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Mental Health Make your anxiety better in two easy steps

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Middleway

Middleway

Ex-Bluelighter
Joined
Apr 10, 2007
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Give up caffeine
Give up Alcohol

Thats it, just give that shit up.

Both of these substances are strongly linked to adverse mental health outcomes in susceptible people

I cant find the links now but I have been reading a lot about caffeine and the latest research.

Basically there was a team of researchers who were studying caffeine and as a result of what they discovered, they all gave it up.

Any benefit you perceive caffeine gives you - waking you up, helping you to concentrate - once you are a daily user it only functions to bring you back to baseline from being in withdrawal.

New research from Johns Hopkins Medical School shows that performance increases due to caffeine intake are the result of caffeine drinkers experiencing a short-term reversal of caffeine withdrawal. By controlling for caffeine use in study participants, John Hopkins researchers found that caffeine-related performance improvement is nonexistent without caffeine withdrawal
Click to expand...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/travisb...-the-silent-killer-of-emotional-intelligence/

Especially give up coffee - when you drink coffee, it is not just caffeine, it is also harmaline alkaloids MAOI's that potentiate the caffeine and are psychoactive on their own.

If you have an anxiety disorder, you owe it to yourself to do at least a few weeks caffeine free.
Switch to hot chocolate or herbal teas - there is so much research linking caffeine and anxiety disorders.

Alcohol is even worse for some people. I don't know why it took me so many years to draw the link between my drinking and my mental health.

I finally realised that even one drink will make me feel depressed and anxious the next day and maybe the day after that.
Try it yourself, do a week without alcohol and then have one drink (only one) and notice your mental state the next day.

The hard thing is that both of these substances are so woven in with society and socialising that it is very hard to resist.
I haven't drank for around 4 months now and I feel much better for it.
I will drink again, but I will be paying close attention to how it effects me and if it is worth it.

Anyway, these are just some thoughts for you good people.
What is right for me, may not be for you but if you're struggling and suffering - give it a try
 
i think the answer could just be to give them up if you have a problems controlling ur usage of either of those substances

i find a coffee before work a few days a week helps make life less anxious and a couple beers a week also doesn't really effect me

moderations key to evrything
 
What I found with coffee is that it makes me calmer in the short term (ie, 20 minutes) after than I have hours of increased anxiety.

Everyone is different
 
iv been taking 400mg l-theanine morning and night and it makes it so u have less anxiety than usual on caffeine and more focused nd positive

pretty cheap i love it lots
 
For me, nothing beats centering myself mentally whether it is through meditation, breathing consciously or simply focusing on my physical sensations and taking the time to "notice" them. That break in the rapid-fire chatter of anxiety that my own mind produces is usually all it takes. I don't drink alcohol and though I do have a cup of coffee in the morning, I agree that it can contribute, especially for me if I have any more during the day. One cup, for me, seems to be OK.

Anxiety for me is such a habit. I have a way of coming up with everything that could possibly go wrong, etc. Right now, I am traveling by myself in a foreign country so I have been really doing this a lot. The other day, I literally just made myself stop and sit down and breathe. I recognized how there was actually nothing externally wrong--it was all in my head!
 
So if I give up alcohol and coffee my generalized anxiety disorder will go away? Yeah, ok.
 
nuttynutskin said:
So if I give up alcohol and coffee my generalized anxiety disorder will go away? Yeah, ok.
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I didn't say that - I said giving both these substances up will almost certainly improve an anxiety disorder. For myself, I found it was coffee more than caffeine per say.

I can see the difference straight away when I ditch coffee, with alcohol it is a bit harder. If you get rid of it for a couple of weeks and then have just one drink, and look at your mental state over the next day or 2 you can see if it makes a difference.

Plenty of research supporting both my arguments, couldn't be assed looking all over the net for it now
 
I think the effects of alcohol on anxiety are much larger than those of caffeine , although some people are particularily prone to bad reactions/ more side effects (poor metabolizers).
 
I've given up caffeine completely, alcohol is a bit harder. While it does help to give up both at the end of the day I can't justify giving up drinking completely since it doesn't help that much. Even giving up caffeine doesn't help that much it just keeps me from having panic attacks.
 
Middleway said:
I didn't say that - I said giving both these substances up will almost certainly improve an anxiety disorder.
Click to expand...

I had absolutely zero improvement to my anxieties after giving up caffeine and alcohol for more than 2 months. While these may be strongly linked to the mental health issues, that doesn't mean that everyone will react exactly the same. For some the anxiety will get worse. I know that for the first month of no caffeine my anxiety was made worse by the fact I was constantly fatigued and worried about the effect on my work.
 
since all of this information is pretty subjective and clearly varies from person to person, I am going to close this thread.

also, since many people are addicted to alcohol, giving it up to improve anxiety may not be as simple as it sounds. using caffeine sparingly will obviously help reduce anxiety because caffeine is a stimulant, and all stimulants can have stimulating effects -- just the opposite of what someone with anxiety needs.

I hope some people were/are able to benefit from your advice.
 
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