Dr. Nicole Cain explains how excess histamine triggers your autonomic nervous system like adrenaline does, causing anxiety and sleep problems beyond the typical allergy symptoms. She suggests trying antihistamines like Benadryl or hydroxyzine to test if they help, then tracking down what's raising your histamine in the first place.
Chapters
One of the immune system cells that you and your listeners might be familiar with is histamine. And so that's what makes us have itchy eyes, watery eyes, runny nose, skin rash. Histamine can cause reflux, it can cause all sorts of symptoms. But what a lot of people don't know about histamine is that it can be as stimulating as adrenaline. So that poor little chemical is just making you want to sneeze every time you go out into the grass. Could also be putting you into autonomic arousal. And then if we give you a beta blocker, or we give you an antidepressant, or we give you a benzodiazepine, if these things don't regulate immune system, if they don't regulate histamine, you're still going to be anxious. And so this is another example of how having more zeroed in and more specific systems to do deeper digging will help you get treatments that will actually work. An experiment for your listeners is if you have anxiety and it's keeping you up at night and you're wondering, okay, I wonder if this could be histamine related or if it's, if it's something else related, your doctor might prescribe, like try natural Z's over the counter, or Benadryl or diphenhydramine or hydroxyzine, some of these histamine lowering strategies. And if that is just game changing for your anxiety and your emotional wellbeing, the question that you should ask next is, why would that be? Why is my histamine really high? Because that's an obstacle to cure too.
