What Supplements Are Good for Anxiety? Best Supplements To Support Your Recovery

What supplements are good for anxiety is one of the most looked up questions on the internet. With the increase in the number of mental health issues across the world, an intervention to control the symptoms is the need of the hour.  

Moreover, with the awareness that is spreading regarding complete nutrition, it is important to learn where does mental health benefits from these supplements? This article dives into the nutritional benefits a person with anxiety can reap through supplements.  

Supplements And Their Journey to Mental Wellness

Before answering what supplements are good for anxiety, it is important to learn what supplements are and their role in human health. Let’s dive right into it.  

Supplements are any food stuff that supports the primary nutrition we get from our meals. This is the simple version of supplements. The more technical version of its definition is: Supplements contain herbs, vitamins, amino acids, enzymes and botanicals that can support the overall health of an individual.  

Dietary supplements contain active ingredients along with other ingredients such as binders, fillers and flavorings. That is not always a good thing, however, sometimes flavorings are needed to cover the natural smell of the active ingredients. This makes the supplement more palatable, allowing picky eaters to obtain complete nutrition.   

It is important to speak to your doctor, no matter if they are a psychiatrist or primary care provider. Unless you are prescribed a supplement by a professional, consuming these supporting elements can do more harm than good.   

Supplements are available in various forms such as tablets, capsules, powders drinks and even gummies! These different formulas help the consumer meet their requirements in a way that is comfortable for them to ingest.  

Supplements found their way in the human diet in the early 1930s when a yeast-extract vitamin B complex was available. This was followed by a boom in the mass production of multivitamins and supplements. This was helpful in controlling the rise in vitamin deficiencies within the population.  

During that time, it was on the rise, causing severe issues in people, more in children. These supplements were able to fill the dietary gaps that were showing up during that time. How does it find its way into mental health? Let’s explore that!  

Supplements And Mental Health  

Supplements are vitamins and minerals. We’ve gotten to that point now. Vitamins and mental health wellbeing find a connection through the role the former play in relaying chemical messengers.  

Supplements have an important role in mental wellness. The usual vitamins and supplements that we consume for physical health also support our mental wellbeing. For example, Vitamin D or the sunshine vitamin has a significant role in improving bone health. However, it is also great for brain health.  

These evidence of vitamin’s impact on the overall mental wellbeing has come from years of research on mental illness. Mental illness has always been plaguing the populace, but the research into how it can be made better has only now picked up speed.  

Specifically, the impact of vitamins and food. This is how we now have the impact of supplements on mental health, specifically their role in improving issues such as anxiety.  

What supplements are good for anxiety can have several answers, there are natural supplements that can work wonders, alternatively there are also synthetic supplements. The following section will investigate the different supplements that are good for anxiety.  

Another example of how supplements can improve overall mental health is the role of B-complex vitamins. B-complex vitamins have a key role in boosting the consumer’s mood. The action of B-complex vitamins can be complex to understand, so we would keep it for another discussion.   

What Supplements Are Good for Anxiety: Answered.

Finally! Here’s the entire list of supplements that can help you improve your symptoms of anxiety. A supplement can contain just one vitamin or a mix of various vitamins (multivitamin supplement.) Vitamins and minerals can benefit people experiencing mood disorders such as anxiety.  

The following list shows all the supplements that can help in alleviating the symptoms of anxiety:  

1. Magnesium  

An essential mineral, magnesium is known to improve the symptoms of anxiety through its effect on the stress response. Magnesium plays a role in the body’s response to stress, which is one of the prominent manifestations of anxiety.  

Magnesium supplements have an overall beneficial effect on people with anxiety. In a recent study, it was found that magnesium supplements are good for people with anxiety. The research reflects on the effect of magnesium supplements on people with anxiety, also suggesting deeper research into the effectiveness of magnesium supplements.  

2. B vitamin supplements  

Another suggestion for What supplements are good for anxiety comes B vitamins such as vitamins B6, B9 and B12. These help in the synthesis of neurotransmitters that can directly impact mood. This helps in regulating the mood and cognitive function.  

Your physician will be able to conduct a comprehensive nutritional analysis to know what vitamin deficiency/-ies you may have. As we already have seen in the above sections, vitamins can play a role in enhancing or disrupting our mental wellness. Thus, a deficiency in vitamin B can negatively impact your body’s ability to regulate your mood.  

It can also hamper your cognitive function which can lead to other symptoms of aggravating anxiety. Ensuring adequate levels of vitamin B will help the individual with anxiety manage their symptoms in a better way.  

3. Omega-3 fatty acids  

Omega-3 fatty acids are one of the healthy fats that help maintain an overall healthy cardiovascular health. There are also other health benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, including its positive impact on people with anxiety.  

Omega-3 fatty acid supplements can be helpful in supporting the overall mental wellbeing. This is through its anti-inflammatory action that can help improve the high levels of inflammation that a person with anxiety experiences. As severe stress can activate the HPA or the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, it plays a role in triggering anxiety.  

4. Vitamin D 

Vitamin D is another great option for people with anxiety as it plays a key role in regulating mood. Mood regulation is one of the most important aspects of keeping a healthy mental wellbeing. We know that happy hormones such as serotonin and melatonin help in keeping our emotional and mental wellbeing at its best.  

An increase in these hormones through the action of vitamin D helps in improving the mood of a person with anxiety. This in turn, helps provide stability to the overall emotional wellbeing.  

5. L-theanine  

L-theanine is an amino acid that works as an anti-anxiety agent. The amino acid is known to have significant impact in lowering the stress response. In addition, the amino acid improves anxiety symptoms through increasing the alpha waves.  

The supplement is known to improve calm contentment, reducing stress and anxiety.  

6. Chamomile  

Another one of the supplements that is good for people with anxiety, chamomile, has calming effects. The dietary supplementation of chamomile can help in improving the symptoms of General Anxiety Disorder.  

With the use of chamomile, you can see a drastic difference in the symptoms of anxiety. Several studies investigating the effects of supplements have found that chamomile also has a positive impact on the anxiety symptoms an individual experiences.  

7. Multivitamin 

Multivitamin supplement becomes a broad suggestion for what supplements are good for anxiety. If the list is overwhelming, thinking so many vitamins must be taken together, don’t worry. You can request your physician to prescribe a multivitamin that has all the right vitamins for you.  

However, their opinion on this is of utmost importance as they will study your reports and have a complete idea of your health reports.  

Multivitamins also do not interfere with other anxiety medications so you will not face any difficulty in continuing it with your prescription. In addition, multivitamins (if it was not already evident) contain different composition of ingredients.  

So, your physician will be able to suggest a multivitamin that has the necessary amount of vitamins that will be necessary for your wellbeing.

8. Valerian root 

Another one of the options that are good for you, Valerian root is the 8^th answer to what supplements are good for anxiety. This root is proven to have great calming effects on the consumer, thus proving to be helpful for people with anxiety.  

A recent study found that the use of valerian root was beneficial for the participants, where participants felt at ease with their symptoms of anxiety related to post-menopause.  

However, you must exercise caution with its use, and be sure to follow your doctor’s advice.  

Wrapping It Up!

In conclusion, what supplements are good for anxiety required a discussion of supplements and what is anxiety. The article dives into the relation between supplements and mental health and issues like anxiety.  

Due to the article’s limitation, there were aspects lightly discussed (such as the action of vitamins in depth). If you would like us to discuss the article in depth, let us know in the comments below!