Recently, it has become fairly common for people to use marijuana to treat anxiety and depression. There are some people, though, who prefer to use CBD alone, one component of marijuana, trying to avoid THC and other compounds that might not help anxiety. I know people who take CBD during acute anxiety which is not extreme enough to cause them to get an anxiety medication, and they believe that it does help to calm them. However, does CBD actually work to treat anxiety, or do people just believe that it would work, making them calmer?
A study done by Spinella et al., in 2021, tested how much of the relief felt by people by CBD was due to the placebo effect, instead of testing the pharmacological effects of CBD. To do the study, they needed people who were at least 19, and these participants had to have used marijuana at least once in their lives to have some familiarity with how they perceived the drug to affect them. Some tests to invoke anxiety included switching between putting their hands in really cold water and having to count backward in odd increments from a high number. They then recorded both heart rate and heart rate variability, as well as asked the participants to rate their stress on a scale of 1 to 10, all after asking how effective they thought CBD was for anxiety. None of the participants consumed any CBD, instead getting hemp seed oil that was without CBD, but one time that they did the tests they were told that it had CBD, and then the other they were told that it did not have any. Overall, they found that the expectation of CBD most likely did help the relaxation that people find when they take it, with the people who believed that CBD would help with their anxiety reporting a higher decrease in stress than those who moderately thought so (Spinella, et al., 2021).
Overall, it seems like some of the benefits from CBD can come from the placebo effect, which in itself isn’t a bad thing. If more studies are done to make sure that CBD is safe for the brain and doesn’t have any horrible side effects, then it could be a good tool for anxiety for the people who believe that it works, even if it is not as pharmacologically effective as once thought.
Spinella, T. C., Stewart, S. H., Naugler, J., Yakovenko, I., & Barrett, S. P. (2021). Evaluating cannabidiol (CBD) expectancy effects on acute stress and anxiety in healthy adults: a randomized crossover study. Psychopharmacology, 238(7), 1965–1977. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-021-05823-w
I had no idea there were studies done to assess the affects of CBD as a placebo effect! I've noticed the upsurge of CBD in a surprising amount of products in recent years (lotion, pills, even shaving cream), and I was interested to know if there were any published studies that assessed this. The fact that no CBD was administered in the study is interesting, in studying the placebo effect specifically. I think it's crazy that believing a person took CBD is enough to help ease physiological symptoms associated with stress and anxiety. That said, it makes sense as I know the Placebo effect is well-studied in other substances as well.
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