I hear a lot of people ask "how does Xanax work for anxiety?". Let's face it. We live in a world where everyone wants a quick fix for everything. Every ailment must have a cure right?

It would be totally absurd to think that something like an anxiety disorder may take a bit of work to get rid of. The human mind takes years and years in most cases to develop into a brain that is afraid of everything. Constant panic attacks and bouts of anxiety are behaviors that do not just appear out of the blue for most people.

How Does Xanax Work For Anxiety?

Xanax is in a class of prescription drugs called benzodiazepines. Benzodiazepines, or "Benzos" as the in-crowd calls them were developed for the most part to calm people down in times of stress. They are also used to control seizures sometimes and are often used to help alcoholics taper off the booze.

What these drugs do is more or less simple. We all have a chemical in our brains called gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) that keeps our brain calm. If you have an anxiety disorder than this GABA is "off" or out of whack.

What Xanax (its generic name is Alprazolam) does is help restore artificial GABA in your brain, making you feel that nice feeling of calm. But since Xanax is a fast-acting drug, that means that it is also a fast leaving drug.

It leaves your body in a short period of time, which is why so many people need to take more of the drug to get the same effect. This is called dependence and is the first sign that you are beginning to get in trouble with a benzodiazepine type of drug.

Is It Bad To Take?

So what millions of people do is head to the doctor to get a dose of the cure-all known as Xanax, and they figure that their days of anxiety attacks and panic are behind them. And at first, this is so true! Those Xanax work so well for anxiety it's almost unbelievable.

The trouble is not how well they work, but how much they truly make your life not suck anymore! Have you ever had one of these Xanax pills? They are unreal. You can be having the most debilitating panic attack of your life, pop one of those suckers and you are calmed down 15 minutes later.

But then years go by and you are up to several milligrams a day just to feel halfway normal. That great feeling comes less often as you start to go through mini withdrawals if you haven't had your fix in a while, and it becomes a total nightmare.

You Must Take Benzo's With Extreme Caution!

The side-effects of Xanax can range from mildly annoying to death. I'm not joking there either. A lot of innocent people are out there trying to feel less anxious, and are dying from taking some kind of so-called miracle drug.

Take it from me. The only miracle is how you get off of the stuff without losing your mind and going totally insane. All in all...benzodiazepines such as Xanax work very well for anxiety disorders, but they are not meant to be a substitute for natural coping skills.