There are a few anxiety remedies worth trying before turning to medication. These include meditation, deep breathing, and temporarily eliminating certain foods from your diet. However, less known causes of anxiety can be a lack of iron, thyroid problems, or low blood sugar, in which case it is recommended to carry out tests to discover possible irregularities.
Here are the top 9 remedies and a couple of them can even be causes (if not fixed) for anxiety that are worth trying before we take anxiolytics or, even to get rid of these drugs that, although practical, also have side effects.
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1. Low blood sugar (hypoglycemia)
When you have low blood sugar, it can lead to anxiety. This is what always happens when I eat something heavily processed with lots of simple carbs – my blood sugar goes up, then goes down a lot – at low blood sugar levels, I get overexcited, jittery, and anxious. Keep your blood sugar under control by what you eat.
2. You may have low hemoglobin
If you have low hemoglobin, it is good to correct it. That’s why it’s good to do a simple analysis – blood count – to be interpreted by a doctor. If you’re anemic, correct that anemia—and possibly correct your anxiety.
3. Lack of iron can cause anxiety
Iron deficiency is the most common cause of anemia – you see it on tests and correct it, either through lifestyle or supplements, or both. Iron deficiency can also be seen in simple analyses, such as the blood count, through the number of erythrocytes, their size, hematocrit (the total number of blood cells as a percentage), and hemoglobin concentration (how much hemoglobin carries an erythrocyte).
4. Hypothyroidism
This means you have low thyroid hormones. Hypothyroidism is one of the most common and underdiagnosed endocrine pathologies, but also a frequent cause of chronic anxiety.
Blood tests – high TSH, low T3, T4, and endocrinologist consultation with thyroid hormone replacement. It’s a shame to take anxiolytics for undiagnosed hypothyroidism when you can correct the hypothyroidism and get off the anxiolytics.
5. Cut back on processed food in order to fight anxiety
If it’s in a bag and has a lot of sugar, preservatives, and dyes, it’s not good. Pack your own fruits and vegetables at home and eat whole foods – the way they grow – with as little processing as possible.
6. Selectively remove these ingredients from your diet
Dyes, gluten, and artificial sweeteners like aspartame – can interact negatively with your microbiome, and that can be a cause of anxiety.
7. Don’t eat for a month the following
Bread, white flour, sugar, syrups, cookies, white rice and potatoes, pretzels – excess sugar can harm your brain, lead to those hypoglycemias I talked about above, and interact negatively metabolically, directly in the brain.
8. Meditate, pray, do breathing exercises regularly. These can be the best remedies when fighting anxiety
They have no adverse effects and can help you enormously; it’s probably just what your brain needs and the benefits are there whether you’re praying to something real or not (you get the point).
Read also about Which are the meditation benefits from an emotional point of view?
9. Simple breathing exercises to do constantly
4-4-8, meaning 4 seconds inhale, 4 seconds hold your breath, 8 seconds exhale.
In parallel, I highly recommend, for those with anxieties that hurt, that make you non-functional, therapy and a psychiatrist to cure the suffering. Anxiety can often have psychological causes, childhood trauma, etc., and the two above can help you with them.
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