Anxiety Medication

With the prevalence of anxiety in today’s modern society, anxiety medications are also becoming more prevalent. However, benzodiazepines, including Klonopin, Xanax, Valium and Ativan have remained perhaps the number one medications of choice for practitioners, as long as they can be used short-term, because benzodiazepines can be habit forming.

Alcohol should also be avoided when taking benzodiazepines, and those taking them may also develop a tolerance for them, so that greater doses are needed over time to achieve the same effect.

Most practitioners strive to start patients on medication short-term, to help them feel better and alleviate some of their symptoms, while behavior therapy to help patients begin to confront and soothe their own anxiety symptoms is started.

Because behavior therapy takes a while to work, medications can often be used as a stopgap, to alleviate the worst anxiety symptoms, so that patients can feel better and still function.

This is why benzodiazepines often work, because most of the time, anti anxiety medication doesn’t have to be taken long term. In the event these cannot be taken, antidepressant medications also are used with considerable success in alleviating anxiety disorders, as are, notably, beta-blockers, which are normally used for high blood pressure.

Once a suitable antianxiety medication has been chosen, patients are then started on behavioral therapy, to help them cope with their symptoms. They are also taught coping techniques, such as deep breathing and visualization.

Interestingly, instead of the more popular and better-known reality-based “immersion therapy,” virtual reality therapy is now being used to expose patients to things that make them feel anxious. This is a little simpler, and perhaps faster because it can be done more quickly, than traditional immersion therapy may be.

As with therapy for social phobia, however, therapists often expose patients to that which they fear most, and then teach them coping mechanisms to help them confront and know that they can handle their fears.

Diet, proper nutrition, proper sleep, and rebalancing a patient’s life so that stress triggers are minimized may also be helpful. Anxiety may in part be prevalent today because of a sort of “societal overload” from all of the constant stimulation we must face, from 24-hour television to constant accessibility by our bosses and coworkers; it also seems that people who are “always busy” seem to be more important than those who are not, and this is pursued instead of balance. Therefore, we simply have no “downtime” as we used to have.

It is also possible that those with anxiety disorders always existed (and in fact, this is probably true, since anxiety tends to have genetic as well as environmental factors) but that they simply have not been as visible as they are now.

Nevertheless, given the fact that approximately 40 million Americans suffer from some kind of anxiety disorder at any given time, it is most likely that this is a larger problem than it used to be, even when taking into consideration that there is a larger population of Americans in existence than was true in previous decades.

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