Everyone’s winter wellness routine looks a little different. However, common practices you may adopt to prevent illness include taking vitamin C supplements, drinking herbal tea, getting enough sleep, and frequently washing your hands. You might also wear extra layers and bundle up outside because otherwise, as a parent or grandparent probably told you many times, "you'll catch a cold." But does being cold actually mean you'll get a cold or the flu?
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Cold weather can weaken your immune system and make it easier for germs to get into your nose.
While cold weather itself doesn’t make you sick, it can weaken your immune system as your body works harder to stay warm. This can, in turn, make you more susceptible to respiratory illnesses, such as the common cold, COVID-19, flu, asthma, pneumonia, and bronchitis.
It’s not unusual to experience difficulty breathing or a runny nose in frigid temps, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re sick.
"The cold air, particularly cold, dry air, can cause your airways to constrict and can be irritable to your airways," emergency medicine physician Chidinma Nwakanma, MD, told CBS News Philadelphia. "Which is why we recommend that if you are outside for these prolonged periods of time, you're covering your nose, you're covering your mouth, you're warming up the air that your lungs are taking in."
To this point, when you breathe in cold, dry air outside, your nasal passages have a harder time expelling viruses.
Peter Hwang, MD, head of the Stanford Sinus Center, told HuffPost that this is because your nose needs a "well-hydrated mucus layer" to act as a "physical blockade for viruses and bacteria to enter the tissue and as an active immunologic organ."
Moreover, a 2023 study published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (JACI) found that when your nose gets cold, it produces fewer extra-cellular vesicles or EVs, microscopic sacs that work to kill bacteria before it enters your nasal passageway.
"A decrease of just 9 degrees Fahrenheit in the tissue temperature of the nasal passages cut the number of EVs available to respond to a threat by more than 40%. The colder temperature also caused changes to the composition of the EVs that reduced their efficacy," explained UCLA Health. "The researchers theorize that all of this hampers the body’s ability to fight off respiratory viruses."
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Cold temperatures can also affect your body in other ways.
Studies have also shown a correlation between cold weather and high blood pressure or cardiac events. Exerting energy in bone-chilling temperatures, like when shoveling snow or scraping ice off your car, has been known to provoke “chest pain or angina,” added Steve Dorsey, MD, assistant medical director at the Cleveland Clinic emergency department.
Frostbite and hypothermia are also of concern. In the right conditions, Arctic winds and subzero temperatures can damage the skin (frostbite) and result in a drop in body temperature (hypothermia).
With hypothermia, “the body loses heat faster than it can produce heat, causing a dangerously low body temperature,” Mayo Clinic. A healthy body temperature is around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and anything below 95 degrees is considered a medical emergency.
“At those temperatures, it makes it very hard for the body to do its normal functioning, such as brain function, heart function, lung function," said Nwakanma.
Meanwhile, frostbite causes the skin and underlying tissue to go numb. If prolonged, it can cause skin to become discolored and hardened. Other tell-tale signs of frostbite include tingling, pain, joint stiffness, waxy-looking skin, and patches of red, white, blue, gray, purple, or brown skin, notes Mayo Clinic.
With frostbite, the best thing you can do, “particularly for the fingers or toes would be to run them under warm, not hot, but warm water," Dorsey told CBS News.
"Then it's a matter of taking a look at the skin and seeing is there are their coloration changes? Is there's dustiness at the tips or are there blisters, those are signs of deeper skin injury that need to be seen by a physician promptly,” he continued.
Nwakanma said your best defense against getting sick, whether respiratory or physical numbness, is to “make sure to cover your ears and hands and keep your feet warm.”
