Are Food Allergies Taking Over Your Life? 3 Ways to Safely Navigate Food Allergy Anxiety
If you have a food allergy, being careful helps keep you safe. Reading labels, asking questions, and doing your due diligence about where you eat and what you put into your body dramatically reduces the risk of an allergic reaction. And if you’ve ever experienced an allergic reaction (or watched someone you love have one), you know better than anybody how scary it can get.
But sometimes, despite doing everything right and ensuring you’re protecting yourself, the anxiety about having a reaction doesn’t go away. You find yourself researching restaurants for hours before agreeing to dinner plans. You avoid eating food prepared by anybody other than yourself. Maybe you’ve even started avoiding vacations, work trips, social events, dating, or stopped sending your child to school because of the possibility of an allergic reaction.
What started as good and healthy intentions has turned into your health anxiety dictating the way you live your life. And we’re here to tell you, it doesn’t have to be this way.
At Soultality Psychotherapy in Boston, MA, we work with people and families whose food allergies hinder how they live their lives. Today, we want to talk about why this happens and how a holistic approach to therapy can help you build a routine that’s both safe and fulfilling.
Signs of Anxiety with Food Allergies
Every person and situation is different when it comes to food allergies and the anxiety that can come with it.
Here are some common signs of food allergy anxiety:
Finding yourself scrolling through reviews for hours before going to a new restaurant
Refusing playdates or birthday parties, even when allergy protocols are in place
Not traveling in fear that there won’t be enough ‘safe’ places to eat
Spending hours checking labels at the grocery stores
Turning down dates or nights out with friends that have uncertainty around food
For most people who deal with this, they’re working with an allergist and doing everything recommended. They carry their EpiPen, read the ingredient labels, and inform restaurants of their allergy. On paper, they’re being very responsible, but it still doesn’t feel like enough. This is normally the point where people start wondering if they’re missing something, not researching enough, or tricking themselves into thinking they accidentally overlooked a potentially dangerous situation even though they already checked.
What we often see with patients who have food allergy anxiety is that the anxiety starts to grow beyond the actual medical recommendations provided by their allergist. Instead of checking the label once, they’ll check it multiple times. This happens because the brain wants more certainty, which leads to the repetitive desire to check labels over and over again.
Information Gathering VS Reassurance Seeking
Some of the behaviors we see with anxiety around food allergies are called reassurance seeking.
Information gathering is a purposeful behavior. For people with food allergies, it can look like checking a restaurant’s allergy policy, reading an ingredient label, or ensuring they’re following their allergist’s recommendations.
Reassurance seeking can initially look like information gathering, but instead of being satisfied, the person needs more and more information before they can start to feel safe (if ever). This can look like reading every review online to see if anybody ever had a bad experience at a restaurant or researching the same product’s ingredients repeatedly.
The challenge here is that many people with anxiety about their food allergy start with information gathering. But as they lose trust and become more anxious, they start reassurance seeking. This can seem helpful in the moment, but it actually teaches the brain that any uncertainty is dangerous. Over time, the need for more and more clarification and the reassurance urge grows stronger.
When we have patients who have anxiety about their food allergies, we share this point with them because understanding this part of the brain’s thought process can be very empowering. It explains why they feel stuck and why they feel the need to constantly check if their food is safe.
When Food Allergies Intersect with Anxiety, OCD, and Trauma
Many people with food allergies have experienced an allergic reaction. And when something scary happens to us, our brains remember and try to make sure that experience never happens again.
The problem is that sometimes our brains become a little too good at their job.
Instead of learning, “I need to take reasonable precautions because I have a food allergy,” the brain starts operating from a belief that the only safe way to live is to eliminate every possible risk. And because eliminating every possible risk isn’t actually realistic, anxiety steps in and starts demanding more and more certainty.
This is often where patterns that look like OCD can emerge. Not because people in this situation are being irrational; it’s because the brain is working overtime to protect from potential exposures.
Soultality’s Approach to Food Allergies & Anxiety
At Soultality Psychotherapy, we help people navigate their anxiety about their food allergy by combining holistic, factual, and proven clinical approaches. By combining these three approaches, we’re able to help people enjoy their lives with their food allergy, rather than living in fear because of it.
Gathering the Facts
The first step we take is contacting our patient’s allergist. Food allergies (especially those like gluten allergies, tree nut allergies, dairy allergies, and shellfish allergies) should be taken extremely seriously. As the patient’s therapist, we want to clarify what the actual medical recommendations are for our patient’s specific situation. By collaborating with allergists and healthcare providers, we’re able to ensure that the therapeutic treatment stays aligned with the standard of care for that specific allergy. This also helps us get the facts for when we recommend other therapeutic treatments, like ERP and ACT.
Exposure & Response Therapy (ERP)
The gold standard for anxiety and OCD presentations is ERP. ERP helps people practice tolerating uncertainty without relying on compulsions to help them feel safe. For people with anxiety about their food allergies, this might look like resisting the urge to read fifty restaurant reviews before going out for dinner. It might mean allowing a trusted friend to choose the restaurant instead of giving in to compulsions to check and research beforehand. ERP for food allergies also involves practicing trust in the safety protocols provided by the allergist.
This treatment is done alongside a therapist to walk you through why this is helpful and navigate any resistance and compulsions that come up.
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT
We also incorporate ACT therapy to help our patients reconnect with the life they actually want to be living. Life can feel very small when the world revolves around what you can’t eat, and we want our patients to feel empowered to live big!
Acceptance & commitment therapy helps people develop psychological flexibility. Rather than feeling like they need to give in to their compulsions or fight against them, ACT gives people the tools they need to accept their responses and consciously choose to make decisions that are more aligned with their values.
You Deserve a Life Bigger Than Your Food Allergy
Living with food allergies requires a lot of thoughtfulness and effort. But it does not require you to spend every waking moment protecting yourself from it.
At Soultality Psychotherapy in Boston, MA, we help people navigate fears and compulsions around food allergies by using holistic and clinically proven approaches. You deserve to live a rich and fulfilling life, and we’ll do everything within our power to help you navigate fears around your food allergy. Click here to schedule your next appointment today.