All you anxious babes, listen up because we’ve found the simplest hack ever to shut down panic. And it involves candy.
Yep. Candy. Sour candy, to be specific. It goes like this: When you start to feel anxious or overwhelmed or panicked, pop a super sour candy in your mouth. Boom. Fight-or-flight mode deactivated.
Because it sounds almost too good to be true, and we discovered it on TikTok, we wanted an expert to weigh in. So we tapped board-certified psychiatrist Dr. Sasha Hamdani to share her thoughts.
“Fear arises when our amygdala initiates the fight-or-flight reaction. A method to lessen the amygdala’s spinning and reduce anxiety is to focus on the present moment using our senses: taste, smell, touch, sight, and hearing,” Dr.Hamdani says.
“Sour candy rapidly directs our attention to the sense of taste, effectively reducing the activity of the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, and enabling greater engagement with the frontal cerebral cortex, the reasoning part of the brain.”
The result: “The reasoning part of our brain communicates to the emotional part that we are not truly in danger,” she explains.
Guess it’s time to buy some sour candy in bulk.
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