This past week and a half I’ve had a lot of head and chest congestion and when that happens, it’s easy for me to let myself get backed up in my work. Much of what I do is by phone, so when I can’t do hours worth of calls each day, the work begins to pile up on me. When I’m feeling stressed and rushed and overwhelmed, that’s when I’m glad to know about natural, herbal alternatives like Valerian and St. John’s Wort, which affect the same brain pathways as anti-anxiety drugs like Xanax. Read more: “Valerian and St. John’s Wort for Anxiety: Relieving Anxiety and Depression with Mild Natural Herbs”.
A Psychology Today Article says St. John’s wort is often used for alleviating anxiety, stress, seasonal affective disorder, insomnia and depression. James Duke, an ethnobotanist and author of The Green Pharmacy calls it “simply the best herbal treatment for depression.” Like serotonin-reuptake inhibitors, St. John’s wort is believed to work by allowing more serotonin to linger in the brain, as low serotonin levels have been linked with depression. The herb may also lower levels of the protein interleukin-6. High levels of this protein are also associated with depression.
###
end of Psychology Today excerpt
I’ve known about Valerian for years and always carry it with me when I travel. I’ll take 3 tablets an hour before bed, each tablet is 800 mg standardized. Always get standardized, that ensures you will get an absorbable dosage as labelled. To me it’s the same as taking a Valium.
I began taking St. John’s Wort last year as a trial run, one 300mg standardized a day. The dosage is 3 per day but I’m not depressed, or even under much stress, I just wanted to see how St. John’s Wart affected me as an anxiety reliever. Within a week, I noticed that my sense of urgency in responding to emails and phone calls was diminished. I mean, I still returned calls and responded to emails, but I didn’t feel every moment I was relaxing that I should be checking email instead. I didn’t have thoughts of work running through my head 24/7. It felt okay to let six hours in a row go by without checking email. That’s called overnight to most people. I can tell the St. John’s Wort makes me more relaxed. I buy mine at a big discount online at www.vitacost.com.
I know I’m not alone in feeling rushed. I am a relatively mellow person. I do a lot in the course of my day, but there is seldom a sense of frantic rush about any of it. I know I am beginning to get stressed when I have thoughts of my To Do List racing through my head every waking moment. When I do things like, last Thursday when I felt a cold coming on, I rushed to get the magazine to press before I fell sick, in case I was going to.
I think that’s a survival reflex kicking in. When I feel my body going down for the count, instead of making myself rest like I tell everyone else to do, I rush to complete a bunch of work that no one but me knows is being done anyway. I may not still have this congestion had I simply rested at the first sniffle, ten days ago. What a brat I can be.
So if you find yourself with thoughts racing, a sense of urgency in getting it all done, a sense of things just falling in on you and overwhelming you, if you’re like me and don’t take any medications, try some natural herbal alternatives like Valerian and St. John’s Wort. It might just be the thing to take the edge off until you can get it all back under control again.
2017 Update: A Friend turned me on to GABA which many musicians use for performance anxiety. It seems helpful, it does relax the thoughts. I buy it from Vitacost here
Andrea