things that might be of use to others, with the usual disclaimers that nothing works for everybody.

A few months ago I got a smartwatch, and one of the things it measures is “stress.” Mine, uh. Thinks I’m basically about to explode at all times?

And this isn’t just “okay, yes, I’m under stress.” So is my husband — if anything, more stress than me — and he has the same brand of smartwatch, but it thinks he’s much more chill. So naturally, I wondered what the watch is using as the basis of its evaluation.

Turns out the answer is heart rate variability — which, yes, does appear to be robustly correlated with matters like anxiety and PTSD, along with physical fitness; more fit = better HRV. I do get exercise, and I am not that badly off with anxiety and such, so why is my stress rating so high?

I think I found the answer when I went looking for what can improve HRV. (It doesn’t just reflect your state of mind; there’s evidence that influencing HRV directly can in turn affect how you feel.) One of the most promising answers, where “promising” translates to “something I can try myself at home,” is diaphragmatic breathing, aka belly breathing. When we’re stressed, we tend to tighten our abdomens and breathe more in the upper chest; when we’re relaxed, we breath more from the stomach. Because our brains are gullible chemical sponges, it goes the other way, too: if you deliberately breathe from the diaphragm, you can reduce your feelings of stress, whereas if you breathe from your upper chest, you’ll increase feelings of tension and anxiety.

That much, I already knew. I’d never made a concerted attempt to use that knowledge, though, so I downloaded an app that’s designed for breathing exercises and set it to the timing mentioned in one HRV study, a ten-second in-out cycle, and tried doing that for five or ten minutes. Lo and behold, I can see the stress rating dropping in my smartwatch’s data. Okay, so, yes, this can improve my HRV and thereby reduce the stress metric.

But here’s the real kicker: doing that made me start to notice how I’m breathing throughout my day.

And the answer is, really, really astonishingly badly. It turns out that when I’m focused on something else, I tend to begin breathing very shallowly, and maybe even hold my breath? In small doses that’s fine — quite natural — but if I’m doing that on a regular basis, uh, I think I may know why my smartwatch thinks I’m about to explode. So now my project is to check in with myself periodically and notice if I’ve fallen into that pattern. Over time, I think I can retrain myself to breathe better as a matter of habit. If I’m right, I’ll probably see it reflected in my watch’s data.

But I may — should — also see it reflected in my life. I don’t think I’m super stressed on a psychological level . . . but that’s the kind of thing you quite possibly don’t notice until it’s gone.

Third in a series of random posts on things that might be of use to others, with the usual disclaimers that nothing works for everybody.

I don’t remember where I got linked to this, but the Guardian has a ~5 installment series of weekly emails about how to “reclaim your brain,” i.e. dial back the amount of time you’re spending each day on your phone. The tilde is there because you get an introductory email at the outset and a week six bonus, so it’s actually seven emails all told — and they do sign you up for a couple of other things once that ends, which isn’t entirely great, but on the other hand the stuff you get signed up for is e.g. “Well Actually,” which is a fairly positive-oriented newsletter about health and wellness, so it could be worse. Still and all, you might have to unsubscribe from things after “Reclaim Your Brain” ends, if you’re not interested in other emails.

In general, the series gives you instructions on how to figure out the average amount of time you use your phone each day and take a good look at how that time is being spent — obviously there’s a difference between three hours spent doom-scrolling social media and three hours spent immersed in a great ebook. Then they walk you through techniques to help you break the negative habits you have around usage. All of this more top-level advice is paired with personalized accounts from a guy who realized he’d become extremely unhealthy in his relationship with his phone and social media, so you get both the analytical and emotional sides of the tale.

I, uh. Still need to sit down and implement some of their advice? My issue with my phone isn’t actually social media, it’s games like solitaire, but it’s still true that I’m not happy with how much time I wind up unthinkingly spending on things of that type, rather than something I would find more rewarding. Especially since I have a strong tendency to reach for them in any idle moment, e.g. standing in line at a store, and it’s entirely possible that downtime of that sort is a vital component of my work: if I’m poking at a game on my phone, I’m more likely not noodling with a story in the back of my head. Over time, that’s going to add up to a problem, since “let yourself be bored” is quite possibly a key element in creativity.

But even though I’m not yet a success story for the Guardian’s series, I do recommend “Reclaim Your Brain” to anybody who would like to reduce their phone usage. You can always be like me and save the emails for later . . .

Second in a series of random posts on things that might be of use to others, with the usual disclaimers that nothing works for everybody.

Autogenic training is a technique recommended to me by my trainer/PT-ish guy in the course of trying to fix my ankle problems. He’d given me some exercises that should have helped deal with a nerve issue; when they didn’t, he advanced the theory that at least part of the problem is not mechanically neuromuscular but rather driven by stress, which is preventing my nervous system from downregulating like it should. (He was very concerned that I might read his words as “it’s all in your head and therefore fake” — I assured him I didn’t take it that way. Our minds can absolutely affect our bodies, and that doesn’t make the effects any less real.)

The basic idea of autogenic training goes like this:

1) Train yourself to induce certain physical markers of relaxation on command.
2) Brain says, “oh, if the body’s relaxed, then I guess there’s nothing for me to worry about.”
3) Profit.

This page has the script I’ve been using. You repeat those phrases to yourself, out loud or in your head (or record and listen to them), and try to create the sensation being described. The heaviness is about getting the muscles to relax — without the clench-and-release method that I’ve always found deeply counterproductive — while the warmth is about increasing circulation, since in times of stress or anxiety the body will reduce blood flow to the extremities in order to save it for core functions. Then you move onto controlling the heartbeat, etc.

It takes some practice. At first you may not be very successful at creating the sensations described, and getting a long-term benefit requires more than just a few sessions. But I do find it has short-term benefits pretty much right away, i.e. when I’m done with a round of this, my body definitely feels more relaxed. And it’s kinda neat, being able to just tell myself “my arm feels heavy” and boom, it’s suddenly made of lead? I stupidly fell out of doing this while running the Kickstarter (i.e. right when I needed it the most), but I’m going to try to get back into it.

This might be the start of an irregular blog series about stuff I have found helpful, which I’m mentioning it in case it’s of use to someone else. Feel free to ignore; I recognize that any time somebody on the internet says “I improved/fixed X problem by doing Y,” there’s kind of a whiff of proselytization that can turn people off. I know not every solution will work for everybody. But on the other hand, hey, maybe it helps somebody. That would be nice.

Cutting for (non-icky) discussion of digestive health.

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