The common cold:

Over 50 years ago I remembered an article about researchers doing studies on stress and the common cold.  They found a relationship to poor sleep causing a cold.   Lack of sleep and stress caused the body to develop cold symptoms.  One sleep research in the UK found that single people seldom caught colds but after marriage they commonly caught colds.

Thinking this out with the brain research, I came to understand that the common cold is a way for the brain to make you sleep.  The brain wants to heal your body (do its job) but you won’t let it so it forces you to rest and sleep by giving you a cold.  Many doctors often told patients with a cold to “take two aspirin and get some sleep”.  They knew sleep healed the common cold.

Yes you can pick up a cold from another person but it won’t last long if you get a deep sleep.   The common cold is a 24-hour bacterium that we re-infect (through pillows) ourselves with each night until it dissipates.

Funny things happen when raising children.  Children playing with others pick up a cold and bring it home.   In trying to sleep but can’t, they move in with mom and dad.  Germs now go into parents pillows.  Soon parents breathe in the cold germs.  Now you spread the germs to your partner and back to the child again.  That is why colds last several weeks in a house with children.

Infected pillows should be kept separate or at least put through a hot dryer daily.  Many times we lay the child on the couch pillows and now everyone gets the cold.

Read the research papers: Science Daily (Oct. 15, 2005)

Pillows: A Hot Bed of Fungal Spores by Researchers at the University of Manchester, UK

Page is in my book on www.alignright.com