Should you blow your nose? What is the alternative? Gross? Yup, but good info nonetheless.
Unless you are a small child, letting snot run down your face isn’t an option. But what if blowing your nose was bad for you or even dangerous? What to do? Uuuuggghhh.
But resent research is pointing to evidence that blowing away your boogers isn’t helpful. When you blow your nose hard, some of your mucus actually flies back into your sinuses, causing problems and exposing you to more bacteria and worsening health.
The thing about stuffy noses is they’re rarely stuffed with snot. If cold, flu, or allergies have you feeling congested, chances are your nose is blocked up not with mucus, but with swollen blood vessels. The case against blowing one’s nose – by which we mean the good, hard, blast that one unleashes when one means serious business – is two fold: First, it generates a lot of pressure in one’s nasal cavity. Second, that pressure can trigger a kind of otolaryngological blowback, blasting dollops of mucus not out the nose, but backwards and into the sinuses.
So are we supposed to, ew, swallow? Well, that is up to you. Best practice however for obvious reasons, is to blow gently.
