Lightening The Load: 10 Ways To Reduce Your Allergic Burden Today

What is allergic burden?

The question that you might be wondering right now is, ‘What is Allergic burden?’ Well, like many things in life, your immune system has a total capacity of things it is equipped to handle at any given time. Now, picture a bucket. That bucket represents the TOTAL amount of what your immune system can handle. Everything that goes into that bucket fills it up like water. Pollen, drip, dust, drip, germs, drip, virus’s, drip, stress, drip, fragrances, drip, so on and so forth. Once that bucket gets full, it’s over. Your immune system can’t handle anymore and it overflows. That’s when you see symptoms flare up. Sneezing, coughing, wheezing, sinus drainage, rash, hives, itching, itchy eyes, swollen tongue, the list goes on and on. Allergic burden is everything that goes into the bucket faster than you can empty it, everything that causes it to fill and to overflow. So, what I want to talk about today is what you can do to slow the flow of what’s filling up your bucket.

Reducing the flow

By slowing the flow into your bucket, it will help reduce the risk of the bucket overflowing. Below is a list of 10 things that I have found help reduce my allergic burden and help mitigate how severe my symptoms are and how long they last. I hope that you will find some help and relief as you also seek to reduce your allergic burden.

1. A Homecoming Cleanse: During the day when we are at work or running errands or whatever the case may be we are constantly encountering what is essentially ‘mini eco systems’ everywhere we go. And little bits of those eco systems stick attach themselves to us. An example of this would be like if you went to somewhere like Bath & Body Works wearing a jacket. The next time you put that jacket on, if you haven’t washed it, you are going to notice a variety of smells that could only have come from Bath & Body Works. That store has a very potent aroma that can be smelled before you even open the door. The smells that you notice on the clothes are little microscopic Atmospheric Hitchhikers that have attached themselves to you and everything on you. A Homecoming Cleanse is basically a fancy way of saying, when you get home, take a shower. Wash off all of those little Atmospheric Hitchhikers and potential surface allergens that are clinging to your skin.
2. Fresh Threads: After showering put on fresh clothes that aren’t carrying other people’s or places Micro Ecosystems on them.
3. Oral Reset: This follows up right on the tail of a Homecoming Cleanse. After you get done showering, brush your teeth, your tongue, your gums, to remove the Atmospheric Hitchhikers that are now hanging out in your mouth. Follow up the brushing with a rinse.
4. Your Toothbrush: Change out your toothbrush with greater than ‘recommended’ frequency. Say, instead of changing your toothbrush out every three months, consider changing it out every month to 6 weeks. That way an build up of Atmospheric Hitchhikers doesn’t begin to cause more problems than it’s solving.
5. Nasal Flush: Use some kind of saline rinse or Neti pot (with distilled water) to rinse out your sinus passages, clearing out some of these Atmospheric Hitchhikers. Do this when you get home, or after cleaning or anything that just stirs up a lot of allergens and irritants.
6. Wash Coats & Jackets Regularly: A lot of times we don’t necessarily think of our coats or jackets needing to be washed on the same kind of schedule as our regular clothes. But when you are dealing with a lot of allergies, reactive asthma or type 2 inflammatory disease, you are dealing with a body that already thinks that you are operating from a mostly full immune bucket. Anything that we can do to slow the flow will help keep our buckets from overflowing. Personally, I wash my coats or jackets after every few times of wearing them on average. However, knowing my own body, my own allergies, my own reactions, I will wash them sometimes after a single use if for example, I know that I have been exposed to cat dander, or if I was somewhere that looked or smelled visibly dirty or dusty. By being aware of the environments that you encounter and being hyper vigilant about the things you know set off your body, you can help to reduce your allergic burden.
7. Change Bedding Regularly: Personally, I wash my sheets every week and the blankets on the bed every other week. This helps to reduce the allergens and irritants that live in my own house. Most of us spend nearly a third of our time in our beds. That means that we need to put in a little extra time to keep that space as free from irritants as we can.
8. Use Free and Clear Laundry Detergents: Even if you don’t think that you are ‘allergic’ to fragrances, they are still one more thing potentially adding drops to your bucket. Any extra chemicals or fragrances can make it more difficult to recover from allergic meltdowns. Personally I use ALL Free & Clear but I have heard good things about other options like Seventh Generations Free & Clear laundry soap.
9. Get a Quality Air Purifier: Or possibly more than one. I have five. Three downstairs and two upstairs. The best air purifiers for allergy sufferers are those with HEPA filtration. The HEPA filtration is designed to capture even really tiny particles. Down to .3 Microns I believe. One thing that I have noticed though is, if you have a good air purifier, (I have the VEVA 8000) and you have guests for example over to your house, you may not want to sit between the air purifier and your guests. If the air is pulling from your guests towards you, you are essentially pulling their personal ‘Walking Cloud’ a part of their own ‘Micro Ecosystem’ directly towards you. It took me awhile to figure out that that was what was happening, but once I did and shifted the location of my air purifier, it made a big difference in how I felt after having certain guests over.
10. Invest in Chair Covers: Or just use blankets to toss over your chairs when guests come over to visit. This helps with easy removal of a big part of their residual Micro Ecosystem when they leave. Here is a link to my favorite chart cover so far. Just gather up the covers, chuck them into the washing machine and voila, your furniture is back to baseline, hopefully anyway. (It wouldn’t hurt to run a vacuum over the floors either.)

Glossary of Terms:

• Allergic Burden: The total sum of every trigger that your body is trying to fight all at once.
• Atmospheric Hitchhikers:
• Bucket: The total sum of triggers that your immune system is able to handle. When the bucket overflows, so do your symptoms.
• Fresh Threads: Fresh clean clothes from your own house that have not been compromised by exterior ecosystems or Atmospheric Hitchhikers.
• Homecoming Cleanse: A shower upon arriving home to wash away any surface allergens and irritants that have attached to your skin and hair.
• Irritants: Any particle that aggravates your immune system whether you are allergic to it or not.
• Micro Ecosystem: The unique biological and chemical signature of any given location. Like a store, or a home or a workplace for example. The physical particles that can attach themselves to anything that comes into that environment.
• Oral Reset: Brushing teeth, gargling and rinsing out the mouth to physically remove surface allergens and irritants that have settled inside the mouth and on the mucous membranes.
• Walking Cloud: A invisible, specific layer of particles that are attached to any person that is unique to them and their own Micro Ecosystem.