Growing up, I had seasonal allergies. Starting around August, my eyes would start watering and my nose plug up. It wasn’t much fun. Growing up, I was surprised to learn that allergies is a very modern phenomenon. It is something that is only seen in wealthy countries.

What are allergies? Why don’t people in developing countries have them? Why don’t animals in the wild have them?

Below I’d like to outline a definition of an allergy within a complex system.

A New Definition

All the definitions on the word ‘allergy’ are biologically based: “a damaging immune response by the body to a substance, especially pollen, fur, a particular food, or dust, to which it has become hypersensitive.”

I would like to propose a more abstract, system based definition :

Hyper activity of a defense mechanism in an anti-fragile system due to lack of stress.

Anti-fragile?

Our bodies are anti-fragile systems. Here’s a quick review of Anti-fragility:

Antifragility is a property of systems in which they increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. (Wikipedia)

Nature figured this out billions of years ago and has used this to constantly expand/extend itself in a reality that has entropy at its core. Since we’re apart of nature, our body systems are inherently anti-fragile.

The classic example of our bodies anti-fragility is weight lifting: the stress of lifting weights tears your muscle fibers. Once you’re done lifting, your bodies defense mechanisms repairs your muscle fibers, making them stronger.

Too Clean?

Throughout history our bodies were used to being in an environment full of dirt and pollen. This environment constantly applied a stress to our body, foreign invaders called pollen and dust that our system had to fight and defeat.

Since our bodies are an anti-fragile system, it needs this stress in order to stay strong. Without these stressors our bodies will become weak. The reason is that the defense mechanisms for fighting the foreign invaders will not have any work to do and find something else to fight. Or, in the case of seasonal allergies, hyper react to pollen/dust and cause issues with the overall system. (Try working with an allergy attack!)

How to resolve an allergy

Since an allergy is a defense mechanism hyper-reacting do to a lack of stress, then the simple solution is to apply more stress. Sounds illogical, but it works!

My season allergies were pretty bad, enough to get allergy shots at our local clinic. But no solutions from the medical industry worked in the long term. The shots didn’t even work at all.

After understanding anti-fragility, a better solution presented itself: get outside more! Especially during the seasons that caused the most issues. So I added many activies to my daily regeme to get my body out into nature with all of its pollen and dust. Activities included cycling, walking, and hiking.

It worked really well!!! I do every once and while have an allergy attack, but not nearly to the extent that I had throughout most of my life.

Oral Immunotherapy

Be careful, some modern allergies are so severe that applied stress could be deadly. Peanut allergies is an example of an extreme allergy. Currently the best way of treating peanut allergies is called Oral Immunotherapy.

Oral Immunotherapy is a process of having an individual with a food allergy, in a properly supervised environment, consume the food they are allergic to at a small, but ever increasing amount over time, thus slowly applying stress to the immune system.

For deadly allergies, please seek medical advice from a professional about safe ways of re-applying stress to your system.

Overview

An allergy is a hyper activity of a defense mechanism in an anti-fragile system due to lack of stress. If you find an allergy within a system, the simple fix is to increase the stress to the system.