How To Maintain Proper Hygiene?

Maintaining proper hygiene is key to lead a healthy life. If you have poor hygiene, then it can cause many problems like body odour and dental problems. Read here about how poor hygiene can affect your health.

You can divide the hygiene maintenance into two levels which are personal hygiene and environmental or surrounding hygiene.

Read on for understanding how both differ from each other and how can you maintain hygiene to lead a healthy life.

Personal Hygiene

As the name suggests, personal hygiene is all about caring for your own body. Wherever you go, you come in contact with millions of germs and viruses. Some of these viruses can linger on in your body and do no harm. And others like the SARS-CoV-2 can cause a pandemic killing millions.

Developing basic personal hygiene habits can help you and the people around you in preventing any illness. To develop personal hygiene habits, first, you need to understand the types of personal hygiene practices and ways you can maintain them.

Maintaining Personal Hygiene

Your ideas for personal hygiene might differ from mine, but these basic ideas can be a good start for developing hygiene habits.

Shower/Bathing

You should take a bath or shower at least once a day. Showering with soap will help clean all the sweat, dead skin cells, bacteria, and oils. You should also wash your hair twice a week to prevent any dead skin build-up and protect against any infections.

Oral

Dental or oral hygiene is more than just white teeth. You must take care of your teeth and gums to prevent any sorts of gum diseases or cavities. You should brush at least two times a day once after waking up and second before going to bed. If you can brush after every meal, it is better.

Hands And Nails

You touch your hands in many places from where you can pick up germs, viruses, or bacteria. That can enter your body through the mouth, nose, or eyes. To avoid catching the flu in such conditions, frequently wash your hands. Make it a habit to wash hands before touching food items, before you eat, after you sneeze, after going to the washroom, or after you touch an animal.

Make it a habit to wash your hands frequently. Whenever you wash your hands, scrub them with soap for at least 30 seconds. Make sure to clean between fingers, on the back of your hands, and under your nails. In case you don’t have access to water you can use alcohol-based hand sanitizers.

You should keep your nails short and clean by trimming them regularly. If possible, regularly clean your nails, which will help you in preventing germs from entering your body. You should also avoid biting nails.

Environmental Hygiene

The environment is not limited to natural surroundings but also includes your house, modes of transports, your electronic devices. Maintaining hygiene of all these things can help in avoiding the outbreak of any sort of disease. The environment hygiene can be further divided into household hygiene and community level hygiene.

Household hygiene can include maintaining proper hygiene at the house level by proper cleaning of floors, toilets, and frequently used areas.

Community-level hygiene can include clean roads, proper working drain, no garbage dumps or standing water. Carelessness on these parts at the community level can lead to disease outbreaks.

Maintaining Environmental Hygiene

You might think that it is easier said than done, especially in the case of maintaining environmental hygiene. Here I am providing you with tips regarding how to maintain proper environmental hygiene.

Getting started with household hygiene.

Proper Ventilation At Your Home

Proper ventilation can ensure that air in the house keeps on changing. Any toxins present in the air get cleaned with the air and you breathe clean natural air. The flow of fresh air into your house makes sure that the air you are breathing is free from germs, viruses, and bacteria.

Proper Lighting

A house with proper natural lighting helps in keeping the house neat and clean. Poor lighting can also make your eyesight suffer. The sunlight helps in kills many germs and the heat from the sunlight helps in keeping the humidity in the house under control.  

Keeping It Clean

You should regularly clean your house to prevent any dust from getting deposited. You must properly clean the place where you cook and eat food. By properly disposing of the food waste, you can ensure that you are not getting unnecessary flies and mosquitos in your house.

Moving on to community level hygiene.

Make Sure Your Surroundings Are Open Defecation Free

Open defecation major reason behind disease outbreaks like diarrhea and polio. That can absolutely be prevented by building public toilets with help of the local community.

Creating Awareness In Your Community

You should work along with your community to create awareness about hygiene practices. And how to keep yourself and your surroundings hygienic and free from disease outbreaks.

Conclusion

Hygiene got all new meaning in the covid pandemic period, everyone is trying to stay hygienic to avoid getting the disease. Maintain hygiene at a personal level is not a laborious task. You can achieve it easily by building up certain habits in your daily routine.

While developing a community level, hygiene is a tedious task as it needs the involvement of the local community and local governments.

If you have more ideas about maintaining hygiene, comment below and share it with us.