Allergic to Anxiety?

When you have allergies, certain foods or times of the year can make you miserable. It isn’t so much the things or the times, but the fact that your body’s immune system overreacts to certain things, and you have a reaction to coming into contact with them.

If you go to an allergy doctor, they can identify your allergic triggers by watching how you react when brought into contact with certain known triggers. Then a strategy is devised, often a mix of medicines that help suppress the body’s immune overreaction coupled with removing the triggers from your environment (or removing yourself from triggering environments where possible).

Anxiety works a lot the same way.

Things trigger your anxiety reaction in a mental cascade effect similar to how the body reacts to allergens. And your strategy for handling it looks very similar as well.

Medications

For example, Xanax is prescribed for many sufferers of anxiety reactions. Xanax has become the mental/emotional equivalent of an allergy patient’s Benadryl. It’s almost a standard for treating mild to moderate cases of anxiety.

Many in the world don’t like the fact that Xanax exists, seeing it as a crutch. However like anything in the world that relieves anything unpleasant, it is not a crutch out of the box but can become one if the person begins to rely on it to escape regularly rather than deal with the things causing the anxious reaction.

There are other, more intense medications for severe anxiety, but they should not be taken lightly or often. Like an allergy patient’s epinephrine injection, these medications act like flipping an electric breaker closed in a house. In an extreme case it is necessary to shut the whole mechanism down to prevent catastrophe. Just as epinephrine can shut down much of the immune reaction process, these medicines can shut down much of the associative reaction process. Good for emergencies, but not to become a common tool.

Get away from them triggers!

If you are allergic to nuts, you learn to read ingredients and avoid nuts.

But if you have environmental allergies, it can be a little trickier.

Let’s say you are allergic to cats. You can find ways to live with it, such as keeping your kitty clean, reducing shed hair all over the house, and so on. But if that doesn’t work, you may have to make a decision: have cats and get used to sneezing, or learn to live without cats.

If you have huge allergy problems with spring, you might have a tough life for part of each year. Pollen from a hundred different sources can help you break world records for sneezing. While certain medicines can help, the strategy tends to be “Stay indoors when possible, and use filtered air conditioning to help alleviate symptoms.”

Environmental triggers are similar with anxiety.

If you are particularly bugged by a co-worker or a classmate, you can try and adjust environmental factors related to that person. Sometimes they are having a tough life themselves, and your unilateral kindness might be just the thing that helps you both. Learning what sets them off can help you mitigate their reactions, which in turn will alleviate yours.

Unfortunately it may be necessary to just stay away from them. Some folks are too toxic when combined with you, and they will never be safe in your world.

Likewise, if the home or workplace is the source of the anxiety, a hundred different triggers might be slamming into you from all directions. In cases like that you may have some hard decisions to make. Moving to another job or home might help, but often we move only to find ourselves besieged again by the same triggers that only look different.

Often it takes the same adjustments we make for allergy season: you can’t entirely avoid the triggers by staying isolated, but you can spend far more time in an “air conditioned environment” by removing as many triggers as possible from the other places you spend time in, or varying the places you spend your other time in.

If your workplace just crushes you with anxiety but you can’t reasonably just quit or change duties, maybe you can employ strategies for making it through so that you can go home and leave that junk behind. You may have to get home and figuratively “decontaminate.”

If home is where the triggers are heaviest, the workplace can become a haven. But rather than try and spend more and more time at work, maybe spending time going for walks, shopping, hobbies, or other diversions can help reduce our contact with our triggers.

De-sensitizing treatment strategy

When you want to really work on overcoming allergies, there are therapies for that, often in the form of allergy shots or other methods.

For example, a shot can be formulated to introduce very small amounts of allergen triggers into your system. This trains the immune system to not totally freak out every time it encounters these things.

The immune system sees the pollen come along one spring and suddenly it’s saying, “Oh, white oak pollen, huh? Yeah, I found out that stuff isn’t as dangerous as I thought.” It reacts less over time until it hardly reacts at all and you stop dreading springtime.

Anxiety triggers can be dealt with the same way. Through mindful acceptance you can co-exist with the triggers by training your mind to have less of a reaction to the stimuli. Small exposures to a trigger can help you see them as being less dangerous as previously thought. Gradually-increased contact with the trigger can help you gauge your reaction improvement.

In the case of both the physical allergy and the mental/emotional anxiety response, we gradually desensitize our systems to the triggers. The less sensitive we are to the things that cause that heartbeat to turn into a gallop or start us sweating even if we aren’t warm, the less anxious our overall lives will be.