How To Avoid Touching Your Face
As medical professionals, the team at Comprehensive Cancer Centers understands that one of the best precautions to slow the spread of COVID-19 is to avoid touching your face, especially your eyes and nose. Keeping from touching your face lowers your personal risk of contracting, or potentially spreading the virus.
While the advice to not touch your face is simple, touching our faces and eyes are subconscious habits that are challenging to break. These simple acts are the result of patterns that have been built over years and are not easily broken. With that in mind, we offer a few tips on how to make using your hands something you notice more, to help you work towards touching your face and your eyes less frequently.
Ways to Stop Touching Your Face
Stay Eye-Dropped/Moisturized/Lip Balmed/Glossed – A key trigger for touching your eyes, face or lips are dryness or irritation. Stay ahead of the dryness by using eye drops, facial moisturizer and lip balm/gloss regularly. Always apply after you’ve thoroughly washed your hands. And remember to reapply during the warmer months when eyes, skin and lips can dry out quickly. Staying hydrated is also important to prevent dryness, so drink plenty of water.
Wear Your Glasses – If you wear contact lenses, and own a pair of glasses, it’s a good idea to wear your glasses more often. With contacts, irritants often get in eyes, and rubbing edges and corners of the eyes to alleviate irritation can be dangerous. With the allergy season now upon us in Southern Nevada, and ramping up with every new blossom, irritants in the air and in our eyes are only going to increase. It’s also more difficult to get to the eyes when you have to get through your glasses, which is an added benefit of wearing glasses rather than contacts. Again, if you prefer to wear your contacts, be sure to wash your hands thoroughly before taking the lenses in and out of your eyes.
Wear Your Sunglasses – As the sun comes up earlier in the morning and goes down later at night, make sure to wear sunglasses when outdoors. This will prevent you from rubbing your eyes when faced with sudden bright light exposure from the sun, forming another barrier between your eyes and your hands. As with regular prescription glasses, make sure to keep your sunglasses clean and wash them even more regularly than you did before.
Give Your Hands Some Work – While relaxing at home, you can do simple things such as bridge your hands together, or twiddle your thumbs, to shift focus on your hands, where they are and what they’re doing. You can also get a (clean and unshared) tennis ball and rotate it in your hands or pass it from hand to hand. The idea here is to keep your hands busy and below your face, while building habits of keeping them away from your face and eyes.
Skip the Makeup – While staying at home, or behind a mask, give your skin a rest and take some time off from make up. While this not always is possible, if you’re out at work, you can always give yourself the weekend off. Take a break from makeup will help your skin stay cleaner and even less irritated, while also preventing the need from touching up makeup, hence your skin, eyes or nose.
Comprehensive Reminds You to Keep Your Hands Clean
As you keep your hands away from your face and your eyes, it’s important to keep them clean by washing them regularly. While the onset of COVID-19 has made people more aware of the benefits of regularly washing your hands, it’s still a habit that is a benefit every day. A good way of doing that is by setting alerts on your phone, with each hour a good start that pings you and reminds you to watch your hands on a regular basis. Wash your hands for at least 20 seconds with soap and water.
As per health experts from the CDC and locally at the Southern Nevada Health District, the Comprehensive team urges you to practice social distancing (stay six feet away from other people), stay home whenever your can, cover your coughs and sneezes with the inside corner of your elbow and be as safe as possible in all circumstances.
Comprehensive Cancer Centers Can Help
The physicians at Comprehensive Cancer Centers provide a variety of treatment options for cancer, blood disorders, breast health conditions, lung diseases and sleep disorders. you or a loved one has been diagnosed with cancer or a pulmonary disease, call 702-952-3350 to schedule an appointment today. Comprehensive is also now offering telemedicine (LINK 3).
The content is this post is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.
