A Natural Way to Treat Anxiety

Your brain, in a manner of speaking, vibrates. It operates in frequencies that we refer to as brain waves. There are four of these—delta, theta, alpha and beta. Delta are the lowest frequency waves, at about four pulses per second, and are active when you are asleep. Theta waves, at four to seven pulses per second, are a sign of somnolence, a fancy term for being half asleep. Alpha waves, at seven to thirteen pulses per second, indicate that you are awake and alert, with your mind open to your creative capacities. Beta waves are the fastest—thirteen to sixteen pulses per second—and show that you are completely alert or, at the upper end, anxious.

During normal waking hours, alpha brainwaves represent your default mental status. When you are emotionally upset—anxious, frightened, angry—and your beta waves have been running the show for a while, your brain will start producing extra amounts of a chemical known as gamma-aminobutyric acid, GABA for short, which locks into the neuroreceptor sites in your brain and calms things down.

If you take your anxiety to a physician, you are likely to leave the doctor’s office with a prescription for a tranquilizer. What happens when you take that drug is that it fills up the same neuroreceptor spaces that GABA would fill. Once again, you calm down, but only until the drug wears off. So you take some more, and it works for a while, then wears off again, so you take more. After a period of time, as we know, your body habituates, and the drug is less effective, so you need a larger dose. That starts a vicious cycle that ends with the drug not working at all.

That is only part of the bad news. Another problem is that, after you have been taking anti-anxiety drugs for a while, your body begins to lose the ability to produce its own natural, home-grown tranquilizer—GABA—the same way people who depend on laxatives lose the ability to have a normal bowel movement, and the way taking testosterone supplements weakens a body’s ability to create its own male hormone.

In too many cases, when a tranquilizer loses its effectiveness, the response is to go back to the physician, get a prescription for a different tranquilizer drug, and start the same, sad trip all over again.

There is a better way. It’s called hypnosis. Our next blog will take a look at why hypnosis and hypnotherapy offer a much more powerful, and permanent, solution to the problem of anxiety.