Your body’s journey during sickness

There is this belief that getting through a sickness makes you stronger. It seems sensible because we have all been through it . So what happens when we get sick?

When you think of yourself as a country with an army to protect it, you're familiar with the danger of enemies trying to take your land, energy, and resources. This is a matter of life and death, so your body has evolved to be sensitive to potential damage and to the presence of enemies. This means that an invasion could happen at any moment and you have to act fast.

When something changes in your cells, they release an onslaught of signal proteins called cytokines. They are like air raid sirens that activate all sorts of immune cells, which then themselves release many more cytokines, amplifying the alarm. Soon your brain activates sickness behavior and reorganizes your body's priorities to defense. The more signals you receive, the faster mobilization happens.

The first thing you notice is that your energy levels drop and you become sleepy. All of this serves to save your energy and reroute it into your immune response. You become a country under attack, switching into a war economy, because properly activating your defenses saves your energy and helps keep you healthy.

Your immune system is intensely disruptive and demanding. Just like war is expensive for a country as its industry switches to building tanks, your immune system demands huge amounts of energy, amino acids and micro elements to build its weapons. Take fever: it speeds up your metabolism and makes your cells work harder and faster, while creating heat that is pretty stressful for many invaders – but it uses up a lot of calories to maintain. Then your immune system begins to clone millions of specialized immune cells to respond specifically to the enemy infecting you. B Cells produce millions of antibodies every second, each requiring hundreds of amino acids to construct. Billions or even trillions of proteins need to be made to refresh the complement system, a minefield inside your blood. Cytokines, the mobilization and information signals, also need constant refreshing.

Your body slows down the digestion process when you're sick, since your energy is limited. This may lead to the breakdown of muscle tissue, since it has easier access to amino acids than usual. If you're young and healthy, you'll make up for any losses quickly once you get better. But if you're old or very young, weak or have an illness, this process may be too draining. Your body's main response to sickness is to consume itself in order to keep your immune system functioning. Your immune system can be just as harmful to yourself as it is to enemies. There is a delicate balance between the damage caused by an infection and the collateral damage caused by immune cells - one of your first responders are neutrophils, which are like crazy aggressive chimps with machine guns.

Healthy organs usually perform their normal functions without affecting a person's quality of life. However, when a person becomes ill, their organs may suffer small but permanent damage. This damage can be caused by chemicals released by invading microorganisms or cell death. Fortunately, the body's immune system is able to take care of most of this damage, and re growing cells help heals the holes left by invaders. However, some damage is permanent; scars are a good example. Scar tissue has no functioning cells in it and cannot do what the original tissue was doing. These scars can be seen on our skin and may affect how our organs function.

There's something you can do to train your immune system, and the best way to do it is by hacking one of its best features. Getting sick is always a gamble with your health on the line, but there's something you can do to make sure you have a better chance of beating any infection. You can't predict where on the spectrum your immune system will be, but that doesn't mean you can't make it stronger.

When you fight a disease, your body has strong defenses against it the next time it comes along. You either don't get the disease again or it is much milder the next time.

Vaccines are an incredible achievement of human ingenuity; they pretend to be a certain disease and train your defenses to be ready if it ever shows up for real. They are designed to create the same memory cells that you would get after surviving an infection.

But, there are side effects when you take vaccines . Sometimes after a vaccine you get sick for a few days, but that's generally it. No scars, no permanent damage.

On the other hand, getting a disease to become immune means going to a nature dojo. In nature dojo, you train with actual weapons - sharp knives and swords - which can be more risky. However, the immunity you get from a vaccine is often better than the natural resistance, because they are engineered to engage your immune system in more productive way.