The Allergy Technique

Read this first. Allergies can kill. This is not medical advice and it is not a replacement for your medication, your EpiPen, or your doctor. Never test an allergy by exposing yourself to the thing you react to. Treat what follows as an experiment in mind-body work for mild, non-dangerous sensitivities only — and keep your real treatment exactly as it is.

With that said: there’s an NLP technique built on an interesting premise — that some allergic responses behave like a phobia of the immune system. The body has learned to treat something harmless as a threat and over-reacts. The technique tries to gently re-educate that response. It works best when the trigger is known, and when there’s a similar but safe thing your body doesn’t react to (allergic to cats? use a fluffy dog. Reactive to peanuts? use kidney beans).

The visualisation

1. Anchor the calm response. Recall what clear, easy breathing and clear eyes feel like — the opposite of the reaction. As you feel it, press a knuckle to set an anchor.
2. Find the safe lookalike — the thing of a similar type your body is completely fine with.
3. Put up a screen. Imagine a sheet of plexiglass in front of you. On the other side, picture an ideal version of you — calm, breathing clear — easily handling the safe lookalike.
4. Now have that ideal-you handle the real trigger the same easy way, on the far side of the screen, while you fire your calm anchor. Keep them relaxed, keep the anchor on.
5. Bring it in. When it feels solid, imagine lifting the screen and stepping the ideal-you back inside yourself — calm response and all.
6. Break state. Then, only in your imagination, picture being near the trigger in the future and notice the response feels different.

Whether you believe the mechanism or not, the calm-state rehearsal is worth doing. Just never let an experiment like this anywhere near a serious allergy.