Top Ten Alternative Remedies For Anxiety

Written by Melanie Haiken

Antianxiety medications, sleeping pills! What if you don't want to take medications to treat your anxiety? CBT, biofeedback and natural anxiety treatments can work.

I don't remember how I first ended up talking with a doctor about my little "worry problem." I do remember that I was 16 and my mother had brought me in for some ordinary health concern, but that we quickly got onto the subject of my insomnia. And I can still picture the doctor's look of fretful outrage when I said I was sleeping only six hours a night. "That's not enough! You're still growing!" he insisted. "You must go to bed earlier."

It wasn't that simple, I told him— sleep just wouldn't come. Instead I'd lie rigidly in the dark, trying to push away the thoughts spiraling around my mind, feeling like my brain was a motor that couldn't be turned off.

He didn't have much to offer—he suggested I cut down on coffee and dismissed my mother's questions about biofeedback. But one suggestion he made stuck with me. "Keep a notebook next to your bed," he said. "Write down everything that's worrying you so you can let go of it and fall asleep." That simple prescription, it turned out, was only the first of many remedies I've tried in what has become a lifelong struggle to cope with anxiety.

While I've often felt isolated and ashamed of my near-constant inner turmoil, the truth is, I'm in good company. More than 19 million Americans—13 percent of the population—suffer from a diagnosable anxiety disorder, 4 million of them meeting the criteria for generalized anxiety disorder, the chronic low-level anxiety that plagues me. And of course today the multiple threats of war, terrorism, and economic instability have made anxiety the malady of our age; millions of people who don't meet the criteria for a full-blown disorder struggle with excessive worry nonetheless. The number of prescriptions written for antianxiety medications and sleeping pills jumped in the weeks following September 11 and has continued rising steadily ever since.

At several points in my life, I too have considered medication. But in the end I've always pursued natural remedies instead. Chalk it up to my stubborn refusal to believe my problems are great enough to warrant full-on drugs, or to my preference for all things natural. Either way, my strategies have served me well. What I've learned about using them, though, is that no single approach works in every situation; I've needed to keep experimenting to see what works for me at a particular time and place in my life. Here's my tale of "recovery"—complete with all the messy detours along the way. Everything's okay—so why am I so tense?

During my college years and early 20s, no one would have described me as calm. I'm sure many of my former roommates still remember my bitten fingernails and late-night prowling around the house.

It was during these years that I began building a foundation for coping with my anxiety, experimenting with various relaxation techniques in addition to filling the "worry pad" I kept beside my bed. I took up running, and immediately found that 40 minutes of pounding up and down neighborhood hills left me feeling calmer and more confident, and able to sleep better at night. I also tried meditation and yoga, which relaxed me physically and refreshed my mind. Since my worries back then tended to be both concrete and relatively common—from whether I'd finish a term paper on time to whether the cute guy in Shakespeare 101 would ask me to coffee—the exercise and mind-body practices were enough to keep me feeling like a normally functioning member of society. It wasn't until later that I found I needed more—much more.

I'm a working mom—and it's more than I can handle

Fast-forward to my mid-30s, when I'd married, had two children, and was working full-time at a job I loved. I seemed to have it all, but my stress level was through the roof. I felt incredibly guilty about leaving my kids to go off to work and was convinced the world thought I was a poor mother for doing so. I set out to prove everyone wrong by holding myself to exhaustingly high standards.

I wouldn't let myself crawl into bed at night until the house was clean—even if that meant I was doing dishes and sweeping the kitchen well past midnight—because I was so fearful of dismaying our baby-sitter with a mess in the morning. I'd spend hours at work secretly researching college savings plans, and then come home and inundate my husband with charts and graphs, convinced that we'd hopelessly missed our chance to provide our daughters with a college education. My previous coping strategies—exercise, meditation, and yoga—fell victim to my impossibly tight schedule.

The out-of-control anxiety put a huge strain on my marriage; I simply couldn't sit down and enjoy a relaxed hour with my husband. "Come here and check this out," he'd call from the living room, where he was laughing over an episode of Seinfeld. "In a minute," I'd call back, hands deep in dishwater, and by the time I was hovering tensely in the doorway, the credits would be rolling.

It was around this time that I saw a news item about kava, an herb from Polynesia that was said to relieve anxiety with few or no side effects. What really appealed to me was the writer's promise that kava wasn't sedating and could bolster mental clarity. I headed straight for the health food store. The first time I tried kava, I was sold. A capsule in the morning just before I ran for the bus made the day flow better, without the usual edge of hysteria that had tinged my every decision. Soon I found that a combination of kava and valerian just before bed slowed the spinning in my mind and left my limbs rubbery with relaxation.

My happy solution didn't last long, however. Just months after I started taking kava, headlines proclaimed that the herb had been found to cause liver damage. Friends started warning me against kava, and it began disappearing from my local health food store. At first, I was too enamored of my new ally to stop taking it, and tried to get away with cutting down my usage to about once a week. But I found myself getting increasingly nervous about the very thing that was supposed to calm me down, and after a while I stopped taking it.

That's when I began prowling the health food store shelves looking for substitutes. In some stores, a whole shelf of supplements, bearing soothing names like "True Calm" and "Calm Mood," promised to soothe ruffled temperaments. Some seemed to be made up largely of amino acids that claimed to regulate brain chemistry and soothe overstimulated nerve cells.