Six sneezes before I’d even reached the shower this morning. I know because I wrote it in the journal, the scrappy one that lives on the kitchen bench, along with a note about the wattle along Terrigal Drive looking particularly yellow this week. Hay fever season has properly arrived on the Central Coast, and if your eyes have been itching on the walk from the car park to work, you’re not imagining it.
I’m not a doctor and I won’t pretend food fixes hay fever season, because it doesn’t, not in any way I could honestly claim. But I’ve noticed, over a few years of paying attention to my own mornings, that what I eat and how I sleep change how the whole thing feels. Some September mornings I wake up foggy and thick-headed regardless. Others, and they tend to follow a decent night’s sleep and a breakfast with actual substance, I feel like I can cope with the sneezing rather than be flattened by it.
What hay fever season actually feels like around here
Living near the water doesn’t spare you. If anything the sea breeze pushes pollen around the headland at Avoca and it settles over the reserve behind our place, and by late morning my eyes are doing that gritty thing. Healthdirect’s guide to hay fever describes it as an allergic reaction to pollen, dust or animal dander, and reading through it a few years back was the first time I stopped thinking of it as a personal failing and started thinking of it as, well, just weather my body reacts to.
The thing I keep coming back to is that spring in Australia asks a lot of people with sensitive systems. The itchy eyes, the blocked nose first thing, the low hum of tiredness that isn’t quite tiredness. None of that is dramatic. It’s just wearing, over weeks.
The gut and spring connection I keep noticing
I’m careful here because I don’t want to overstate it. But there’s a reasonable amount written, including on Better Health Channel’s allergic rhinitis page, about how a body under strain from an allergic response can leave you feeling more fatigued and less resilient generally. What I’ve noticed, purely from my own scrappy notes, is that the weeks I’m eating well and sleeping properly are the weeks the hay fever feels like background noise rather than the main event.
Fibre keeps coming up in what I read, and honestly it’s not exciting advice but it’s the one I trust most. Why fibre matters more than most of us think covers this better than I can here, but the short version is that a settled gut seems to sit underneath a lot of how steady you feel through a demanding season.
Breakfasts that carry me through the worst mornings
On the mornings I wake up already sniffling, the last thing I want is a heavy plate. What actually helps is something warm, something I don’t have to think too hard about, and ideally something with a bit of ginger or turmeric in it because those flavours settle me even if I can’t point to a reason why. Golden milk with cinnamon has become a genuine ritual rather than a nice idea, and I’ll have a small mug of it most spring mornings before the ocean swim, not after.
For actual breakfast I’ve been leaning on things with a bit of resistance to them, oats with fruit, or a bowl I can make the night before. It sounds small but not having to make a decision at 6am when your head already feels stuffed is its own kind of relief.
A pot of something on the stove most days
By dinner time in hay fever season I want warmth and not much fuss. Tuscan Sun-Dried Tomato and Bean Broth has been on high rotation this month, partly because it reheats well for the nights I get home and can’t be bothered standing at the stove, and partly because there’s something about a broth that feels like it’s doing more than it probably is. I’ll take that placebo, honestly.
Honey and lemon is the other one I reach for without fail. Local honey specifically, because there’s a lovely stall at the Saturday market near Erina that sells it, and whether or not it does anything for pollen sensitivity in the way people online like to claim, the warm cup itself slows me down in the evening. Honey and lemon soothing tea is the one I make when my throat feels scratchy from all the sneezing, more for the ritual of it than any promise.
Building a morning that doesn’t ask too much of you
I swim most mornings before work, out past the flags at Avoca when the tide’s right, and I’ll admit spring is the season I most want to skip it. Eyes already itchy, nose already blocked, the thought of salt water doesn’t always appeal. But the mornings I go anyway tend to be the ones where I feel more capable by nine o’clock, not less. I can’t fully explain that and I’m wary of dressing it up as more than it is. It might just be the walk down Hastings Lane in the quiet before the tourists arrive that does it.
What I’m not doing this year is loading up on supplements the pharmacy keeps pushing at the front counter. I reckon there’s a fair bit of spruiking that goes on around hay fever season, and my honest opinion, which I hold loosely, is that a decent breakfast and an early night do more for how I feel than most of what’s on that shelf. That’s not a claim about anyone’s biology. It’s just what I’ve noticed in my own scrappy notes, year on year.
When it’s more than food can touch
Some hay fever seasons are worse than others, and some people find the itching and congestion genuinely disrupts sleep and work for weeks at a stretch. That’s worth talking through with a GP or pharmacist rather than managing alone, and healthdirect.gov.au has a straightforward rundown of when treatment beyond food and rest makes sense. Food is the gentle end of the toolkit, not the whole kit.
What actually helps, in my experience, is treating the season as something to be managed calmly rather than fought. A good breakfast, an early swim, a pot of something warm on the stove by six. None of it is dramatic. But by October, when the wattle’s gone and the worst of it has passed, I always notice I’ve come through it feeling steadier than the years I tried to just push through on empty.
— Tanya Pryce, Golden Door Living
