Natural Anxiety Relief: History and Origins

Unlike a single drug or a named protocol, "natural anxiety relief" has no inventor and no founding moment. It is a long, braided story made of many separate threads: the calming herbs that healers in different parts of the world reached for thousands of years ago; the slow effort of physicians to even name and define what we now call anxiety; the twentieth-century pioneers who built structured relaxation, meditation, and breathing methods; the Soviet scientists who coined the word "adaptogen"; and the laboratory researchers who finally began to explain, molecule by molecule, why a cup of chamomile or a long slow exhale can settle a racing mind. This article traces those threads honestly — naming real people and real dates where the record supports them, and saying plainly where a practice is ancient tradition, where it is genuinely effective, and where the science is still thin. There is no hero to crown here. The truthful history is that calm has been pursued, and partly understood, by countless cultures and many named investigators across a very long span of time.

Table of Contents

  1. Naming the Feeling: Anxiety Before It Had a Diagnosis
  2. Ancient and Traditional Calming Herbs
  3. From Melancholy to Diagnosis: Burton, Freud, and DSM-III
  4. The Relaxation Pioneers: Jacobson, Schultz, and Benson
  5. Meditation Enters the Clinic: Kabat-Zinn and MBSR
  6. The Adaptogen Idea: Lazarev and Brekhman
  7. The Biochemical Turn: GABA and the Tranquillizer Era
  8. Evidence and Reception: What the Research Actually Shows
  9. Research Papers and References
  10. Connections
  11. Featured Videos

Naming the Feeling: Anxiety Before It Had a Diagnosis

The first thing worth knowing about the history of natural anxiety relief is that, for most of recorded history, there was no word for the precise thing we are treating. The English word anxiety descends from the Latin anxietas, built on the verb angere (also written anguere), which literally means "to choke" or "to squeeze," and figuratively "to torment" or "cause distress." That buried image — a tightness in the throat and chest — is itself a remarkably accurate description of how anxiety feels in the body, and it tells us that people have recognised the sensation for a very long time even when they lacked a clinical name for it.

Ancient and pre-modern healers did not separate anxiety from the broader categories they used for low mood, fear, and nervous suffering. Symptoms we would now call anxiety were folded into ideas like the four humours, into "melancholy," and later into vague nineteenth-century labels such as neurasthenia ("nervous exhaustion") and pantophobia. This matters for the history of treatment: because the problem was understood as a general state of being depleted, agitated, or nervously worn down, the remedies offered for it were correspondingly general — calming herbs, rest, baths, diet, music, prayer, and quiet. In other words, the "natural" approaches came first, by many centuries, simply because they were the only approaches that existed.

Keeping this in view guards against a common mistake. When older sources say a herb was used "for the nerves" or "for melancholy," they are not making a modern claim that it treats Generalized Anxiety Disorder, a category that did not exist until 1980 (described below). They are recording that, within an older framework of health, the remedy was reached for when a person was distressed, restless, or sleepless. That is a real and useful historical fact — but it is a fact about tradition and usage, not a verdict on clinical effectiveness.

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Ancient and Traditional Calming Herbs

The oldest layer of natural anxiety relief is botanical, and several of the herbs still sold for calm today carry genuinely ancient pedigrees. Valerian (Valeriana officinalis) is the clearest example: its use as a calming and sleep-promoting remedy reaches back to classical antiquity. The Greek physician Dioscorides, in his first-century herbal De Materia Medica, and the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, in his Naturalis Historia, both describe the plant, and medieval European herbalists prized it so highly that they called it "all-heal." By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries valerian was among the most commonly used nervine remedies in Western herbal practice. This is a long, well-documented thread — though it is worth noting that traditional use across two thousand years is a reason to study a herb, not proof that it works for a modern anxiety disorder.

Chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla, also called Matricaria recutita) and lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) likewise have deep roots in European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern folk medicine as gentle remedies for restlessness, upset stomach, and sleeplessness — conditions that overlap heavily with what we now call anxiety. Lemon balm (Melissa officinalis), a Mediterranean member of the mint family, was recommended by medieval and Renaissance writers to "gladden the heart" and ease nervous complaints. These herbs spread along the same trade and monastery-garden routes that carried much of European herbal knowledge, and they survived into modern pharmacy precisely because so many generations found them mild and useful.

Other calming herbs come from outside the European tradition entirely. Passionflower (Passiflora incarnata) is native to the southeastern United States and was used by Indigenous peoples of the Americas before being adopted as a sedative and "nerve" remedy in European and North American herbalism. Kava (Piper methysticum) is a Pacific Island plant, central for centuries to the social and ceremonial life of communities across Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, where the root was prepared as a relaxing ceremonial drink long before Western science took an interest. And in South Asia, the Ayurvedic tradition classed ashwagandha (Withania somnifera) among its rasayana or rejuvenating tonics — it is named in the classical compendium the Charaka Samhita as a strengthening, restorative herb for the depleted and nervous. The honest summary of this whole layer is that many cultures, independently, discovered plants that seem to take the edge off agitation; the modern era inherited that discovery without inventing it.

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From Melancholy to Diagnosis: Burton, Freud, and DSM-III

Natural anxiety relief could only become a distinct field once anxiety itself became a distinct idea, and that took centuries. An important early milestone is Robert Burton's sprawling 1621 work The Anatomy of Melancholy, one of the most popular books of seventeenth-century England, which catalogued the causes, symptoms, and "cures" of melancholy in enormous detail and ranged across fear, worry, and despair. Burton was not describing anxiety in the modern clinical sense, but his book is a landmark in the long effort to treat troubled states of mind as something that could be analysed and relieved rather than simply endured. Two centuries later, in 1844, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard published The Concept of Anxiety under a pseudonym, treating anxiety (or angst) as a fundamental condition of human freedom — a philosophical, not medical, contribution, but one that put the very word at the centre of Western thought.

The decisive medical step came at the end of the nineteenth century with Sigmund Freud, who in 1895 separated out what he called "anxiety neurosis" from the catch-all category of neurasthenia. Freud's description — chronic apprehension or "anxious expectation," general irritability, anxiety attacks, and avoidance — is recognisably the modern clinical picture, and his framing dominated psychiatry for much of the twentieth century. For decades, however, "anxiety neurosis" lumped together what we would now distinguish as panic attacks and as persistent background worry.

The modern diagnostic landscape was set in 1980, when the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-III (the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) split anxiety neurosis into two separate conditions: Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Panic Disorder. One reason for the split was the observation that the two responded differently to medication. This 1980 boundary is the moment "anxiety" in the precise sense used on this site came into being. It is also why any history of natural anxiety relief must be careful: nearly all the herbs and practices described here were in use long before there was a diagnosis for them to treat, so their traditional reputations were earned against older, looser ideas of nervousness rather than against the modern categories.

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The Relaxation Pioneers: Jacobson, Schultz, and Benson

If herbs are the oldest thread of natural anxiety relief, structured relaxation methods are its first distinctly modern thread — and here the history does have named pioneers, even if no single "founder" of the whole field. The earliest is the American physician Edmund Jacobson (1888–1983), who began studying muscle tension and its relationship to nervous states around 1908, after graduating from Northwestern University and moving on to research at Harvard. Over the following two decades he developed Progressive Relaxation (often called progressive muscle relaxation, or PMR), a systematic method of deliberately tensing and then releasing muscle groups in sequence to produce deep bodily calm. He set out the technique in his 1929 book Progressive Relaxation, published by the University of Chicago Press. Jacobson's central insight — that mental anxiety and physical muscle tension are tightly linked, and that relaxing the body can quiet the mind — underlies a great deal of modern anxiety self-management.

In Germany, working in roughly the same era, the psychiatrist Johannes Heinrich Schultz developed autogenic training, a self-directed relaxation method in which a person repeats calming phrases and visualisations (for example, imagining the limbs as warm and heavy) to shift the body toward a restful state. Jacobson and Schultz approached the problem from different angles — Jacobson through physical muscle work, Schultz through guided self-suggestion — but they shared the foundational premise that relaxation is a learnable skill with measurable physical effects, not merely a vague mood.

That premise was given a powerful scientific frame in the 1970s by the Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson. Studying practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, Benson documented a consistent physiological state — lowered heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, and metabolism — that he named the "relaxation response," presenting it to a wide audience in his 1975 book of the same name. Crucially, Benson argued that this calming response was not unique to any one religion or technique but could be triggered by many simple practices, including meditation, repetitive prayer, and slow breathing. By giving the body's anti-stress state a name and a measurable signature, Benson helped move relaxation from the margins into mainstream medicine — a key turning point in how natural anxiety relief came to be taken seriously.

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Meditation Enters the Clinic: Kabat-Zinn and MBSR

The single most influential figure in turning a contemplative practice into a clinical tool for stress and anxiety is Jon Kabat-Zinn (born 1944). A molecular biologist by training — he earned his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971 under the Nobel laureate Salvador Luria — Kabat-Zinn was also a long-time student of Buddhist meditation. In 1979 he founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and there developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), a structured eight-week program that adapts mindfulness meditation, body-awareness exercises, and gentle yoga into a secular format deliberately stripped of religious language so that it could fit inside a Western hospital.

MBSR mattered because it was designed from the start to be teachable, repeatable, and studiable. By packaging meditation as a standardised curriculum, Kabat-Zinn made it possible to test the practice in controlled trials, and over the following decades MBSR and its close relative Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) — developed later by Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale — became among the most heavily researched non-drug interventions for stress, anxiety, and depression. This is the thread that connects an ancient contemplative tradition to the meditation apps and clinic-based mindfulness courses of today.

It is worth being precise about what Kabat-Zinn did and did not do. He did not invent meditation, which is far older than any individual, and he was careful to credit the contemplative traditions he drew from. What he did was specific and consequential: he translated those practices into a secular, standardised, clinically testable form. As the evidence section below notes, mindfulness produces real but moderate benefits for anxiety — meaningful, but not a cure-all — and honest histories of the field resist the temptation to oversell it.

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The Adaptogen Idea: Lazarev and Brekhman

One of the most commonly used terms in the modern natural-calm marketplace — adaptogen — has a surprisingly specific and well-documented origin in Soviet science. The word was coined in 1947 by the Soviet physician and toxicologist Nikolai Lazarev. Lazarev had spent the earlier part of his career studying the effects of harmful industrial chemicals and, during the Second World War, military stimulants; afterward he turned to a different question: were there substances that could raise the body's overall resistance to stress over the long term, without the dependence or crash that came with stimulants? He named this proposed class of substances "adaptogens."

The concept was carried forward and formalised by Lazarev's student Israel I. Brekhman, often called the "father of adaptogens," who together with his colleague Igor Dardymov set out a working definition in 1969: an adaptogen should be essentially non-toxic, should produce a non-specific increase in resistance to a wide range of physical, chemical, and biological stressors, and should have a normalising effect — nudging the body back toward balance regardless of which direction it had strayed. Much of this Soviet-era research focused on plants such as Eleutherococcus (eleuthero, or "Siberian ginseng") and rhodiola, and it was bound up with efforts to support the performance of soldiers, cosmonauts, and athletes.

This origin story is genuinely important for an honest history, for two reasons. First, it shows that the trendy word "adaptogen" is not ancient herbal lore but a twentieth-century pharmacological concept with named authors and dates. Second, it explains why herbs like ashwagandha and rhodiola were among the first to be marketed for stress under that banner: they fit a framework that had already been built for them. The framework itself, however, was a hypothesis about how certain plants behave, and much of the original research was carried out under conditions that would not meet today's standards for transparency — another reason to treat "adaptogen" as a useful organising idea rather than a guarantee of results.

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The Biochemical Turn: GABA and the Tranquillizer Era

For most of the history told above, no one could explain why a calming herb calmed. That began to change in the mid-twentieth century, when scientists started to identify the brain chemistry of relaxation — work that, in time, gave traditional remedies a plausible mechanism. A foundational moment came in 1950, when the American neuroscientist Eugene Roberts, working with Sam Frankel, reported the discovery of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in the mammalian brain. GABA was eventually recognised as the brain's principal inhibitory neurotransmitter — the chemical brake that quiets neural activity — and it now sits at the centre of how scientists understand both anxiety and its relief.

The same decades saw the rise of the first modern anti-anxiety drugs, which is part of the same story because their success reshaped how natural remedies were viewed and marketed. In 1955 the drug meprobamate — synthesised by Frank Berger and Bernard Ludwig and sold as Miltown — became the first true blockbuster psychiatric medication, the first drug marketed specifically as an anti-anxiety agent. It was soon eclipsed by the benzodiazepines: the chemist Leo Sternbach at Hoffmann-La Roche discovered the first of them, chlordiazepoxide, which reached the market as Librium in 1960, followed by diazepam (Valium) in 1963. Benzodiazepines work precisely by amplifying GABA's calming signal, and for a time Valium was the most-prescribed drug in the United States.

This pharmaceutical wave is woven into the history of natural anxiety relief in two opposite ways. On one hand, the discovery that the GABA system governs calm gave researchers a yardstick against which to test herbs — and indeed several traditional anxiolytics, including valerian, passionflower, kava, chamomile, and lemon balm, were later found to interact with GABA pathways, which lent their old reputations a modern rationale. On the other hand, the well-documented problems of the tranquillizers — dependence, withdrawal, and sedation — drove many people back toward gentler, non-drug options, fueling the late-twentieth-century revival of interest in herbs, supplements, breathwork, and meditation that the rest of this site explores. The modern field of natural anxiety relief is, in large part, a response to both the promise and the limits of the pill.

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Evidence and Reception: What the Research Actually Shows

Because this is a public-health resource and not a sales page, the honest bottom line deserves a section of its own. "Natural" does not mean "proven," and the quality of evidence behind the many approaches gathered under natural anxiety relief varies enormously — from genuinely strong to barely tested. Treating them all as equally validated would be misleading.

Among the herbs, the evidence is uneven. Kava has the strongest clinical support: a Cochrane systematic review concluded it is more effective than placebo for anxiety symptoms — but it also carries documented, if rare, reports of serious liver injury, which led several countries to restrict it in the early 2000s, so it is not a casual remedy. Lavender (as the standardised oil preparation Silexan), chamomile, passionflower, lemon balm, and ashwagandha each have at least some supportive randomized trial data, though study sizes are often small and product quality varies. Valerian, despite its two-thousand-year reputation, has notably weak and inconsistent trial evidence specifically for anxiety — a clear example of long tradition not translating into proven effect. Among lifestyle approaches, exercise, mindfulness meditation, and structured breathing and relaxation techniques have the most robust support, with meta-analyses showing real but generally moderate benefits.

The mainstream medical reception reflects this mixed picture. Bodies such as the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) generally describe the herbal and supplement options as "promising but not conclusively proven," emphasise that supplements are loosely regulated and can vary widely in content and purity, and warn about real interactions — for instance, that kava and valerian can deepen the sedation of alcohol and prescription sedatives, and that several herbs interact with prescription drugs. The clearest consensus is that natural approaches are best regarded as complementary: reasonable for mild to moderate anxiety and as supports alongside established care, but not substitutes for professional evaluation and evidence-based treatment when anxiety is severe, persistent, or accompanied by warning signs. The deeper purpose of knowing this history is to hold two truths at once — that people have pursued natural calm intelligently for millennia, and that only careful modern research can tell us which of those traditions actually deliver.

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Research Papers and References

The list below combines peer-reviewed historical and clinical sources with curated PubMed topic-search links into the history and evidence base of natural anxiety relief. Historical primary sources — Dioscorides' De Materia Medica, Pliny's Naturalis Historia, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety, the Charaka Samhita, and Jacobson's and Benson's books — are named in the article as historical works rather than as modern citations. Author names, titles, and journals are given as plain text; only the stable DOI, PMID, or archive link is hyperlinked, and each opens in a new tab.

  1. Crocq MA. A history of anxiety: from Hippocrates to DSM. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience. 2015;17(3):319-325. — PMID: 26487812
  2. Crocq MA. The history of generalized anxiety disorder as a diagnostic category. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience. 2017;19(2):107-116. — PMID: 28867935
  3. Savage K, Firth J, Stough C, Sarris J. GABA-modulating phytomedicines for anxiety: a systematic review of preclinical and clinical evidence. Phytotherapy Research. 2018;32(1):3-18. — doi:10.1002/ptr.5940
  4. Pittler MH, Ernst E. Kava extract versus placebo for treating anxiety. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2003;(1):CD003383. — PMID: 12535473
  5. Akhondzadeh S, Naghavi HR, Vazirian M, et al. Passionflower in the treatment of generalized anxiety: a pilot double-blind randomized controlled trial with oxazepam. Journal of Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics. 2001;26(5):363-367. — doi:10.1046/j.1365-2710.2001.00367.x
  6. Amsterdam JD, Li Y, Soeller I, et al. A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of oral Matricaria recutita (chamomile) extract therapy for generalized anxiety disorder. Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology. 2009;29(4):378-382. — doi:10.1097/JCP.0b013e3181ac935c
  7. Panossian A, Wikman G. Effects of adaptogens on the central nervous system and the molecular mechanisms associated with their stress-protective activity. Pharmaceuticals. 2010;3(1):188-224. — doi:10.3390/ph3010188
  8. Singh N, Bhalla M, de Jager P, Gilca M. An overview on ashwagandha: a Rasayana (rejuvenator) of Ayurveda. African Journal of Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicines. 2011;8(5 Suppl):208-213. — PMID: 22754076
  9. History of natural and herbal anxiety remedies — PubMed: herbal medicine for anxiety, history and traditional use
  10. Mindfulness and relaxation for anxiety — PubMed: mindfulness and relaxation for anxiety (systematic reviews)

External Authoritative Resources

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Connections

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