From the Archives: in Sickness and in Health

The beginning of the winter term, or spring semester, or whatever your current chronological unit is called on your campus, is always kind of exciting and kind of hectic, like the beginning of any academic season. But if your campus is anything like mine, in addition to thousands of students, you have several colds and viruses arriving on campus during those first few weeks, which can make life difficult for students and faculty alike.

Here are some tips from the ProfHacker archives on things you can do to enhance your physical well-being and to help get through it if you do get sick.

Staying Healthy

• Erin offers tips on how to fit exercise into your busy semester in The Rule of 200: Fitness Edition
• Kathleen discusses Prioritizing Exercise by putting it first and making it social.
• I wrote about some analog and digital ways to keep track of your water intake if you’d like to make sure you’re drinking a certain amount.
• Jason writes about research into the benefits of afternoon naps
• George highlights recent research on the benefits of exercise in Exercise and the Life of the Mind
• Brian shared his method for successfully losing five pounds
• Erin discusses jog.fm
• Billie evaluates Using a Garmin Forerunner 305 as a Training Tool
• ProfHacker readers share their Health and Fitness Tracking Tools in an open-thread post.
• Anastasia’s post on Sleep and Holiday Travel includes tips that can help you get a better night’s sleep at home, too, like using a white noise machine and sleep calculator apps.

Avoid Getting Sick

• Erin’s Dealing with (the Common) Cold Season highlights the value of sleep, handwashing, and nasal rinsing. (I’m a believer in the neti pot too!)
• In Managing One’s Health, Billie offers a useful checklist of strategies that can minimize your chances of getting sick.
• Jason’s flu season checklist in Hacking the Flu contains lots of useful advice if a flu virus is sweeping through your campus: distribute announcements to your students online, use your own office supplies, and stay home if you get the virus.
• If you need more encouragement to accept digital assignments, Jason also suggests that a paperless classroom is a disease-free classroom.

When You (or Your Family) Are Sick

• In her vividly-titled When Hacking is in Your Lungs, Heather offers a number of important strategies to put in place in case you do get sick this semester, and also suggestions about how to handle your recovery time.
• Mark writes about Juggling Sick Children With Your Professional Life

What other questions or topics about sickness and health would you like us to cover? let us know in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed photo from flickr user dandeluca]