Dealing With Hay Fever Through Respiratory Exercise

Summer is a time of year to look forward to, associated with long, lazy days or exciting vacations with friends and family. However, it also has its downside, like bad action movies, exacerbated heat due to global warming, and hay fever. For many sufferers, hay fever is something that keeps coming back, year after year. It is not a matter of curing the symptoms. One may only choose to bear them nobly, or be a whiner.

Alright, perhaps that was a little melodramatic. There are several ways to either minimize exposure or treat the symptoms of hay fever.

One might try to take treatments to suppress ones own immune responses (since these responses, not the allergen, are the direct cause of the symptoms), but this might leave one vulnerable to far more serious health problems. Some medicines, like pseudoepinephrine, that treat allergies or flu-like symptoms might even set off drug tests administered in schools and work places. Of course, there are often further rounds of testing or other similar measures to eliminate these kinds of false positives, but setting off the preliminary alarms can cause a major hassle, all the same.

Also, anti-allergy medication, which, besides being expensive, can make you sleepy or, in more serious cases, give you polyps in your nose. Though the overall trend in medicine is to resort to medication, there is such a concept as too much of a good thing. It might be better for you to try other treatments, instead.

Besides bringing out the pills and syrups, one might try to learn breathing techniques to avoid hay fever. You can train yourself to breathe through your nose and never your mouth, since the nose has better filtering mechanisms that are more likely to block allergens. In addition, people can learn to control their breathing when they are around sources of hay fever-inducing pollen.

Proper breathing might help you avoid hay fever, but it cannot guarantee 100% effective protection, especially if you live in a place with many "dangerous" plants, or are an especially sensitive individual whose system reacts to the slightest trace of inhaled pollen. Therefore, we should also discuss what to do if and when you actually do get hay fever.

You can try to use special cough breathing techniques so that you will not choke on air while coughing, or end up with overlong coughing bouts that irritate your throat. Coughing with phlegm does not hurt as much as dry cough, but it can still damage your throat if you do it too often. For some patients, slow, shallow breaths can help calm a cough. In general, your research should target your upper airway breathing passages, so that you will not end up using a breathing technique that makes you swallow or inhale your own mucus. (Disgusting to read, write, and say, but still a legitimate problem that needs to be discussed.)

The next time summer rolls around, try breathing better instead of popping pills. You will be better able to think of summer as a fun time, instead of as hay fever season.