Allergy season is well underway in Williamsburg, Virginia, with flowers, trees and grass in full bloom. Here are 5 natural, simple and easy ways to help your allergy symptoms. While this time of year is certainly beautiful to behold, it can be brutal to experience, especially for allergy sufferers.
Making sure to exercise regularly, ingest small doses of local honey and begin a regimen of daily apple cider vinegar consumption can actually help your body’s immune response to common allergens. Keeping your immune system in balance with probiotics and using natural anti-inflammatories like green tea to ease and soothe symptoms can help keep you comfortable and breathing clear. Here are five natural allergy hacks to help you thrive throughout this spring season!
*Before making any changes to your lifestyle or routine, please consult your physician.
- Exercise: Believe it or not, moving your body is one of the simplest ways to improve your health and tackle allergy symptoms. Research shows that mild to moderate exercise can help to reduce your body’s inflammatory response, helping to ease congestion and free your airways during allergy season.
- Apple Cider Vinegar: ACV (as it is affectionately known) is an all-purpose condiment, and its uses range from jazzing up salad dressings to removing odors from gym clothes. During allergy season, it can be particularly helpful in keeping symptoms at bay by cleaning your body’s lymphatic system and keeping mucus production down. Drink as a tablespoon straight, or by pouring a tablespoon into a glass of water, and your airways will be sure to thank you!
- Local Honey: Local honey contains small amounts of tree and grass pollen from local bees during their production process. Exposing your body to these common allergens in small doses, regularly, can help to inform your immune system and prevent it from experiencing a large inflammatory response. Taking a tablespoon a local honey once per day has been shown to reduce the body’s mucus production and inflammatory response.
- Green Tea: Green tea has anti-inflammatory properties that can help to ease congestion and stopped up sinuses. Drinking a hot cup of tea can also help you to breathe better during allergy flare-ups, as the steam will gently open up airways and help mucus to break up.Probiotics
Allergy symptoms can be exacerbated and even brought on by an unbalanced immune system, and this is where probiotics can become part of your allergy solution. Probiotics help to balance your immune system by reintroducing necessary, healthy gut bacteria back into your system. Healing your gut is the start to healing and balancing almost every other system in the body, and a balanced immune system is less likely to react or overreact to common allergens in your environment.