Mastering proper hygiene is an important skill.
Being a thorough hand cleaner has always been my habit, even prior to the widespread awareness brought about by the COVID-19 outbreak. Your hands, being your primary mode of connection with both yourself and the external environment, provide a strong rationale for maintaining consistent cleanliness—it’s a good idea to keep them sanitized, pandemic or no pandemic. However, hand washing entails more than simply rinsing them under a stream of water.
To begin with, even before initiating the actual washing process, it’s crucial to lather up using a premium antibacterial soap. Fortunately, the availability of hand soap is no longer as limited as it was at the peak of the pandemic, so you can easily procure a couple of bottles of the standard variety at your neighborhood grocery store or drugstore. Just remember to replenish your supply promptly once it’s depleted, and avoid resorting to the unwise act of diluting water in an empty soap container as a substitute. Water can never replace soap, no matter how much you convince yourself.
Once your hands are thoroughly lathered, it’s essential to engage in a comprehensive scrubbing routine that covers all major surfaces of both hands. This includes the palms, the backs of the hands, spaces between fingers, back of fingers, thumbs, fingertips, and wrists. A total duration of about 20 seconds should be allocated for this process; if you need a handy method to keep track, consider singing the happy birthday song twice. On a personal note, I prefer singing the initial verse of Queen’s “Killer Queen” to inject some fun into the routine.
I make it a point to cleanse my hands every time I return home from an outing, in addition to before and after meal preparation, handling trash, and naturally, after using the restroom. Hopefully, you also upheld the practice of washing your hands post restroom visits long before the pandemic took hold.
