Beyond Bubble Baths: Self-Care for Food Allergies & Celiac

Self-care is often framed as indulgent, aesthetic, or optional, but for individuals and families managing food allergies or other chronic conditions, it is essential.

In this solo episode, I explore misconceptions about self-care means, and how it is uniquely difficult in food allergy and celiac life.

This episode covers:

• Why food allergy management creates chronic nervous system activation
• Why our nervous systems resist self-care
• How self-care functions as nervous system regulation, not indulgence

This conversation is for anyone who feels like self-care is a luxury or a burden rather than a necessity.

Special thanks to Kyle Dine for permission to use his song The Doghouse for the podcast theme!
www.kyledine.com

Find Dr. Whitehouse:
-thefoodallergypsychologist.com
-Instagram: @thefoodallergypsychologist
-Facebook: Dr. Amanda Whitehouse, Food Allergy Anxiety Psychologist
-welcome@dramandawhitehouse.com

Transcript

Amanda Whitehouse, PhD: 0:05

​We underestimate the emotional toll of what we are living and how it affects us in our lives And we underestimate the power of taking these steps for ourselves in terms of their ability to improve, how we can take care of either our own medical needs or our children's. So in this conversation, let's reframe self-care, not as something extra, but as one of the most powerful tools we have for taking good care of the child who relies on us or taking good care of our own medical needs.

Speaker: 0:36

Welcome to the Don't Feed the Fear podcast, where we dive into the complex world of food allergy anxiety. I'm your host, Dr. Amanda Whitehouse, food allergy anxiety psychologist and food allergy mom. Whether you're dealing with allergies yourself or supporting someone who is, join us for an empathetic and informative journey toward food allergy calm and confidence..

Amanda Whitehouse, PhD: 0:57

Welcome back to the Don't Feed the Fear Podcast, and again, happy 2026. I wanted to do my first solo episode of the year with a conversation that feels especially important this time of year, especially for those of us living with food allergies, celiac, or any type of chronic illness or caring for somebody who is, We have just navigated so much pressure to make one of the happiest, most joyful, most extravagant times of the year, but often for us one of the most stressful, draining, depleting. And often frustrating times of year. so I wanted to take some time today to have an honest conversation with you about self care and before you tune out, because I know that that word can feel really loaded. I want to be really clear about what I mean. I'm not talking about. The curated aesthetic version. I'm not talking about bubble baths and morning routines that are Instagram friendly. not something for you to add to an already impossible list. If you're anything like me, this time of year, I feel like I wanna crash, but this is when I have to pick myself back up and get back into the regular routine again. So today I wanna talk about the kind of self-care that actually keeps people functioning in the middle of real life, especially with chronic illness, with food allergies, with celiac, with anxiety, with trauma. Because in our world, self-care isn't optional. It isn't indulgent or fancy, and it definitely isn't easy. It's uncomfortable, it's unseen. It can be repetitive, and it can be absolutely essential. I want to talk in research based, but practical ways to keep your own cup from getting empty while you're trying to fill everybody else's. And I know that metaphor annoys a lot of people. I know everyone rolls their eyes when we say things like, put on your own oxygen mask first, And it's true for those managing food allergies, That advice can feel really dismissive because the reality is that you are managing a life-threatening risk. You're making hundreds of micro decisions a day, as well as planning ahead for decisions for immediate, short-term, long-term, indefinite into the future decisions that will need to be made down the road. It is of the utmost importance that you take those safety steps, like making sure that the emergency medication is always around, trusting other people navigating schools, holidays, travel, restaurants, medications, those things don't end. They're always on the horizon. But also what's always there is the grief, the fear, and the past trauma that we might be carrying. Our labor is invisible and so are the burdens that we carry. So please know that when I say to you that I want to support you in taking care of yourself, I do understand the weight of what you're carrying, and as a psychologist who specializes in food allergy, anxiety, and trauma, and who lives this in my own home, I see it all the time. We underestimate the emotional toll that of what we are living and how it affects us in our lives and how. And we underestimate the power of taking these steps for ourselves in terms of their ability to improve, how we can take care of either our own medical needs or our children's. What contributes to that is that Many of us are walking around every day, hypervigilant on edge. From our past experiences. We might be avoidant of the things that make us feel anxious or where we've had bad experiences. We've got anxiety. We might have grief, anger at the people who could support us in this, but maybe have not been inclusive or helpful or understanding, and we're exhausted. Physically exhausted, emotionally exhausted relationally w e're exhausted and this comes up in very real physical symptoms. So if it's our own medical conditions that we're managing, it can exacerbate those. And if we are the parents or the caregivers, we can develop our own stress, our own real physical symptoms that then decrease our ability to do all of those very important things. So in this conversation, let's reframe self-care, not as something extra, but as one of the most powerful tools we have for taking good care of the child who relies on us or taking good care of our own medical needs. As I said earlier, I'm not necessarily talking about the social media friendly types of self-care. Healthcare research. defines self-care as the daily decisions and behaviors that people use to maintain physical stability, emotional balance, and functional capacity in the context of those ongoing health demands. It's not about pampering or stress relief or mood improvement. Self-care is how people keep going. It is about monitoring symptoms, responding early to changes, following treatment plans, managing emotional responses, knowing when rest is needed. Again, not for pampering, but because physically our bodies require it, and knowing when to ask for help, which we all know, we can be very isolated and it can be extremely difficult to ask for help and to receive the type of help that we need. That definition matters to this conversation because food allergies and celiac disease are chronic conditions. And chronic conditions. Often leave our nervous system on all the time. That's what makes self-care so hard. When you live with real unpredictable threat every day, everywhere you go, your body learns to stay alert. That's not anxiety. That is survival. Physiology, your sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight or flight response stays activated much of the time because it believes that it has to over time. That leads to irritability, emotional burnout, trouble sleeping, difficulty concentrating, decision fatigue, never being able to fully rest. Even when you try and feeling like you always have to be on, you can't ever let your guard down and when your nervous system is stuck in survival mode. All of those things make rest, feel unsafe. Slowing down feels dangerous. Because we might be forgetting something, or not planning or thinking of something, setting boundaries can feel dangerous. Because we might already be so limited. The amount of support and connection that we have So self-care isn't resisted because you don't value yourself necessarily on a deeper level. Your nervous system will resist it because your body is trying to keep you safe. Often we have good intentions. We think we're going to set aside an afternoon on the weekend to read a book we've been wanting to get to or wake up and have some quiet time with our tea in the morning. Whatever it is, we know nourishes and rejuvenates us, but somehow we never seem to make time for. And the more we intend to do it and then don't, the more we beat ourselves up, the more frustrated and behind we feel because we feel like we've wasted time or we've lost an opportunity and it becomes A negative self-fulfilling prophecy. So let's slow down and say something really important. Self-care in this life that you and I are leading. It's about teaching your nervous system that safety exists. That is what will allow us to do all of the tasks that you're probably are already doing that are self-care, like filling prescriptions and planning safe meals and navigating daily life with ease instead of with stress constantly. We wanna do those things from a place of. Confidence and calm in the body, not from panic and feeling like we're always frantically paddling to keep our heads above water. When you take self-care actions, each of those sends a message to the body, and it teaches your nervous system something different from what it has learned as a result of living life the way that you've had to manage it. When you're compassionate with yourself after you make a mistake, your nervous system learns I'm safe. Even when I'm not perfect. I'm capable of taking care of things. When you set a boundary with a family member about an activity or an unsafe food practice, your nervous system learns. I don't have to people please to survive. When you hold that boundary that you have expressed, even when someone is disappointed or questions or challenges, it because they don't understand, your body learns, I'm still safe, even when others are unhappy about something. When you take time to rest, your nervous system learns. I don't have to earn safety through productivity. I don't become safe by constantly doing more. And when you take a break, even when things are unfinished, your body learns. I'm still safe. Even when I pause and a task is left undone, I trust myself to come back to it later. When you take time for yourself, your nervous system learns that you can put yourself first and you and everyone around you can still be okay. That's not indulgence, that is regulation. Many of us are not accustomed to feeling that way to doing these things. And so when we first try to shift how we've been approaching this, we can actually become more dysregulated, more alarmed, more hypervigilant, Our bodies and our nervous systems literally need to learn what safety feels like and we need to teach it to them. The guide that I use to help. My clients start to recognize what that feels like is drawn from a therapeutic approach called Internal Family Systems. The creator of that likes to use what he calls the eight Cs, as an indicator of when you're in a regulated and safe state. Those are calm, curiosity, compassion, clarity, creativity, courage, confidence, and connectedness. But in my experience with the kids and the adults that I've worked with, it's really easy to recognize if you're feeling curious or not. And curiosity is the baseline for all of the others. So if you're feeling compassionate for someone else. It means that you are curious about their experience. If you're feeling clarity about a situation, it means you're curious about the details, that have occurred or that led to it. If you're feeling confident, that means you're not afraid of that scenario or that experience. You are curious about experiencing it. And so rather than trying to memorize all those Cs, I guide my clients in using the concept of curiosity to. Help you recognize when you've not just forced yourself to do a self care task, but when your body starts to shift into receiving that and understanding the safety message that's being communicated to it, you don't have to force these states. But. You can encourage them. So if you're trying to do something and you're noticing that you're feeling stressed about it, trying to become curious is a practice that can help you start learning to shift into curiosity. And the easiest way to do that is with questions. Whether it's trying to engage in a self-care task, or there's an experience coming up that you're feeling stressed about. If you notice that you feel rigid, frantic, numb, reactive, you're bracing your body, your brain is racing with thoughts about it. Clearly your nervous system is in fight, flight, or freeze, asking yourself questions and trying to get curious can help the state of safety return. Curiosity tells the nervous system that we're not in danger right now. It's not an emergency If there's enough safety to look inward and consider something. So if something feels intense, you can gently say to yourself, I noticed a part of me that feels anxious, or I notice that I'm having trouble reading this book that I wanted to spend some time with this afternoon. And then instead of asking why in a critical way, we can try asking how or what with openness. What am I worried will happen? Where is my brain drifting off to? What feels uncomfortable about this right now? What do I feel my body pulling me to be doing instead of focusing on this thing that I wanted to spend time doing? You don't need answers. The act of asking is what creates the regulation when curiosity is present. Judgment softens. When judgment softens, the nervous system begins to stand down. It doesn't feel so criticized. That's what allows the body to shift from urgency into connection, either with ourselves or with the task that we wanna be enjoying. So if you ask those questions and you notice yourself wanting to rush or fix or perform, that is information. It's not a failure. It's something for you to observe and acknowledge. Curiosity creates space, and space creates safety. Safety allows the body to return gently to regulation. You don't have to change anything you're doing, you're just listening. Oftentimes for those of us who are managing food allergies and celiac, the thing that will come up is that there is something we feel we need to be doing to protect ourselves more. Something specifically related to the food management medication, planning for foods, checking or making sure that an activity or a certain place that we're going to be attending will be accommodating and safe. That is an important part of self-care. And when you're doing that, you're engaging in self-care, But I bet you've already got that part down. So I want to remind you that there are some other categories that we should be balancing that out with. We shouldn't be spending a hundred percent of our time doing the self-care tasks for the medical need. So another area to get curious about is whether in addition to meeting all of the necessary medical and safety needs, are you balancing out the other areas of self-care? There are a lot of these that I'll go through quickly and I'm going to give you my favorite reminder for touching on the most important ones on a regular basis. Of course we all know we need to do our physical self-care. We need sleep, nutrition movement in addition to the medical adherence. This doesn't just look like always carrying epi and making sure that food is safe. This is including things like prioritizing sleep, especially after having a particularly distressing event or reaction. Eating enough safe food, not just what's available. Getting gentle movement instead of pushing through exhaustion Sleep deprivation alone increases anxiety, sensitivity, and our threat perception, which is something that we already carry. What often gets neglected is our emotional self-care, expressing our feelings, processing our grief, and our difficult experiences, and making time for creativity. Therapy's one way to do that, but there are also a lot of other things that you could do. Just talking to friends, journaling, art, music. Whatever you enjoy or whatever feels effective for you in releasing and processing those emotions, letting your feelings exist without judging them. When we suppress our emotions, it increases our physiological stress and expression, helps to complete the stress cycles, to return our body to a state of homeostasis. This might sound the same because a lot of people mix up their thoughts and their feelings, mental self-care people think is mental health, but that's not what I mean. Mental self care is things like learning curiosity, rest from decision making. Your brain is working hard and it needs care, you might enjoy learning about other things that feel empowering or interesting to you. Not compulsive anxiety driven reading everything you can about allergies, which I've definitely found myself guilty of. I am not making fun of you. It is about stepping away from food allergy, social media, or other content when it becomes overwhelming, letting your mind wander without problem solving. Using your brain in different ways and giving your brain a rest. Cognitive overload, worsens our anxiety and our executive functioning skills, especially when we're under chronic stress. This is another tough one with food allergies, but social self-care is also important. As humans, we are wired for connection, and human connection equals safety. To us, that requires both reaching out and nurturing our relationships and setting and maintaining appropriate boundaries that give us safe relationships. This is where things get tricky, and it's very important to understand that self-care is community care. Nobody regulates alone. We are trying to regulate within a society that often dismisses or doesn't provide adequate care for our medical needs. But we can't do it without them. Nobody can regulate alone. So social self-care might mean Choosing fewer, safer social spaces, or practicing scripts for boundary setting, letting people help you even when it's imperfect and connecting with other people who do get it. Isolation increases our threat perception and connection reduces it. Self-isolation and and how to navigate and balance that appropriately when you're managing food allergies and celiac. That'll be my next solo episode out next month. next Spiritual self-care. That doesn't have to be a religious belief. If you don't have one, I'm not pushing that on you. If you do have one, obviously that's an important source of support and meaning for you. But this can be your values and your connection to something bigger. It can be community-based, it can simply be meditation or breath work. It can be connecting to nature and it can be connecting to your purpose and what motivates you, but making meaning within our lives in some way buffers our stress and improves resilience in chronic illness. Practical and financial considerations are also an area of self-care, something that reduces cognitive load and something that can be really difficult for us managing what we do. We all know about the allergy tax and how much more expensive our safe foods can be if we can find them in the first place. We have to budget for that. We have to. Organize medications and create routines for remembering when to refill and making sure that things are always with us when we leave the house and no matter where we are. The more that you can spend time and give a little bit of consideration to simplifying or improving those routines when there is a mistake or a mishap and advocating for accommodations or changes when you need them, it can help to support your decision fatigue, and the last area is professional and vocational self-care. So our work in this world, whenever it may be, is a big part of our identity and the meaning making that we talked about. For many work environments don't feel safe. Career choices can be shaped by our health needs and we can burn out. From not the job itself or the work itself, but from constantly managing risk. So professional self-care includes things like asking for accommodations, which many people are uncomfortable doing, letting your identity be more than the allergy person, and building a sustainable pace. So I know that that's a lot of areas to remember. Obviously I'm not anticipating memorizing all of these, but what I do want you to leave this episode with is a handy acronym that will remind you ideally on a daily basis to touch on those areas. It's often used in the mental health space to remind people in a tongue in cheek way, did you take your meds? MEDS, medication, exercise, diet, and sleep is often what people use for the S, but I teach my clients sleep and sun. I cannot find anything reliable about who initially coined this phrase, I can't take credit for it, but it's pretty widely known at this point. Our episode last week with Dr. Gary Soffer talked a little bit about mindfulness and the importance of it physiologically and medically. I know the word mindfulness or meditation really turns a lot of people off, but mindfulness doesn't mean sitting cross-legged and trying to be serene. It is about pulling yourself into the moment that you're in. particularly in our case, noticing that you're not in danger when you're not, and getting your nervous system out of emergency mode. That is why breathing is helpful. Making your mind come back to the present moment is helpful because it will tell your body over and over again until your body starts to trust that you're not in an emergency all the time. Mindfulness helps your brain to differentiate. I'm safe right now. We can evaluate instead of react. The E is for exercise, and again, we have a lot of misunderstandings about this. So movement is important because our chronic vigilance creates muscle tension. The adrenaline of that fight or flight response keeps us elevated, our panic pathways stay active and our stress hormones need a place to go. This doesn't have to be structured. It's not about high intensity. It certainly isn't about body image or weight or fitness. It's about releasing. So if you can take a walk after a difficult appointment, if you can get up and move in between a task that's taking you a long time or running from one to another if you can put on some music and dance in the kitchen while you're preparing dinner or packing lunches, movement releases, that chronic vigilance and stress from your body. D is for diet and we certainly think about this part a lot in Unhelpful ways as well. Obviously with food allergies and celiac, we're very focused on safe foods, We have also come to understand the word diet, to mean dieting, to lose weight, to improve our body image, to be a certain size or create a certain image. Food is so complicated for everyone in our society, but especially for our community, understandably. Food can be danger, but we need food to feel safe. Your body still needs nourishment, not just nutrition, but to be nourished and fed. So this can look like making sure that you're eating on a regular basis. Remembering to have safe snacks for yourself not just the kids. Sometimes convenient foods are needed when we're overwhelmed or when we're busy, and we need to do that without guilt as long as the food is safe for us. So self-care when it comes to diet is not about purity. It is about safety, but it's also about fueling ourselves so that we can either care for ourselves or care for our loved ones. And last S for sleep. And in my world for sunshine, sleep is your most underrated allergy tool in my book, sleep deprivation amplifies every single symptom of anxiety, hyper vigilance, emotional burnout. Most allergy parents are chronically sleep deprived, So supportive sleep might include a simple, consistent bedtime routine, A mindfulness practice at night is wonderful to help with nighttime rumination, You might need to work with your doctor to adjust the timing of medications if they're interfering with your sleep. You might need to consider the timing of meals. If you're running all day kids, going to one activity to another and not eating until too late at night, digestion can interfere with proper sleep. So consider that so that you can allow your brain to reset your nervous system to feel safe. And regulated during that rest period and your capacity can return for the next day. That is not laziness. It is survival. And my little add-on to the S is sun. Sometimes with the kids that I work with, especially when they're, wanting to be on screens all day and maybe not getting enough activity and not wanting to play outside, I always give them the goal or the homework of going outside and getting some sunshine in their eyeballs. And there are scientific reasons that we actually want the sun to hit our eyeballs. If you are getting sunshine, it is most likely that you're getting all of those other things too. Sunshine isn't a wellness trend, it's a biological signal. When natural light reaches our eyes and our skin, especially early in the day. It helps to regulate our circadian rhythm, which impacts our sleep quality, our energy, our mood, our resilience, and particularly for people like me who live in colder climates in the winter right now, when the days are shorter and there's not a lot of sunlight. It can be difficult to get it, but if you are getting sunshine, that probably means that you are sleeping on a regular routine and waking up and hopefully getting some sunshine in the morning when the sunlight is shining hopefully that means you're outside and moving to some extent, and if you're outside moving and walking in the sunshine. That touches on your mindfulness. When you get that sunshine it will support proper vitamin D synthesis, which plays a role in your immune function, your appetite, your inflammation, your mood regulation. So for people who are managing chronic conditions, that connection between light and immunity and mental health really matters. And from that mindfulness perspective, sunlight helps to anchor us into time and place. It reminds the body that we are part of a predictable rhythm, day and night, light and dark, which is really regulating and soothing for the human nervous system. Sunshine isn't about perfection or pressure, it's about just try to get some sunshine in your eyeballs today. That was a lot of information today. Thank you for bearing with me. I don't wanna bore you, but I do want you to understand this and shift the perspective in the way that I've described it today. So if nothing else, I want you to remember these three things.

Speaker: 26:01

Number one.

Amanda Whitehouse, PhD: 26:02

Self-care is not extra. It is foundational. It is caring for the basic needs of yourself and or the person that you are responsible for. We do so well at that with food allergy or celiac tasks and safety management, and I want you to take those skills and apply them to the other areas of basic self-care that you need to stay well, to be regulated, to make clear, grounded decisions and to be present in your life. You don't have to do everything, but small, consistent care is enough. Number two, if you forget the meds, MEDS, medicine, exercise, diet, sleep, and sun, just remember the sunshine. Light helps to regulate your body. Sunshine supports mood, sleep, energy, immune function, nervous systems, stability. Even a few minutes of daylight by a window or stepping outside counts. You don't have to optimize it, you just have to let it in. And number three of all of those Cs that we talked about, just stay curious when things feel overwhelming, curiosity is often the fastest path back to regulation. If you're trying to engage in self-care and you're finding yourself meeting up against roadblocks, a curious stance. What's happening in my body right now signals safety to your nervous system. You don't need to fix or judge what you notice. Just stay curious, and that's enough to begin settling your system. If the rest feels fuzzy, that's okay. Sunshine, curiosity, those are powerful places to start Next month. I'll have another solo episode diving further into what we mentioned today about self-care being connected. And requiring a certain extent of community care. That's a complicated topic for us here in food allergy and celiac life, and I've been thinking a lot about it and trying to come up with ways to support you and be honest about what I think we need in those regards. So stay tuned. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next week

Speaker: 27:59

the content of this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only, and is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any questions about your own medical experience or mental health needs, please consult a professional. I'm Dr. Amanda Whitehouse. Thanks for joining me. And until we chat again, remember don't feed the fear.