Few people need to have anxiety described for them. It's that combination of uneasiness and apprehension you feel when you face uncertainty: a new job, a move to a new community, a second marriage, seeing your first child off to college and so forth. Some degree of anxiety seems to be an unavoidable part of the human condition, given all the uncertainties of life.

Certain periods of life – adolescence and middle age – are particularly fraught with anxiety. To balance out anxiety, we turn to activities we enjoy: time with our friends; participating in hobbies, games or sports; listening to music or reading books. When the causes of anxiety are real, those antidotes usually work pretty well.

But when anxiety is chronic and free floating – that is, not traceable to any specific cause – those antidotes don't work. Instead, one experience an increasing sense of panic. Or the feeling that everything inside is wound up tight. You force yourself to take deep breaths, but that doesn’t calm you down.

Perhaps you fly off the handle at the least little thing, then a wave of depression sweeps in. You tend to burst into tears frequently – or feel like you’re going to. In many people, anxiety is accompanied by headaches, stomach troubles or other physical complaints.

When an anxious person goes to a doctor with his or her problem, he or she’s apt to be given a tranquilizer to a psychologist, who spends a lot of time investigating past experiences and relationships with other people. Sometimes that works. But sometime it doesn’t, and the person still ends up with a prescription for tranquilizers.

In a case like that, anxiety is a puzzle – with one of the pieces missing. That piece may an allergy. Working on the possibility that anxiety and allergy are sometimes linked, certain doctors have solved the puzzle of their patients’ ”baseless” anxiety.

Ronald Finn and H. Newman Cohen, of the Royal Southern Hospital in the Liverpool Department of Medicine at the University of Liverpool in Great Britain, worked with six people who suffered anxiety and other mental symptoms. All had failed to improve after extensive examination and prolonged medical treatment. The researchers found that coffee and tea were responsible for much of the patients’ anxiety and other psychological problems.

”The symptoms produced by excessive coffee are probably due to caffeine,” says Drs. Finn and Cohen. ”The symptoms, which may mimic an anxiety state, included irritability, palpitations, headache and gastrointestinal disturbances. ”Although these reactions to coffee have been well documented,” say the researchers, ”it is clear that the diagnosis is often overlooked.”

The implications are clear: if you’ve been overly anxious for no good reason and drink coffee every day (most coffee drinkers do), you’d be smart to give up the brew for a weeks. Of course, that also means giving up tea, cola, chocolate and over the counter painkillers, which contain either caffeine or caffeine-like compounds.

It may take several days for you apprehension, you’ll notice a dramatic drop in anxiety levels. While Drs. Finn and Cohen single out caffeine, they also feel that almost any food to which one is allergic may be the recognized cause of baseless anxiety.

”Unlike conventional allergic reactions, such as a skin rash, the patient is usually unaware of the food to which he is sensitive and may even be unaware that his symptoms might be due to food intolerance,” says Drs. Finn and Cohen. ”The offending agent is often a favorite food which is taken daily, usually in large quantities” (Lancet, February 25, 1978).

Food may not be the only possible offender. Mashall Mandell, M.D., an allergist in Norwalk, Connecticut who has done extensive work in the field of allergy, tells of a 25 year old woman who suffered from anxiety, along with fatigue, depression, menstrual discomfort and conventional allergic problems such as Hives and Nasal symptoms.

Medical treatment had been no help, and she’s been advised to seek psychiatric help. Instead, she went to Dr. Mandell, who checked into the possibility that her problems were caused by allergy foods and chemicals. ”I learned that she reacted to freshly manufactured plastics and rubber articles, hair sprays, paints, furniture oils, fumes from gas stoves, automobile exhaust, chlordane insecticide and a number of foods,” says Dr. Mandell.”

When she cleaned up her home environment by removing all offending household products, had her gas stove removed and the inlet pipe that supplied her house sealed off at the meter so that no gas entered her home, and went onto a Rotary Diet that eliminate all of the food to which she had reacted, her symptoms began to subside and in less than a month all of her complaints cleared up” (Dr. Mandell’s 5 Day Allergy Relief System, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979).

You may not have to taken as many steps as that woman did to clear up your anxiety. But all of the avoidance methods mentioned by Dr. Mandell – plus several other helpful tips – are covered in detail in earlier. They can be used to identity and eliminate allergic causes of anxiety in people who’ve gone the whole route of medical and psychological evaluation and are still burdened with free floating anxiety.

In particular, Finding Your No Allergy Diet, and Clearing the Air, can help you control food and inhalant allergies, including allergy to caffeine or chemicals, two of the most month causes of anxiety. Because anxiety is so often accompanied by Headaches, stomach troubles and Depression, many readers will find the entries on those topics, very helpful.