The science is in. Stress acts like a poison to your body. The longer you experience stress, the more you're likely to have organ damage, lose brain cells, and weaken your immune system. Long term stress has many of the same effects as swallowing a toxic pill every day, and is one of the greatest long term health problems of today's society.
Anxiety is the most common cause of long term stress, and millions of people suffer from it every day. Anxiety takes a toll on your body that can be highly damaging, in addition to the other issues that anxiety causes, such as frequent worry, mood changes, and a fear of social situations. Curing anxiety should be one of the first changes you make when you're trying to improve your overall health. Yet many people are making a risky choice – one that may not be in their best interests.
Pharmaceutical Medicines
Many people take anxiety medications to cure their anxiety. In their defense, anxiety medications have come a long way, and are now fairly decent at reducing anxiety. But despite that small benefit, these medications are loaded with side effects and problems that make them less than ideal for long term use. Anti-anxiety medications suffer from several very serious issues:
• Addiction – The greatest problem with these medications is the tendency for addiction. Once you start taking these medicines, you need to keep taking them every day at the same time in the same dose. Without it, you'll start to suffer from withdrawal symptoms, which can cause severe anxiety; worse than the anxiety before you started the medication. Some people also find that they crave the drugs so badly they start to overdose on them. Addiction is a problem with many medications, and a serious problem with these ones.
• Side Effects – As mentioned, these medications come with some severe side effects. Memory loss and mood changes are the most common, as these medicines can alter your personality and make you feel and act like a different person. Depression, dizziness, light headedness and slurred speech are also common issues, as are allergic reactions. These drugs can also cause psychosis, respiratory arrest, and other rare side effects as well. These are not safe medicines.
• Temporary Fix – Because of these side effects, they're not ideal for long term treatment. That means that in a year or two after you start taking the medicines, you'll need to wean off them. Unfortunately, these medicines don't cure anxiety – only numb it. So once you stop taking the medicine, you're bound to suffer from severe anxiety again. If the medicines were side effect free you could take them indefinitely, but since they are not, they are simply too risky for long term use, and your anxiety will come back.
It's not that anti-anxiety medications don't work. They've received significant research and nowadays they are far more effective than they had been in the past. It's that they come with such severe consequences that they're not worth taking. Many of the consequences of these medications are genuinely worse than dealing with anxiety, and certainly don't help you live the better quality of life that you wanted.
Seeking Out Natural Treatments
That's why it's so important to utilize natural anxiety treatments long before you decide to switch to medicines. There are countless herbs and minerals available with known benefits at relieving anxiety, including passionflower, kava, and St. John's Wort. None of those supplements have side effects, and all of them have shown promise for being used as natural anxiety treatments. Rather than skip right to the heavy medications, it is in your best interests to try these natural remedies first, so that you have a side effect free and non-addictive option that you can continue to take to relieve your anxiety
.
About the Author: Ryan Rivera suffered from intense anxiety most of his life, and found that pharmaceutical medicines were only making it worse. Now he writes about anxiety treatments and other information at www.calmclinic.com.