March 3, 2026Wellness

Stress and Anxiety: The unnoticed Epidemic

What is stress and why does it impact us so much in our daily lives? How Ashwagandha helps you in stress management?

Stress: The silent killer of the 21st century

The terms “stress”, “depression” and “mental health” have become so common nowadays that it would not be surprising to find them to be the most googled medical terminologies.

Before discussing further, let us understand what do we mean by stress. According to the World Health Organisation, stress is explained as a mental tension caused by adverse environmental conditions.

Stress is different from anxiety although they are used in a similar context. Stress improves performance levels in moderate amounts, however, excessive stress is very harmful and often occurs due to work or peer pressure or challenging situations at home. Currently, many educational institutions have reported school children to be in constant stress of academic performance so much so that extracurricular activities get ignored at academic levels. With increasing age, this stress increases tension causing anxiety which directly shoots up cortisol in men and women causing hormonal imbalance. This disrupts the normal sleeping pattern and causes restlessness instructing the body to go into “flight” mode 24*7.

A Global warning

Before diving into the worldwide impact of stress on every other person on this planet, let's go through some quick facts about Anxiety and Stress

Women are affective more by anxiety than men
Younger people especially in the age bracket of 16-29 years have been most likely to have some kind of anxiety
According to 31 nation Ipsos Global advisor study, 1 out of 2 urban Indians have felt stressed to the extent that have a negative impact on their daily living.
Stress is known be a major targeting factor contributing to Non communicable diseases and behavioural abnormalities

How does stress affect us ?

People having stress experience excessive fear or worry about any situation be it social or regular life. Some distinct symptoms of constant stress or anxiety are as follows:

Difficulty in concentrating, or decision making
Feeling a sense of irritation, tension or restlessness
Experiencing nausea or abdominal stress
Heart palpitation
Sleeping issues
Sense of impending danger panic or doom

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Ashwaganda: The ancient antidote to stress

Ashwagandha is known widely for its role in stress management and have been used for years. Considering its effect on the nervous system, Ashwagandha works in various ways which can be summarised as follows:

Ashwagandha has been shown to have antioxidant effects, enhancing the growth of new brain cells and controlling stress through modulation of the Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal or HPA axis (Dipankar et al., 2025).
Ashwagandha also have anxiolytic and antidepressant effects during animal testing as it impacts gamma aminobutyric acid signalling, altering the monoamine pathyways, blocking the damaging effect of glutamate of the brain when in stress (Srivastava et al., 2024).
Consumption of Ashwagandha have been associated with lower anxiety, few cases of sleep disturbances concluding its effect on stress related neurological diseases (Maideen et al., 2022).
Following preclinical data, withanolides have been found to boost brain plasticity which allows for long term potentiation improving tasks requiring spatial memory (None Aqsa et al., 2024).
Ashwagandha also helps create new nerve cells in the hippocampus important for learning and memory when people get older. Furthermore researchers have found that healthy patients with mid cognitive impairment has shown better working memory, executive function as well as processing speed after consuming this in the clinical trials (Xing et al., 2022).

References

Dipankar, S. P., Dani, M. M., Anirudhan, R., Tripathi, D., Mishra, C., & Devi, S. H. (2025). Pharmacological Insights Into Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera): A Review of Its Immunomodulatory and Neuroprotective Properties. Cureus. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.89856 '
Maideen, N. M. P., Balasubramaniam, R., Manavalan, G., Balasubramanian, K., Nivedhitha S, Thirumal M, & Kumar S, V. (2022). An Insight of Clinical Evidences of Ayurveda Interventions in the Management of COVID-19 Patients. Infectious Disorders - Drug Targets, 22. https://doi.org/10.2174/1871526522666220321152504
Aqsa, Ali, S., Summer, M., Yousaf, S., Laiba Nazakat, & Noor, S. (2024). Pharmacological and immunomodulatory modes of action of medically important phytochemicals against arthritis: A molecular insight. Molecular Biology Reports, 51(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11033-024-09386-9
Srivastava, A., Ahmad, R., Yadav, K., Siddiqui, S., Trivedi, A., Misra, A., Mehrotra, S., Ahmad, B., & Ali Khan, M. (2024). An update on existing therapeutic options and status of novel anti-metastatic agents in breast cancer: Elucidating the molecular mechanisms underlying the pleiotropic action of Withania somnifera (Indian ginseng) in breast cancer attenuation. International Immunopharmacology, 136, 112232. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intimp.2024.112232
Xing, D., Yoo, C., Gonzalez, D., Jenkins, V., Nottingham, K., Dickerson, B., Leonard, M., Ko, J., Faries, M., Kephart, W., Purpura, M., Jäger, R., Sowinski, R., Rasmussen, C. J., & Kreider, R. B. (2022). Effects of Acute Ashwagandha Ingestion on Cognitive Function. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(19), 11852. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191911852