One of my long term goals is to set up holistic rehab facilities for patients withdrawing from psychiatric medications. What I have witnessed, in my practice, around bezodiazepine (“anti-anxiety”) medication dependence has 
been sobering. There is, finally, an emerging acknowledgement that antidepressants are habit forming, but medications like Xanax and Valium have been known to be addictive for many decades. Nonetheless, unsuspecting patients are written prescriptions for months to years on end. There are entire websites devoted to supporting patients in their journey off these medications which loose effect and incur short and long-term side effects.
Better Than Xanax
One of the most powerful solutions to anxiety, particularly when it is bodily in nature (racing heart, sweating, muscle tension, stomach discomfort, headache), is blood sugar stabilization. Reactive hypoglycemia masquerades as anxiety and panic attacks, particularly in women.
In the absence of a physiologic driver, anxiety can be important. It is a signal of imbalance. A signal of a need for inner focus. A signal of a need for growth, for change. When we can react less and meet that anxiety with a watching eye, shifts can happen.
3 Safe Ways to Chill
Here are three relatively quick fixes that serve to promote that subtle resilience, to take the edge off, so that this symptom can be better examined.
1. Breath This Way
An ancient technology for nervous system adjustment, yoga, and specifically Kundalini yoga, offers quick, efficient tools. Here are some simple instructions fromkundaliniwomen.org:
Left Nostril Breathing: Relax
Description: Left nostril breathing activates the Ida Nerve Ending in the left nostril, which relates to calmness and relaxation. Left nostril breathing is associated with the moon energy, which is changeable, feminine, yin, giving, and cool. Breathing through the left nostril for five minutes can calm you and lower your blood pressure.
Breath: Sit in Easy Pose. Close your right nostril with your right thumb, your other fingers are stretched straight up as antennas. Your left hand is in Gyan Mudra (illustration) on your left knee. Close your eyes and concentration at your 3rd Eye. Begin to breathe long and deep only through your left nostril. Continue for three minutes.
2. Drink This
Because our diets are typically heavy in methionine-rich muscle meats, we miss out on the abundant glycine in bones and connective tissues. Studied in randomized trials for sleep, and active at the NMDA receptor, glycine is an amino acid with calming properties.
Use grass-fed gelatin in warm liquids or hydrolyzed collagen in cold, start with one tablespoon, up to two. It’s flavorless!
3. Soak Here
Who has time for a bath? Half of my Manhattan patients don’t even have a bath tub, or they use it as a guest bed. Structuring a bath into the end of a stressful day is an act of self care, and can also double as a mineral cure for anxiety. Epsom salt, or magnesium sulfate, is readily absorbed through the skin, getting to work on optimizing detoxification and cellular function. Often called the “relaxation mineral”, magnesium is calming to the sympathetic nervous system.
Add two cups of Epsom Salts to filtered bath water and soak for 20 minutes.
Supporting your body and mind through dis-ease offers you the opportunity to take a mindful look at symptoms and states, so that necessary changes can be made and that which is not serving us can be willfully released. Don’t fight yourself, because the body and mind fight back. There’s a gentler way.
By Dr Kelly Brogan M.D.