What Immune Resilience Actually Means & Why Our Health Depends On It

This is one of those moments. We have a chance right now to harness the fear and uncertainty of this ongoing pandemic to get smarter about immunity. We have a chance to increase immune resilience at a global level and build a better future for ourselves as a species.

A few months back, I wrote about the new thinking in the scientific community about rejuvenating the immune system. COVID-19 brings immunity front of mind for most people. But simple "boosts" to your immune system are an inelegant and inadequate approach to lasting immune health.

Your immune system is one of the primary interfaces you have between the interior world of your body and the exterior world of your society and planet. Immunity translates signals. When it senses danger, it ramps up. It activates. Sometimes it misreads the signals and stays overreactive in a chronic state of alarm that can lead to inflammation and a basket of metabolic diseases we know all too well, like heart disease, diabetes, and a wide range of autoimmune conditions. That chronic inflammation also lives upstream from so many functional detractors from our best lives, like joint pain, aggravating skin conditions, poor sleep, and a lack of energy and vitality.

Sometimes your immune system goes dormant. It gets shy and suppresses itself. This is just as big a problem, with immunosuppression preventing us from effectively fighting off infection and clearing our cells of the debris they accumulate as we age.

This thinking around resilience and balance works for the planet, too. Most of us would admit to some sense that things are increasingly out of whack in the world. It's hot, the weather's extreme, human health is too frail, and the conditions for exogenous shocks like COVID-19 are too ripe to bring us the safe footing we need to live full and abundant lives.

At the onset of the pandemic, when China was first to quarantine and we saw the pollution clouds over Wuhan dissipate, I saw resilience at work. I saw a planet's immune system beginning to heal itself. I saw systems of co-immunity between people, plants, and planet expressing the reality of their deep interconnectedness.

To repeat—your immune health depends on the planet's immune health. When both get healthier, there is abundance and plenty of reserves left in the tank to handle the wild cards to come. When either gets stuck in cycles of degradation and inflammation, then we all stay stuck as a species. We live a trapped life. We live with a pandemic inside a pandemic.

My wish is to educate us all enough so that we're looking for the right solutions coming out of this particular pandemic, but there are specifics on my radar as well. I hesitate to say it because the answers are often so obvious, but these are still ready solutions for the taking: healthy diet, healthy sleep, exercise, social connection, love, and empathy. If we all commit to these basics, then we can begin to optimize our personal and global immunity.