Does CBD Help With Anxiety?
- Written by Emily Volovitz
Anxiety is one of the most challenging mental illnesses to manage. You're not given a lot of support, told that "everyone has anxiety" or that you're just thinking too much.
Those who have experienced the disorder know that it's not something that can just be willed away. A person has to work very hard on their psychology to come to peace with the condition, and medication can help but it's often addictive or dangerous.
Finding an effective and natural way to treat anxiety can be tough. You might have seen CBD products and wondered "does CBD help with anxiety?"
It's an option that many people use and find relief from, but how does it work and will it help you? We're going to take a look at some CBD benefits today, focusing on its relationship to anxiety.
Does CBD Help With Anxiety?
There are a lot of secondary benefits of CBD that address the issue of anxiety. We'll get to those a little bit later in the article, but we'll first take a look at how the endocannabinoid system works to manage the nervous system.
The endocannabinoid system exists in the body to maintain equilibrium in the system. Throughout the body, cannabinoid receptors are present to try and manage things like immune response, nervous system function, hunger, pain responses, and more.
All of these systems exist to keep the individual in a state of harmony. When a virus enters the system, the immune system kicks in to take it out. When a person needs the energy to survive, hunger enters the equation.
When something is causing pain, the pain response alerts the individual to that threat. The nervous system exists to aid all of those functions and more. In some cases, the nervous system can be overexcited and cause more stimulation than the individual would like.
Stress, Anxiety, and CBD
Distress, or just "stress" as we call it colloquially, is a response to stimuli that is disproportionate. For example, we might get stressed when we notice our house is dirty.
There's a small amount of positive stress (this is called eustress) needed to prompt the person to clean the house. The appropriate amount of motivation is there to help us get by and push us to complete tasks.
When the situation is outmatched by the stress, we go into eustress. We might have a panic attack thinking about the dirty house or hold far too much stress or anxiety about it.
Anxiety has a similar function. Anxiousness tends to come in response to certain thoughts or stimuli. In many cases, it's the result of an overactive amygdala or other chemical imbalance in the brain.
It can also develop in the wake of a lot of distress. In all cases, though, the emotion associated with anxiety is disproportionate to the situation at hand.
CBD prompts the endocannabinoid system to manage those stress responses from the central nervous system. It effectively reduces the stress response. It also reduces contributing factors like blood pressure, fear, paranoia, and other elements that might contribute to anxiety.
Secondary Anxiety Benefits
Anxiety is also contributed to by a number of other factors. For example, the lack of sleep might leave a person in the mental space to have anxiety. Chronic pain and the consequences of that pain might also have the same effect.
People can experience heightened stress responses when they don't have an appetite or when they're depressed. All of the symptoms described above can be benefited by the use of CBD products in the right dosage.
There's no telling whether or not it will work for your specific situation, but it can work for those conditions. Issues like lack of sleep and depression are all very complex.
Those things occur for a number of reasons, some of which might be more powerful than others. As a result, it's never possible to say that CBD will "cure" your depression or your insomnia. It could very well help those things and leave you in a healthier state, though.
The same can be said about anxiety. The relief of those contributors to anxiety could reduce the experience of anxiety itself. There might also be a direct benefit to your anxiety through the use of CBD.
That said, mental illness is the result of numerous things both genetic and environmental. There are some individuals whose anxiety is the direct result of an inaccurate nervous system response. Those people might have more benefits than someone who has anxiety as the result of a traumatic experience.
What's The Difference Between CBD and THC?
Some people get caught up in the difference between CBD vs THC. If they both come from the same plant, why wouldn't both get you high?
Can CBD help with anxiety if you're a person who gets more anxious when they're high?
The beautiful thing about CBD is that it's a cannabinoid that's totally distinct from THC. They operate on different endocannabinoid receptors and produce different effects.
THC works more on CB1 receptors which interact with areas of the brain. CBD, on the other hand, leans more toward CB2 receptors which are related to the immune system, central nervous system, and other areas of the body.
There's an overlap in receptors between both, however. This doesn't matter in the case of CBD, though, because its chemical composition is different from THC. It doesn't get you high because it isn't a substance that can get a person high.
There might be some effects on the mind, but those tend to be secondary effects from the impact that CBD has on your body. You might feel relaxed because you're not in as much pain, for example. You can find out more at shrooms dispensary Canada.
Want to Get More Insight on CBD and Anxiety?
So, does CBD help with anxiety? It's a complicated thing to treat a mental illness, but there's a good chance that CBD could benefit a number of aspects that contribute to your anxiety.
There's a lot more to learn, though. We're here to help.
Explore our site for more ideas on CBD, what it can treat, how it works, and much more.
Written by Emily Volovitz
CBD ReThink
