”Self-medication of anxiety symptoms with alcohol, other drugs or both has been a plausible mechanism for the co-occurrence of anxiety disorders and substance use disorders,” the authors write as background information to a report in the August issue of Archives of General...

People who self-medicate — that is, to use alcohol or drugs to reduce unwanted feelings or anxiety — are at greater risk for a later substance abuse problem, according to a new study. Self-medicating also appears to up the risk for social phobia in people with anxiety. People typically...

Panic attacks that seem to strike sufferers out-of-the-blue are not without warning after all, according to new research.  A study based on 24-hour monitoring of panic sufferers while they went about their daily activities captured panic attacks as they happened and discovered waves of...

Training teenagers to look at social situations positively could help those with anxiety and may help prevent problems persisting into adult life, new research from Oxford University is beginning to suggest. The researchers found that tasks designed to prompt either positive or negative...

Regular exercise may be a useful strategy for helping prevent the development of panic and related disorders, a new study suggests. People with an intense fear of the nausea, racing heart, dizziness, stomachaches and shortness of breath that accompany panic — known as “high...

 A big part of coping with life is having a flexible reaction to the ups and downs. Now, a study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people choose to respond differently depending on how...

Just like everyone else, people with panic disorder have real stress in their lives. They get laid off and they fight with their spouses. How such stresses affect their panic symptoms hasn’t been well understood, but a new study by researchers at Brown University presents the...

Yoga has a greater positive effect on a person’s mood and anxiety level than walking and other forms of exercise, which may be due to higher levels of the brain chemical GABA according to an article in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal...

Substance abuse can lead to anxiety disorders, and vice versa. Either way, both problems need to be managed and treated together. While substance abuse is serious enough on its own, users run the additional risk of developing an anxiety disorder as a side effect of abusing drugs or alcohol....

Alcohol is a depressant. People with panic attack are more vulnerable to the effect of these chemicals. When a person drinks during an attack, he or she tends to worsen the condition. Read more about this here. Most people are not aware whether alcohol and panic attacks have any...