Is CBD The Miracle Drug We’ve Been Needing For Anxiety?
Anxiety remains to be one of the most common mental health disorders globally, with hundreds of millions of people suffering from this condition in various degrees.
It is also among the most difficult conditions to treat, but not because it’s a mysterious disorder: anxiety is caused by a multitude of factors, usually overlapped by environmental, psychological, and biological factors. There are treatments available, but anxiety medications aren’t accessible to everyone because they can be expensive and hard to come by. Pharmaceutical drugs designed to treat anxiety often come with numerous side effects. Additionally, talk therapy and treatments can also be very expensive.
However, cannabidiol (CBD) is tremendously effective at treating anxiety. It’s more appealing than pharmaceutical drugs for treating anxiety, and CBD is also natural. There is a growing distrust of pharmaceutical drugs since they are usually synthetic and have several side effects, which can compromise one’s quality of life. These include nausea, sexual dysfunction, emotional numbness and blunting, and addiction.
But CBD can treat anxiety without any side effects. So for countless people looking for a cure, effectively managing anxiety isn’t a pipe dream: it’s completely possible and safe with CBD.
Cut Down Treatment Time: Reductions in Anxiety After Just One Week of Use
CBD works in the human body by interacting with the endocannabinoid system to regulate our moods, stress response, and sleep. It also influences 5-HT1A receptor signaling, which is responsible for calming anxiety as well as calming our moods. For these reasons and more, CBD is often compared to SSRIs, which are among the most popular classes of pharmaceutical drugs prescribed to treat anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders.
Unfortunately, many people aren’t receptive to the effects of SSRIs. And even if they do work, their effects aren’t felt until weeks - sometimes, even months after the first dose. SSRI’s are notorious for taking a significantly long time to work since the brain needs time to adjust to the medications, recalibrate its serotonin production, and build new neural connections for it to all work.
The good news is that CBD can work in a much faster time. A recent study even showed that using CBD for as little as a week was effective enough for dramatically reducing anxiety. For the study, which was researched and written by scientists from the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and conducted at McLean Hospital, 12 adults participated, all of whom had moderate to severe anxiety. They were all tasked to abstain from cannabis use before starting, and to continue abstaining throughout the 7-week trial period.
Once the trials began, they self-administered CBD twice a day for 6 weeks, consuming a total of 30 mg per day. After just a week of starting, the subjects already began acknowledging improvements in anxiety symptoms which included mood, sleep, cognition, and memory. The researchers noted that there were no serious or adverse effects.
“Results from this open-label clinical trial provide evidence that a hemp-derived, full-spectrum, high-CBD product similar to those currently available in the marketplace may be both safe and efficacious for the treatment of anxiety,” they wrote.
“In the present study, dramatic reductions in anxiety occurred following just one week of treatment with the study product,” the authors also wrote. They added that the first course of treatments typically prescribed for anxiety, such as SSRIs, usually takes weeks for its effects to be felt. This is incredibly promising especially for patients whose anxiety is so severe that waiting for a medication to take effect, for weeks or months, can dramatically affect one’s quality of life. Now, you can opt for CBD.
“Findings from this clinical trial provide preliminary evidence that use of this proprietary hemp-derived, full-spectrum, high-CBD sublingual product may result in clinical improvement with few side effects in patients with moderate-to-severe anxiety, extending previous work suggesting CBD may be efficacious for anxiety,” reads the paper.
Furthermore, the safety of CBD for treating many conditions, including anxiety, has been proven time and again. The results of a recent clinical trial, which was published in the Asian Journal of Psychiatry, once again echoes many other studies that solidify the safety and efficacy of this cannabinoid.
Researchers analyzed the effects of 150 mg/mL of CBD against placebo among 178 patients who were diagnosed with anxiety. They were either given a placebo, or CBD, which they then consumed for 15 weeks. The investigators reported that the “CBD oral solution showed therapeutic efficacy, excellent safety, and tolerability in treating not only mild to moderate anxiety disorders, but also associated depression and disturbances in sleep quality with no incidences of withdrawal anxiety upon dose tapering and at the end of treatment,” they wrote.
CONCLUSION
Over the past 5 years, CBD’s popularity as an anti-anxiety treatment has continued to gain momentum. Not surprisingly, given its efficacy; it isn’t just snake oil, nor does it promise a quick fix - it actually works.
Additionally, using CBD offers a fundamentally different approach compared to pharmaceutical drugs. Instead of suppressing symptoms or covering up the root cause, CBD actually supports the nervous system and the other systems in place that help us regulate stress while restoring emotional balance. CBD improves your overall wellness without the harmful tradeoffs from pharmaceutical drugs: emotional numbness, sedation, dependency, withdrawals, insomnia, sexual dysfunction, and much more.
CBD is simply gentler yet it works so well. That said, CBD is not a cure-all, but if you’ve been curious about something new to treat your anxiety, give it a try. CBD may not yet replace pharmaceuticals for everyone, but clearly its growing popularity represents a shift in anxiety treatments. It’s no longer just an alternative but rather a holistic philosophy for overall well-being.
CBD OIL FOR ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION, READ ON...
