Natural remedies to help you sleep
The anxious body: valerian and kava.
For more severe anxiety—the kind that sets your jaw grinding, leaves your shoulders in knots, or keeps you up for days—these potent, well-researched herbs can offer relief, with some caveats. Valerian is believed to act on multiple brain pathways, calming the mind and muscles and reducing the time it takes to fall asleep, research shows. “But for some people, it works fine for a day or two and then it begins to have an opposite, stimulating effect,” says Tufenkian.