If you’ve ever felt anxious about an upcoming event or situation, you’re not alone. In fact, anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the world and end up affecting nearly 40 million people above the age of 18 in the United States alone each year.

While anxiety is nothing new to our society, there’s a growing amount of confusion around what anxiety is, how it’s related to stress and depression, what we can do to treat it, and what methylfolate has to do with any of this mess.

Hopefully, we can clear some of this up for you today and discuss why methylfolate could be considered for anyone suffering from anxiety disorders regularly.

Anxiety, stress, and depression are often linked together and many people believe they all hold the same meaning. A lot of this confusion is due to the fact that the symptoms and warning signs are extremely similar for all three.

While that’s true, these three mental illnesses are far from the same thing. But to recognize the differences, you’ll first have to understand all three of them if you want to fully breakdown the effects of methylfolate on anxiety.

Stress, for starters, is the body’s physical, mental, and emotional reaction to any life event, situation, hardship, or anything else that requires an immediate response. We experience stress when the body releases cortisol, also known as the stress hormone.

Anxiety is defined as the body’s natural reaction to stress. Think of it this way -- where stress is the reaction to an external pressure, anxiety is the internal pressure we build up through excessive worrying. It sounds weird and it’s an extremely small difference, but it’s a difference nonetheless.

Here’s another way to look at it. When we stress out about something, we generally know why we’re stressing out. Anxiety works a little differently because you’ll experience the symptoms of stress without really knowing why.

For this reason, it’s always essential to know how to cope with stress and anxiety anytime they appear in your life. By neglecting these emotions, you won’t give your body and brain an opportunity to work through it. Before you know it, depression will be knocking at your door.

To summarize what we learned above, the body will naturally release hormones when we are faced with a stressful or difficult situation. Two examples of these hormones are cortisol and adrenaline. This is a necessary function that is related to the “fight or flight” response and is essential to survival.

With that being said, these hormones aren’t necessarily needed in low-stressful situations or when pressure isn’t present. Since hormone levels work a lot like dominoes in the body, when one hormone gets out of whack, they all do.

Anxiety is known to cause headaches, panic attacks, irritability, depression, and a loss of excitement about the future; however, the effects go far beyond the brain. Anxiety disorders are often frequented by breathing problems and a fast heartbeat, upset stomach, loss of libido, high blood pressure, chronic fatigue, and muscle pain.

When trying to figure out the source of these irregular hormones, doctors will typically point to one of four things -- genetics, stress, hyperactivity in the body, or irregular reactions in the body.