Much of everyday stress and worry comes down to “learned fear,” or habits of worry that have internalized over time. Habits can be hard to break, leading people to spend undue mental energy on problems that are outside of their control and distracting them from more pressing or more joyous aspects of everyday life. 

According to a November 24, 2016 study in the journal Frontiers of Pharmacology, researchers investigated the role of CBD in regulating learned fear. As anxiety and trauma-related disorders affect up to 25% of individuals worldwide, what they found is both astonishing and heartening. 

Their results indicated that CBD reduces acute fear expression while simultaneously disrupting fear-based memory consolidation and enhancing “extinction.” “Extinction” is a term that researchers use to describe the process by which exposure therapy–repeated encounters with a situation that triggers fear and anxiety–helps patients un-learn learned fear. 

These findings are compelling because they show that CBD may help everyday sufferers of stress or anxiety cope at every stage of the process. CBD may help reduce felt levels of anxiety, prevent fear-based memories from becoming more ingrained in the brain, and speed up the exposure therapy process. It’s a triple-threat for stress.

An August 2019 study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology discusses CBD’s role in disrupting fear-based memory formation. Another October 2017 study in the journal Neuropharmacology takes the discussion one step further by describing the various receptors and brain regions that interact with CBD as patients re-learn how to cope with stress and anxiety.