I have been suffering from the seasonal allergy for the past fifteen years. I had no allergy before that. Though it had been bothering me for quite a while, I start to get along with it and tame the beast to its minimum impact towards my daily activity. Let me share some intersting discovery with you.
Immune system
The allergy doesn’t affect everyone; so it only picks the person who has an “agitatable” immune system. This means most of time, if the body feels there’s a threat, it’ll act upon it so that we experience many symptoms similar to being sick (or under attack).
The reason why the immune system is hard to work with is that it doesn’t have an apparent reasoning/feedback system. There’s no easy way for us to tell the immune system to stop working as what it’s supposed to do. Besides we still rely on it to be functional for real sickness, so we can’t eradicate it.
Discovery
As I grow older, it happens that I notice my symptoms aren’t as severe as used to be, although sometimes it still could be bad. But overall it’s quite noticeable I had it under control comparing to the old time.
So it gave me a chance to look at this problem from a different angle. There might be a way to work with my problem in an indirect way.
The main difference over the years are
a) As my family gets stable, I have less things to worry. Also I tried to put things in wider perspective, so in general things that get me irritated are not getting in my mood that easily.
b) My personalities changes as well. I start to fight less with people, matters that I use to heavily fight with. Things are not worth to fight comparing to used to be. Maybe I’m getting older, and I care about things relative more evenly.
Don’t get me wrong, the allergy does get triggered by some physical matters, such as pollen etc., but it also matters whether the body acts upon them. My life change does contribute to the less occurrence as well as the severity of each occurrence.
Mind and body connection
So here comes what I believe is the workaround for the allergy. In someway, for the allergy case, we need to tell the body this is not a real threat so that it can keep functional the normal way.
How? You might ask. I understand this is the hard part. Because if I literally say it to the body, will it listen to me? That’s a million dollar question. Maybe it will, I don’t know.
The reason I don’t know is that, everyone is different. And in different stage of your life, what you fear is also different. But the good news is, as you grow older, it might get easier to figure out what you really like everyday.
Easy to say for me. Right! I can give you a hint. When you are under the attack of the allergy, what will you do? You suffer, for sure, but what else? Because you suffer, you might cancel trips of going outside, you might avoid seeing people. These are big things, what about small things, you might change all the habitual stuff that you normally do. For instance, you just start to carry a notion that you are suffering and you can’t do certain stuff as used to.
This is not good. By doing the above, you are literally reinforcing the body’s reaction to the incidence. Basically you confirms the issue and aligns with all your future direction with the body. You literally chickened out.
The problem of doing above is that you don’t even give yourself a period of time to justify whether the body is right or not. Suppose it’s wrong, the decision the body makes for you should not be considered. You can still be aware of the signal body tells you. But that doesn’t mean things has to make a 180 degree turn. Because literally nothing needs to happen.
This is not the end. To counter the “wrong” signal, you have to for the time being, adds an artificial signal to tell the body to continue performing as used to be, maybe a bit stronger magnitude so to counteract. Because there must be some dissipation loss in these message battle.
Summary
I know what I provide here as a solution might sound like a fairy tale to some of us. All in all, allergy itself is pretty magical, no one really understand the core of it. The good news is that remember, allergy want you to do something. If you disagree with it, there could be a cure right there.
