Why You Get Sick Every October (And What to Do About It)

You can almost set a calendar by it. Three things converge this month — including a reason traditional Chinese clothing has high collars.

NERVOUS SYSTEM

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10/11/20267 min read

You can probably set a calendar by it. School starts, you make it through September on adrenaline and good intentions, and then somewhere in the second or third week of October your throat starts to feel strange and you spend the next two weeks dragging.

It happens to almost everyone. It happens to me. And it is not a coincidence — there are three specific things converging in October, and Chinese medicine has a name for each of them.

More usefully: it has something to do about each of them.

What is Wei Qi, and why does October test it?

Wei Qi — defensive Qi — is the protective layer of energy that circulates at the surface of the body, between the skin and the muscles. It is Chinese medicine’s understanding of immune function, and it is governed by the Lung and the Metal element.

Wei Qi regulates the pores, controls sweating, warms the body’s surface, and defends against what Chinese medicine calls external pathogenic factors — most importantly, Wind. When Wei Qi is strong, wind passes by. When it is weak, wind carries things through.

October is when three pressures land on that system simultaneously:

1. The season is actively turning.

Hán Lù — Cold Dew — falls around October 8th, and Shuāng Jiàng — Frost’s Descent — around the 23rd. Between those two seasonal nodes, morning dew turns frosty and the air shifts from cool to genuinely cold. Chinese medicine considers seasonal transitions a real physiological demand: the body has to reorganize its temperature regulation, its sleep, its digestion. Transitions are when people get sick.

2. Six weeks of school exposure have accumulated.

The first cold of the season usually arrives in the house in late September. The second one arrives before the first one has resolved. If you are the parent doing the night wakings, you are absorbing the exposure while sleeping the least.

3. Autumn dryness is already taxing the Lung.

Metal governs moisture as well as defense. Dry autumn air — outside, and then indoors once the heat comes on — dries the respiratory tract and makes the Lung’s job harder before any virus arrives.

What is “wind invasion,” and why does the back of the neck matter?

This is one of those pieces of Chinese medicine that sounds like folk superstition until you look at where the points actually are.

Chinese medicine holds that external pathogens enter the body primarily at the back of the neck and upper shoulders. Two points in particular are named for it, and the names are not subtle:

Bladder 12 — Fēng Mén (風門), “Wind Gate”

Just below and beside the prominent vertebra at the base of the neck, between the shoulder blades. The classical entry point for wind-cold.

Gallbladder 20 — Fēng Chí (風池), “Wind Pool”

Higher up, in the two hollows at the base of the skull where the neck muscles attach. If you cup the back of your head in your hands and let your thumbs find the dips beneath the occiput, you have found it. This is where wind is said to pool and accumulate — and it is also where most tension headaches begin.

A gate and a pool. One where wind gets in, one where it collects. Both sit in a region that is thin-skinned, highly vascular, close to major nerve pathways, and directly connected to the muscles that seize when you are cold.

Here is the detail I find most persuasive: traditional Chinese clothing has high collars. Not as ornament. The mandarin collar, the standing collar on a changshan, the high neckline that shows up again and again across centuries of Chinese dress — it covers exactly this territory. A whole culture encoded the instruction into what people wore every day, so that nobody had to remember it.

So whether or not the energetic framing persuades you, the practical instruction that falls out of it is sound: cover the back of your neck when it is cold and windy. A scarf in October is not a fashion decision. It is one of the cheapest preventive interventions available, and people have been doing it deliberately for a very long time.

How do you strengthen Wei Qi before you need it?

Sleep, unglamorously

Wei Qi withdraws inward at night to replenish. Chronically short sleep means chronically underbuilt defenses. Of everything on this list, this is the one with the largest effect and the least appeal.

Warm, cooked food

The Spleen generates the Qi that Wei Qi is made from. Warm cooked food is easy to transform; cold raw food is not. October is the month to put away the smoothies and move to soups, stews, and roasted vegetables.

Astragalus

Huang Qi is the classical Wei Qi tonic — taken through autumn and winter, not at the moment you feel a scratch in your throat. It appears in the formula Yu Ping Feng San, the “Jade Windscreen,” which exists precisely for people who catch everything.

Moxibustion at Stomach 36

There is a long tradition of warming ST 36 — four finger-widths below the kneecap, one finger-width lateral to the shinbone — to build Qi and immunity through the cold months. I teach patients to do this safely at home, and for people who get sick every single winter, it is one of the most valuable things in the toolkit.

Acupuncture as a seasonal transition treatment

One or two sessions as autumn establishes itself does real preventive work: supporting Wei Qi, settling the nervous system, and addressing whatever underlying deficiency is making you the person in the house who always catches it. Here in the Columbia River Valley, October is when my schedule fills with exactly this.

What I reach for when it starts anyway

Prevention is the ideal. But I have spent the past few weeks fighting off one thing after another myself, so let me be practical about the other half of this.

NAC, for the Lung and the Kidney

N-acetylcysteine is a supplement most people encounter as a mucolytic — it thins mucus, which is why it has been used in respiratory medicine for decades. It was recommended to me by naturopathic physician Dr. Michael Smith and it has made a real difference for me this season when I've had a thick phlegmy cough.

I will tell you my own experience plainly: about fifteen minutes after taking it, my cough fades or disappears entirely, and I feel noticeably better. That is one person’s report, not a clinical trial. But it has been consistent enough that it now lives in my cabinet and I’m taking it regularly when I feel phlegm thickening and building up.

What interests me from a Chinese medicine perspective is where it seems to act. NAC supports the Lung directly — loosening and moving phlegm, which is precisely what a Lung struggling with Damp or Phlegm needs. But it also supports the body’s production of glutathione, which is bound up with the deeper constitutional reserves that Chinese medicine attributes to the Kidney. The Lung governs Qi; the Kidney grasps it. A remedy that touches both is working along the same axis Chinese medicine has described for two thousand years.

It is inexpensive and widely available. As with anything, check with your own provider first — particularly if you take nitroglycerin, are on blood thinners, or tend to have a dry constitution.

Gui Zhi Tang, at the very first sign

This is the one I would most like you to know about, because the window for it is narrow and most people miss it.

Gui Zhi Tang — Cinnamon Twig Decoction — comes from the Shāng Hán Lùn, the Treatise on Cold Damage, written roughly eighteen hundred years ago and still one of the most-used clinical texts in Chinese medicine. It is for the very onset of a wind-cold invasion: when you feel cold and cannot warm up, when you are sneezing, when the congestion is clear and watery rather than thick and colored, when chills run up your back and you know something is coming.

Taken in that window, it can genuinely stop a cold before it establishes itself.

The classical instruction is as important as the formula. The Shāng Hán Lùn says to take it warm, then bundle up — blankets, layers, warmth — and allow a light sweat to break. Not a drenching sweat. Just enough to move the pathogen back out through the surface it came in through. Then rest.

It also happens to taste good, which is not something one can say about most Chinese herbal formulas. It is cinnamon-forward, warming, faintly sweet. My patients are usually surprised.

An important caveat, because pattern matters.

Gui Zhi Tang is for wind-cold. If your cold presents with a sore throat, thirst, yellow or green phlegm, or a feeling of being overheated rather than chilled, that is wind-heat — a different pattern entirely, requiring a different formula. Taking a warming formula for a heat pattern can make things worse.

This is the whole reason Chinese herbal medicine is prescribed rather than picked off a shelf. If you are not sure which you have, ask me — it takes about two minutes to sort out. I keep Gui Zhi Tang stocked in the clinic here in St. Helens, and I would rather hand you the right thing than have you guess.

And if you are already properly sick as you read this — come in anyway. Chinese medicine treats acute illness well, particularly in the first day or two, and it can meaningfully shorten how long you are down.

Get ahead of it this year.

I see patients at Well Within in St. Helens, OR. Autumn transition treatments are some of the most valuable preventive care available — and October is the month for them.

Book your first visit at sashadewsnup.com.

Helping you to heal. — Sasha

RESOURCES

Immune Support for Autumn

Wei Qi Tonics

Astragalus (Huang Qi) — the classical autumn immune tonic
Elderberry syrup — for the whole household
Vitamin D3 — essential as Pacific Northwest daylight drops
Moxibustion sticks for home ST 36 practice (ask me for instruction first)
Gui Zhi Tang (Cinnamon Twig Decoction) — available in my clinic. Because the right formula depends on your pattern, I stock this rather than linking it. Message me at the first sign of a cold and I can get it to you the same week.

Practical Prevention

Lightweight scarf — covering the Wind Gate is genuinely preventive
Slow cooker — warm food with minimal evening effort
Cool mist humidifier — counters the dryness that taxes the Lung

Reading

Between Heaven and Earth by Harriet Beinfield — accessible Chinese medicine for the lay reader
The Tao of Nutrition by Maoshing Ni — dietary therapy by season

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