Stress doesn’t cause allergies, but easing your mind might mean less allergy flare-ups this spring. Allergy sufferers with persistent stress experience more allergy flares.
“Stress can cause several negative effects on the body, including causing more symptoms for allergy sufferers,” said lead study author. “Our study also found those with more frequent allergy flares also have a greater negative mood, which may be leading to these flares.”
Researchers from The Ohio State University analyzed 179 patients for 12 weeks. Thirty-nine percent had more than one allergy flare. This group had higher stress than the group without allergy symptoms. Of this group, 64 percent had more than four flares over two, 14 day periods.
While there were no significant findings between allergy flares and stress on the same day, a number of sufferers reported allergy flares within days of increased daily stress.
“While alleviating stress won’t cure allergies, it may help decrease episodes of intense symptoms.”
Allergy sufferers can help alleviate stress by:
• Meditating and breathing deeply
• Reducing things that may be responsible for stress and learning how to cope better (i.e. not turning to smoking or caffeine which can do more damage than good)
• Asking for help whether from a social worker, family member or colleague
• Making time for fun and relaxation
• Adopting a healthy lifestyle by eating right, getting enough sleep and taking care of health conditions
-Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology,
Dr. Keith & Laurie Nemec’s comments on Avoid Allergies Avoid Stress:
What is an allergy? It is a hyperimmune response to an environmental stimulus. In essence your body over reacts to something in the environment whether it is a spore, pollen, mold, dust or a food. Why do allergies occur? Because the immune system has been thrown out of balance, being stuck in the hyer reactive mode. If this is not healed then the immune system will continue to over react and produce autoimmune disease which includes: rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Grave’s disease, Crohns, hepatitis, nephritis, vitiligo, alopecia and Menieres.
What causes the immune system to go out of balance in the first place? One of the systems starts to become over stressed and it leads to compensations in all the other systems. For example if you eat food that you are reactive to but don’t know it then a condition called Leaky Gut developes. This causes large food particles to enter the blood where the immune system sees them as foreign invaders so it attacks them and sprays inflammatory chemicals to kill and digest the food particles. This causes your immune system to get over stressed because now it is not only handling the bacteria, viruses, parasites, yeast, fungi and cancer cell formation that is part of its daily routine but now you just added a tremendous work load to digest your breakfast, lunch and dinner. So what happens is eventually the immune system becomes hyer reactive and this shows up as allergies or autoimmune disease.
What is the answer? It stated it in the last sentence in the research article “Adopting a healthy lifestyle by eating right, getting enough sleep and taking care of health conditions”.
This is what we call the The Seven Basic Steps to Total Health
Don’t ever think about how do cure a symptom, condition or disease but instead only think about how to be all that God created you to be in body, mind and spirit. This is what we call Total Health.
