Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Life today is full of stress and anxiety. There is so much pressure to perform socially, professionally, and personally that it takes everything that the average person has not to go completely insane. All this stress and anxiety can easily build up in a person's mind, if left unattended. The steady build-up of anxiety and enormous stress can actually lead to serious psychological illnesses.

Relieving stress and anxiety early on is key to prevent serious mental disorders. But the ultimate question is: How can you find effective anxiety relief?

You might decide to take pills for anxiety relief, as there are medications that are designed to help with that. After all, like most moods and states of mind, anxiety, excessive worrying, and stress are firmly rooted in the brain's complex biochemistry. Since most anxiety relief drugs are of the psychoactive sort, meaning they affect the chemical and neural responses of the central nervous system. That means that your typical anxiety relief medication might have side-effects on your mental health, which could end up being worse than the stress and anxiety in the first place.

There is, however, one particular alternative to the expensive anxiety medication products you might find in the market. Anxiety relief need not come in the form of a pill, after all. Anxiety medication doesn't even have to come in the form of a bottle, though small amounts of alcohol during particularly stressful times can really help. Perhaps the simplest, oldest, and easiest anxiety relief out there comes in the form of the people around you. The best way to relieve stress could very well be simply gathering your close friends in a place where the sources of stress are as far away from you as Pluto is from the sun. This idea is best exemplified by the lyrics of that old Gary Portnoy song:

Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name,
and they're always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see,
our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows
Your name.



As the song says, sometimes the best way to relieve yourself of the burdens and stresses of everyday life is to go to a place where you and a few friends can just take some time out and relax. For some people, this might come in the form of a pub where the gang can gather around and tell stories of their lives. Nothing like a little ranting and raving to blow off some steam, after all. This approach is usually better with a little alcohol thrown in, just to loosen the inhibitions a bit. However, it is advised that people who take this route to avoid too much alcohol intake.

To be honest, any location where a group of friends can gather and talk freely, without worrying about the boss listening in or being rebuked by somebody. A pub, an apartment, or a coffee shop can all serve as a venue for people to relieve stress and feel liberated from the “mask” they wear while at work. It is in these sorts of environments that people can cut loose and just let everything roll out without really paying much attention to the potential consequences. It is in environments such as the above where people can just sit back, let go, and unwind. In the end, isn't taking a little time to relax a better method of anxiety relief than expensive medications?