Allergy Anxiety and Why it Needs a Different Approach

What is allergy anxiety?

Allergy anxiety is the anxiety that comes from living with the often invisible, but daily reality of allergies.

It’s carried around all day every day, often consuming every decision.

It’s worrying about all possible scenarios, leading you to thinking through every possible outcome and planning for all of these.

It’s being on constant alert, scanning the environment for potential dangers and scanning your body for any sign or symptom that you could be having an allergic reaction.

It’s living in fear and never feeling able to relax. It’s avoiding situations because they don’t feel safe and having to say no to so many things, many not because you need to, but ‘just in case’.

What’s even more heart-breaking is that when people reach out for support from a GP or health care professional they’re either dismissed or told their anxiety is normal and to be expected because of allergies.

So, you’re living with this, you’ve reached out, sat on a waiting list and finally getting some support, only to then find that generic models of therapy are applied which do not give any consideration to the reality of allergies.

I’ve heard some absolute horror stories in my time for clients who have unfortunately been left in worse situations following therapy. The number of times I’ve been told that they were advised to buy their allergen and sit in a room with it whilst they watch their therapist eat the food that they are allergic to, in order to “face the fear”. Honestly, this is so unethical and shows a complete misunderstanding of allergies; trust me when I say we do not have to do this in order to manage your allergy anxiety.

Why traditional anxiety therapy won’t always work

So, here’s why these approaches won’t work.

1. You’re living with a real danger. Traditional therapy goes by an assumption that fears are irrational, and we therefore need to re-condition our brain that our believes are not true. However, in allergies, because this is true, we must acknowledge this reality and this truth.
2. Traditional therapy is focused on exposure to the thing causing fear. There is good rationale for this anxiety, because if we can learn to be around the thing we fear, we learn it’s not dangerous, however if an allergen is the fear, then we absolutely should not be doing exposure to something that is harmful.
3. Symptoms of anxiety have a huge overlap with symptoms of a reaction. This often needs careful unpicking from someone with experience of allergy, because you need to feel confident in identifying symptoms of an allergic reaction. We also need to understand that anxiety can make allergy symptoms worse.

Why we need a unique method for allergy anxiety

So, we’ve established that allergy anxiety is different and therefore the standard anxiety therapy and protocols and understanding don’t work for allergy anxiety.

Now this is not to say many parts of the therapy models we have available don’t work, but the approach certainly needs adapting and tailoring.

But when I first started working in the allergy space, there were no protocols for how to work to allergy anxiety. So that’s exactly why I created my own method, based on existing evidence based approaches such as CBT, ACT and narrative therapies, but tweaked to account for the differences of allergy anxiety.

We are not aiming to get rid of allergy anxiety

The truth is there is no magic off switch to anxiety. Fear is an inbuilt mechanism for survival.

Imagine a smoke alarm; it’s on the ceiling and most of the time we don’t notice it but it’s always got a watchful eye over the room and in the event of any smoke or fire it will kick into action. We don’t want to disconnect this alarm, otherwise it wouldn’t work when we need it, however we need it to only work when there is a fire or possible fire, because if it kept going off and giving false alarms, we’d get annoyed and soon learn not to trust it.

This is the same for allergy anxiety. We need it to be there, keeping a watchful eye and be ready to respond when needed. But it does not need to be as reactive as it certainly shouldn’t be getting in the way of living life.

How do we do this?

In The Allergy Anxiety Method ®, which is my signature approach and unique method for supporting allergy anxiety, we firstly scrap the idea that we need to convince your brain it’s not in danger.

This can sound harsh, but it’s the truth and there’s no point beating around the bush and being disingenuous to ourselves.

Instead, we learn about the position that I call “Safe Enough” (you can read more about that here), which is acknowledging there are always some risks, which we have to manage proactively, but we have to do this alongside tolerating some uncertainty within “safe enough parameters”.

Next, we need to understand what are behaviours which are actually necessary for keeping us safe, and what are safety behaviours which are the unhelpful behaviours that we do because they make us feel safer, and more in control, but actually perpetuate the anxiety cycle.

Whilst acknowledging the risk, we then become aware of any unhelpful interpretations and patterns that have developed with the intention of keeping us safe, but which over time have become biases. In addition, we learn a toolbox of evidence based strategies which stop the spiral of thoughts, and help the body come out of a threat state, thus short-circuiting anxiety before it escalates.

Alongside this we look at any narratives that are keeping the body on alert and start to re-write a different story about the ability to cope with allergies.

These strategies underpin my exact method of supporting allergy anxiety.

The good news is you don’t need to have 1:1 therapy sessions to learn about it. The Allergy Anxiety Method ® has been made into a mini course which guides you through the pillars of managing anxiety, giving you all the tools and strategies to help you turn down the dial of allergy anxiety.