i wish i knew about neti pots years ago

The older I get, the more I learn about stuff.

It didn't take long after 2025 began before I got my first cold of the year, and I have a standard list of things I do to make dealing with that easier. This is stuff I wish I knew when I was younger, but better late than never.

A neti pot is pretty much the only thing that will clear out numbness from my head due to a cold.

In the way my body works, when my sinus gets blocked up from a cold, the blockage favors the left side on my face. Ever since I was a kid, I've always been this way. This means I will sometimes feel numbness on the left side of my face when sick. This also sometimes means the numbness can be even worse after sleep since my face doesn't point straight up while sleeping.

Important note: This numbness I'm describing is absolutely not stroke. Some people get numbness on one side of the face and immediately think uh oh, stroke, then panic. That's not what this is. What I'm describing is a light numbness due to the sinus acting up from a seasonal cold. No loss of motor control, no speech problems, no blurred vision, none of that. Maybe a light dizziness if anything and that's pretty much it.

A neti pot is, in my experience, a very good way to get the sinus back in check.

The way I do the neti pot thing is like this:

1. Fill the little pot up to the fill line (it will be marked) with cold distilled water
2. Dump that into a clean coffee mug
3. Mix in 1 teaspoon salt
4. Heat that in the microwave for 30 seconds
5. Dump that back into the neti pot
6. Use the pot. Water goes up the nose and drained out.

I do this twice in a row, one time for each nostril.

Does this completely clear out the numbness? No, because that takes time since it's not instant. But it does noticeably bring down the numbness in a way I can feel.

The other thing I do is keep the ears clear. What I'm about to describe is very atypical of how most people clear ears, but this works for me.

All I use to keep the ears clear is warm water, applied with an eye dropper. Run some warm water in the sink, fill the eye dropper, tilt the head, place eye dropper up to the ear, gently squirt water in ear canal, then listen. If the water gets in the ear canal easily, I tilt the head the other way and drain the water out. If the water doesn't move down the canal like it's supposed to, I'll keep draining and adding water again until I hear some movement. What's happening here is that if there's a blockage, it takes a few rounds of warm-to-lightly-hot water before the blockage starts to break up. When it does and I hear the water moving in the ear canal, then I know I'm done.

What I used to do before this was the hydrogen peroxide method. This is where you fill an eye dropper with hydrogen peroxide, lay on your side, fill the ear canal with the peroxide, then wait 5 minutes. During this time, the peroxide does its bubbling thing, which you can hear easily. After that 5 minutes, turn over on to a towel and let the ear drain for another 5 minutes, then fill the other ear and repeat.

I get better results from the warm-to-hot water thing for my ears.

Aside from that, I get a big ol' bag of sugar free cough drops and pop one every so often. This helps. It's basically just sugar-free candy with menthol in it for that "icy" effect that helps with keeping the nasal passages clear.

And last but not least is NyQuil Cold & Flu. I use the old school red colored kind, meaning not the one labeled "SEVERE", not the honey one, not VapoCOOL, and not the other colors. I use the one that's been around for decades, take it once daily before bed, and only when I have a cold.

I'm not saying what I just described above is the guaranteed way to fight a cold, but it works for me.

Published 2025 Jan 7