Ashwagandha and Anxiety
What is Ashwagandha?
Ashwagandha is best known for its usage in Ayurveda, a system of ancient medicine from India. While it has been used for hundreds of years, it is still often considered an "alternative" style medicine. However, recent studies are showing that ashwagandha may have a legitimate place as a natural, safe, but powerful supplement that has many proven benefits.
Ashwagandha is most commonly consumed in powder or pill form that consists of the ground up root of the plant. It is often taken as a sleep aid or as part of general "wellness", but we are seeing that it has other very real benefits when it comes to muscle growth, stress hormone regulation, and healthy brain function.
Ashwagandha for Anxiety
When your body experiences stressors, both physical or mental, it releases a hormone called cortisol. Modern humans tend to have chronically increased cortisol levels from stresses of daily life. When cortisol - along with other stress hormones - are elevated, they turn on your "fight or flight" response. This makes your body stop working on other functions and just work on decreasing stress. Over time with elevated cortisol levels, your body continually neglects necessary functions that help regulate all the other systems of the body. Chronically increased cortisol levels are linked to anxiety, depression, digestive problems, weight gain, heart disease, sleep problems, and more. (Mayo Clinic).
Ashwagandha is proven to decrease and help regulate cortisol back to normal levels. So it's safe to say that ashwagandha can be used as a tool to help prevent all of those symptoms of chronically elevated cortisol (anxiety, depression, weight gain, etc.).
However, ashwagandha may help fight anxiety even beyond decreasing cortisol levels!
A study in 2012 had participants rank their perceived stress, anxiety, and depression on a scale of 1 to 40. Over the next 60 days, half of the group was given a placebo while the other half was given full spectrum ashwagandha root. The placebo group had a small decrease in perceived stress (5.5%) while the ashwagandha group had a massive decrease... 44%!
In fact, by day 60 there was a significant reduction in the ashwagandha group for depression and anxiety as well, 77% for depression, and 75.6% for anxiety.
Decreasing Stressors
Ashwagandha isn't a cure-all or miracle tool for anxiety and stress. You won't take it and magically feel amazing immediately. However, studies are showing that it can be an extremely useful tool ALONG WITH working to decrease daily stressors to help bring your body back to optimal functioning. As humans in modern society we will still feel stress and anxiety, but some of the negative effects of it can be mitigated by adding this natural root to your daily routine.
Our ashwagandha is as natural as it gets. We are dedicated to bringing you the safest and most honest product we can make. We take it ourselves and have seen how it has helped us, and we want our customers to experience these same benefits. Order Here!