Can you treat anxiety without medication?
Psychologist at Leeds Anxiety Clinic
Published Wednesday, 10 September 2025
People struggling with anxiety are often recommended medication by their GP. While medication can sometimes be helpful, it is not the only option. In this article, we will explore how anxiety is best addressed, as well as the issues with medication.
What do we mean by treatment?
A good place to start is examining what we mean by treatment.
Anxiety often causes a range of unpleasant symptoms from constant worrying to panic attacks, to physical symptoms like sweating, feeling tense or an upset stomach.
These are horrible, but they are not the problem itself. They are symptoms of underlying emotional distress. While medication such as SSRIs or SNRIs may help reduce these symptoms, it does not tackle the underlying problem.
As a result, when someone stops taking the medication, they often find the symptoms return. Therefore, one could argue that medication does not treat anxiety; it merely suppresses it temporarily.
Why therapy can be more effective
Like medication, therapy can help with the symptoms of anxiety. For example, learning about how anxiety works and coping techniques that can be applied when you are feeling anxious can help reduce the symptoms.
What therapy can also do is tackle the underlying problems that drive anxiety.
There is no one simple answer to what causes anxiety, but it typically involves:
- Unhelpful thought patterns that lead us to worry
- Avoidant behaviours that protect us from our anxiety in the short-term, but lead to maintaining our anxiety in the long-term
- Unresolved past experiences that still affect us emotionally and physically (this is known as trauma)
By working with a therapist, you will be able to explore the root cause of your anxiety, develop new thinking patterns and behaviours, and safely process previous trauma to reduce its impact.
Evidence-based therapies include cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), person-centred therapy and emotion-focused therapy (EFT). Many therapists use an integration of multiple models to utilise the most useful parts from each.
What about lifestyle changes?
Another important factor is lifestyle. For example, getting more exercise, eating healthier, improving our sleep habits and seeing our friends more often.
Evidence shows these things will have a positive impact on our mental health.
However, there are two important things to note. The first is that these factors have a measurable but sometimes small impact on wellbeing. So, while they will be beneficial, they may not have sufficient impact to work on their own.
The second is that these issues can often be hard to solve. For example, if you work a job that involves long hours and lots of stress, you may benefit from getting a different job that causes you less stress and gives you more leisure time. But this is often difficult and may involve major changes to your life.
Can I use a combination?
Medication can be useful in some situations.
For example, if you are too anxious to engage in therapy, medication can help reduce the symptoms to a level where you can engage in therapy, and is therefore a good first step to help you on your journey.
However, medication can also cause challenges in therapy. First, medication can often numb feelings of distress. This can be beneficial if these feelings are overwhelming, but it can also make it more difficult to access these feelings in the therapy room, and therefore prevent this emotional pain from being transformed.
Second, some people find that the side effects of medication include brain fog, reduced concentration, or unwanted physical symptoms that interfere with their ability to attend and engage in therapy.
It is important to say that these experiences vary from person to person, with some people reporting fewer side effects than others.
What do the guidelines say?
Another way we could answer this question is to look at the guidelines published by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), who is responsible for setting guidance for the NHS.
In their guidance for generalised anxiety disorder (CG113), NICE recommend a stepped care approach in which low-intensity psychological interventions such as group therapy or self-help should be tried first. If more support is needed, NICE then recommends either one-to-one therapy or medication, based on the individual's preference.
Conclusion
Can anxiety be treated without medication? The answer is yes. In fact, one might argue it is the only effective way to treat anxiety, as while medication can treat the symptoms, it may not produce long-term change.
However, it is important to acknowledge that we are a psychotherapy service and therefore biased towards recommending therapy. Medication can be helpful for some individuals, and you may wish to discuss your options with your GP.
With or without medication, evidence-based psychotherapy, such as we provide, is proven to reduce anxiety. If you would like to explore how evidence-based therapy could help you, we would be happy to discuss this with you. Please get in touch to find out more.