Can Being Cold Give You a Cold?

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Today’s Health Upgrade

Number You Won’t Forget: 20%

Do Book Readers Live Longer?

Following a story or an argument takes work. You have to remember what happened earlier and connect it to what you’re reading now. That sustained mental effort may help explain an unusual finding about books and longevity.

That might be why scientists found that people who read books had about a 20% lower risk of dying over up to 12 years of follow-up than people who didn’t.

Researchers followed more than 3,000 people over the age of 50, and the link held up after accounting for differences in age, education, wealth, health, and depression. Reading for about 30 minutes a day was associated with lower risk. Newspapers and magazines showed a much weaker link to longer life.

Books ask you to stay with a story or idea long enough to make connections. In the study, differences in thinking and memory partly explained the link between book reading and survival. That fits the idea, though an observational study can’t prove it’s the cause.

Book readers might be healthier or more curious in ways the researchers couldn’t fully account for. We can’t say that picking up a book will add years to your life. But it’s a low-risk behavior (really, there’s no risk in reading more) with high potential reward.

Since most of us spend too much time on our phones, try swapping 20 minutes of evening scrolling for a book tonight. Choose something you want to keep reading, so making time for it feels a little easier.

Mindset 
Weekly Wisdom

Think about the route you drive to work, or the loop you walk with the dog. You’ve covered it hundreds of times. Now describe what you’ll typically see three blocks from your home.

What color is the fence at the corner? What do the houses look like?

Most people come up blank, even though they’ve passed it more times than they can count. When UCLA researchers asked people where the fire extinguisher nearest their office was, only about 1 out of 5 knew, even though many had walked past the bright red canister several times a day for years.

Your brain is built to stop registering whatever stays the same. Scientists call it habituation. It once kept our ancestors’ attention free for what changed, like the rustle in the grass that might be a predator.

In modern life, it means the people and places you see every day slowly fade from view. It’s not a threat, but it has a real cost.

It happens with your health, too. 

Thoreau wrote the line above in his journal in the summer of 1851, a few years after leaving his cabin at Walden Pond. Walden was an ordinary pond outside an ordinary town, and he spent two years there.

Seven years later, he spelled out the method: “We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, and then we can hardly see anything else.”

That line could have been the protocol for a study researchers ran years ago. Everyone was assigned a 15-minute walk once a week for eight weeks. Half the group also got a short briefing on awe, the feeling you get in front of something vast, and were asked to look for it on their walks.

Oddly, the control group logged more than twice as many walks. 

The awe walkers still came out ahead. They reported more joy on their walks, and more compassion in daily life, and their day-to-day distress fell more than the control group’s. 

Even their selfies changed. Week by week, they took up less of the frame, the scenery behind them took up more, and their smiles got bigger.

You could see the difference in what people thought about. One awe walker noticed that the rain had turned the crunchy leaves underfoot soft and spongy. One control walker spent the walk going over a to-do list for an upcoming vacation.

It’s a small study in healthy, highly educated older adults, and the effects were modest. Measures of anxiety, depression, and life satisfaction didn’t change. 

Still, both groups rated their walks as equally scenic, and only one group carried an assignment out the door.

Remember the fire extinguishers? Months later, the researchers asked again, and everyone knew exactly where theirs was. Once they’d gone looking, they couldn’t miss it.

Turn Wisdom Into Action

When life starts to feel flat, most of us assume the scenery needs replacing. New scenery helps for about as long as it stays new. A cheaper fix is giving your attention a job. 

Without one, attention drifts to your inbox or to the argument you’re replaying from this morning. Hand it something to find, and the same day starts giving you more back.

We see this with people who tell us they hate walking. When we dig in, what they dislike is a walk spent mentally answering email. Ask them to come back with one thing they noticed, and within a few weeks the walk becomes the part of the day they protect.

You can do this yourself. Pick one walk this week on a route you know by heart. The dog loop counts. So does the stretch between the parking garage and your desk.

Before you start, give your attention an assignment: find something you’ve never noticed. 

Leave the earbuds out for the first five minutes, and keep the phone in your pocket unless you want a picture of what you found.

When you get back, write one sentence about it. A few days later, walk the same route and find something new.

The first try will probably feel a little silly. Do it anyway. You’re teaching your attention to go looking, and early reps always feel clumsy.

Everything on that route has been there for years. This week, you’ll see it for the first time. And that awareness will do more than you think. 

Fact Or Fiction
Can Being Cold Cause A Cold?

Your mom probably gave you the warning as a child, and maybe you’ve passed it down to your own kids.

“Don’t go out with wet hair.”

Getting sick after going outside with wet hair can make the warning feel convincing. But a cold that shows up after a rushed morning doesn’t tell you what caused it, and the research gives us little reason to treat a hair dryer as cold prevention.

Here’s the short answer: being cold can’t give you a cold. Only a virus can. 

The real question is whether a chill can make a virus you’ve already picked up more likely to hit you. The best evidence says probably not.

An older experiment explains why the myth sticks around. Researchers had adults sit for 20 minutes with their feet in either cold water or an empty bowl. Over the next 4 to 5 days, 13 of the 90 chilled participants reported a cold, compared with 5 of the 90 who weren’t. That’s about 14 percent versus 6 percent.

But nobody was tested for a virus. Everyone knew whether they’d been chilled, and the study counted self-reported symptoms. It couldn’t show that the cold water caused anything.

An earlier experiment asked the question more directly. 

Researchers intentionally put a cold virus into volunteers’ noses, then chilled some of them. Chilling made no clear difference in who got infected or who got sick.

So why do colds really pile up in winter? Mostly because of how viruses spread. 

We spend more time indoors, close together, sharing air and surfaces. There may be a biological piece too. 

A lab study found that breathing cold air cools the inside of the nose, and in human nasal tissue, that cooling weakened the nose’s first-line defenses against viruses. That’s an interesting clue about winter, not proof that wet hair makes you sick.

That points prevention where it belongs: the virus. To prevent those, your best line of defense is washing your hands frequently, keeping more distance from people, and protecting your sleep. 

When researchers deliberately exposed adults to a cold virus, people sleeping under 6 hours were about 4 times more likely to get sick than those sleeping more than 7.

And if it’s freezing out, wear the hat. But not to avoid a cold. Just because you’ll probably be more comfortable.

And that’s it for this week. Thanks for being a part of the positive corner of the internet. And remember: don’t wait to make a change. Take action on any goal, don’t quit in the hard moments, and the results will come. Have a fantastic weekend!
-Arnold, Adam, and Daniel

The Positive Corner of The Internet
About Arnold’s Pump Club Editorial Standards

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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger​

Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell