Anxiety is not generally something you want to treat with prescription medication. It's not that prescription medications are bad necessarily - although there are several side effects and addiction risk that make them less than ideal. The problem is that they don't actually cure the problem.

Natural treatments are much more preferable. Their advantage is that they not only treat anxiety - they also give you an opportunity to relieve anxiety without medications someday in the future. They cause no dependency, no side effects, and using them doesn't impact your ability to learn valuable coping strategies.

Herbal solutions are more common, but some nutrients may be beneficial for anxiety as well. One that has received some promising result is Magnesium.

Magnesium - The Formerly Common Mineral

Magnesium used to be an abundant mineral found in numerous foods. But over time, food processing practices essentially stripped magnesium out of most diets, causing numerous people to be magnesium deficient.

Magnesium plays a role in over 300 different chemical reactions in the body, and many studies have shown that a deficiency in magnesium contributes to several mental health problems, including anxiety.

Most people know how important calcium is to bone health, but what few realize is that magnesium is arguably equally as important, and balances out calcium to ensure a working body.

Magnesium Deposits and Stress

Several studies have also looked how stress levels affect magnesium. They found that during periods of extreme stress, magnesium is often used up by the body.

That means that not only is a significant portion of the country magnesium deficient, potentially leading to anxiety - there may also be a high number of people that use up their magnesium reserves as a result of their anxiety, thus contributing to more anxiety and more stress.