Everyone feels anxious at one point or another, but this anxiety becomes debilitating when its associated symptoms start to impede a person’s ability to function normally every day.

General anxiety disorder (GAD) is often characterized by excessive worry. The worry may be with or without any actual basis, and someone suffering from GAD will struggle with controlling this overwhelming worry.

Anxiety can be caused by a number of things, like your genes, life experiences, and even the chemistry of your brain.

Usual treatments for anxiety

In the United States, anxiety disorders are the most common health problem, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, with around forty million individuals, or 18.1 percent of the entire population, affected yearly.

There are a number of treatment options available, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, which focuses on retraining a patient’s behavior and way of thinking and setting goals to achieve this change.

Anxiolytics, or anti-anxiety medicines, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and benzodiazepines, are also an option. SSRIs, for example, prevent the reabsorption of serotonin, a hormone that affects a person’s mood and certain social behaviors, by some cells in the brain. This, in turn, increases the amount of serotonin. Benzodiazepines ameliorate the effect of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), the neurotransmitter that is in charge of reducing brain activities that cause anxiety or stress.

Marijuana as an alternative anxiolytic

An increasingly popular form of treatment is cannabis, more commonly known as marijuana.

In states like Florida, North Dakota, and Arkansas, marijuana can be used for medicinal purposes. Colorado, Washington and the District of Columbia, Oregon, and Alaska allow the use of marijuana for recreational purposes. Elsewhere in the States, however, cannabis use may be illegal, substance abuse and addiction being the primary reasons. Employers can discriminate against cannabis consumers using drug tests that are difficult to “beat.”

What creates the high? Cannabinoids, such as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), the active components of marijuana. THC is the primary psychoactive chemical and produces the psychological effects when smoked, vaporized, or ingested.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, THC activates and attaches itself to the brain’s cannabinoid receptors, which are responsible for how a person perceives time, feels pleasure, remembers, thinks, and moves.

THC triggers the release of dopamine, a hormone responsible for the brain’s reward and pleasure center. As a result, someone who is using marijuana will experience euphoria. Meanwhile, CBD relieves anxiety by blocking the breakdown of the chemicals responsible for one’s mood and pain.

Studies on cannabis and anxiety

Marijuana’s reputation for being addictive may create some hesitation among anxiety patients, but a 2016 study by Canabo Medical Inc. , a Canadian operator of cannabis clinics, found that “40 percent of patients who were prescribed medical cannabis to treat pain and anxiety eliminated the use of benzodiazepines within 90 days.”

However, the figure changed to 45 percent within a year of patients using cannabis treatment. A 2014 study by an international group of researchers at Vanderbilt University discovered that the brain makes its own endocannabinoids, and this recent finding “could be highly important for understanding how cannabis exerts its behavioral effects,” according to Dr. Sachin Patel, the senior author of the paper and a professor of psychiatry and of molecular physiology and biophysics at the said university.

With that in mind, there’s a rising possibility of legalizing marijuana in the U.S.

A word of caution

As with any other medication, anyone who uses marijuana for therapeutic purposes should use it in moderation.

One should exercise caution and, when the need arises, check the levels of THC in the body with the use of a home marijuana test kit.

Because the field of cannabis study is fairly young and requires more research, medical experts vary in their opinion on using marijuana as an anxiolytic. It does not necessarily replace other therapies and often works as a complementary treatment.

Marijuana may have its own potential side effects just as much as the usual anxiety medications may have, including numbness, dizziness, sleepiness, headaches or dysphoria, among others.

The cannabis strain used, as well as a person’s preexisting conditions and tolerance for drugs, can influence how one feels after having smoked pot or eaten cannabis-laced food.

General anxiety disorder is a delicate mental-health problem to address. Extreme discretion and professional medical help are always advised.

As long as the added burden of legal risks, social stigma and discrimination are applied to cannabis patients, coping with employee drug testing leaves people scrambling to protect their jobs and careers.