Best Supplements for Stress

Some stressors are obvious — money gets tight, competition at work ramps up, the in-laws come to visit. Other stressors are more covert — your sleep schedule gets disrupted, the neighbors undertake a little home renovation, or your dog starts pulling a little more on walks.

Whether they’re the big, hair-pulling types or the subtle, insidious ones, stressors all have this in common: they’re bad for you.1 In some cases, you can make some lifestyle adjustments to reduce stress.2 In others, the stress is inevitable, and you have to do all you can to deal with it.

That’s where supplements for stress can help. They take various forms, but their goal is the same: to reduce the extent to which your body responds negatively to stress. Many boast a significant amount of scientific research, and some companies have combined several well-known stress busters to form powerful complexes.

Our comprehensive guide to stress-relief supplements will show you both which complex formulas are the most effective and which brands offer the best single-ingredient approaches to tackling stress. If you’re in a hurry, here’s a quick breakdown of our findings:

For complex formulas that target stress:

• Best complex daytime stress relief: Focus Support by Innerbody Labs
• Best complex nighttime stress relief: Sleep Support by Innerbody Labs
• Best complex stress-relief beverage: Recess Mood Powder
• Best stress-relief gummies: Green Roads Stress Aways
• Best complex for customers outside the U.S.: Ritual BioSeries Stress Relief

As long as none of the multiple ingredients within a complex formula are contraindicated based on your underlying health or current medications, a complex formula will be your best bet for achieving dramatic results.

Some people, for health reasons, must avoid certain ingredients; for these people, a single-ingredient approach is better. If this describes you, then here are our recommendations for single-ingredient supplements to fight stress:

• Ashwagandha: Nootropics Depot Shoden
• Saffron: Natural Factors Saffron Extract Capsules
• Magnesium: Micro Ingredients Magnesium Glycinate
• Rhodiola: Triquetra Siberian Rhodiola
• Lemon Balm: Vitacost Lemon Balm Extract Featuring Cyracos
• L-Theanine: Swanson Ultra Suntheanine
• CBD: Cornbread Organic CBD gummies
• Tongkat Ali: Nootropics Deport 10% Eurycomanone

At Innerbody Research, we thoroughly scrutinize every product and service we review, and supplements to relieve stress are no exception. Over the years, our investigations into stress relief have involved more than 500 hours and 100 scholarly articles pertaining to fight-or-flight, cortisol, and other aspects of the human stress response.

We’ve also spent thousands of hours researching the individual supplements you’ll find in this guide for stress relief and other potential uses. Armed with all this knowledge, we purchased and tried these supplements for ourselves, giving us the ability to speak directly about the user experience. Additionally, like all health-related content on this website, this guide was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy and will continue to be monitored for updates by our editorial team.

Over the past two decades, Innerbody Research has helped tens of millions of readers make more informed decisions about staying healthy and living healthier lifestyles.

We took several factors into consideration, and we’ll provide some additional context for these results in the paragraphs below, especially as it pertains to the comparison between single ingredients and complex formulas. Ultimately, we selected five criteria we believe will matter most to consumers in this sector:

• Effectiveness
• Safety
• Cost
• Taste (where applicable)
• Convenience

Let’s look closer at each criterion to see how the brands and ingredients here performed.

Effectiveness

Winner: Sleep Support by Innerbody Labs

Stress is a dragon with many heads, and it might take more than a single ingredient for the average person to slay it. That's why we highly regard the complex blends inside Innerbody Labs' Sleep Support and Focus Support to fight stress. Both contain excellent anxiolytic ingredients like ashwagandha, saffron, and L-theanine. And both formulas provide clinically relevant doses of all ingredients based on high-quality human research — something most companies with highly complex formulas can't claim.

Between the two, Sleep Support may be the more reliable option for stress-busting, especially since Focus Support contains a little caffeine. That said, the caffeine dose is relatively mild, a little weaker than a double shot of espresso. And with the relaxing powers of ashwagandha, saffron, and rhodiola — plus the anti-jitter effects of L-theanine — it will likely provide more smooth focus to consumers than anything else.3

Of course, if you're looking for a single ingredient to battle stress, the most effective one we can point to is the saffron that you'll find in both Innerbody Labs formulas.4 As a standalone ingredient, it's a little harder to find in its branded forms than something like ashwagandha — another great single ingredient — but Natural Factors sells a capsule that contains only Affron-branded saffron extract for a reasonable price. It also happens to be our top pick for safety.

Safety

Winner: Natural Factors Saffron Extract

Just as a complex formula will more likely yield positive effects to combat stress, a single-ingredient formula will present you with fewer risks of side effects. That makes it imperative for us to choose from the pool of effective single ingredients we’ve identified when choosing a product based on safety first.

And again, as with our efficacy consideration, this choice comes down to available science. Of the single ingredients we’ve identified that could combat stress, most have reasonable side effect profiles. A typical effective dose for saffron extract is 28mg or 30mg in the majority of studies looking at its ability to mitigate stress, and the refrain of no reported adverse effects continues through most of them. Many of those studies rely on a branded form of saffron extract called Affron, which is what Natural Factors uses in its saffron supplement.

When studies have reported side effects, they’ve been at doses of 400mg/day and above, more than ten times what you’ll take in the average supplement.5

Cost

Winner: Micro Ingredients Magnesium Glycinate

Perhaps not surprisingly, the single-ingredient approach is a more economical way to target stress than the multi-ingredient complex formulas. But there are several single-ingredient options out there that are competing to be the most economical choice overall, and the differences between their proposed doses and the doses we can recommend based on available science are key to understanding which supplement actually presents the best deal.

The three finalists for this criterion were Micro Ingredients Magnesium Glycinate, Swanson Suntheanine, and Vitacost Lemon Balm extract.

Here’s how their costs break down:

As you can see, thanks to the fact that you can take a smaller dose of magnesium and still expect to see some results, you get a lot more doses per purchase at Micro Ingredients’ $30 level than you do at the $9 level of the other two products. Even if you only took single 300mg capsules of lemon balm and found it useful, you’d still be paying around $0.15/dose, two pennies more per dose than you would with magnesium glycinate from Micro Ingredients.

Taste

Winner: Cornbread CBD Gummies

Many of the stress-relieving supplements in this guide are capsules, but a few are either drinks or gummies, allowing us to declare a winner from that pool for taste.

This was not a unanimous call among our testers. Some preferred the berry-flavored drink-mix version of Recess Mood, but Cornbread’s pleasant sweetness made it just a bit more popular.

So did its variety of flavors. Cornbread offers its CBD gummies in watermelon, berry, or peach, as well as additional flavors for other CBD gummies in its lineup (albeit ones with more THC). In contrast, Recess offers its drink mix in just two flavors and one unflavored variety.

Green Roads Stress Aways was another competitor here. Its combination of CBD, ashwagandha, and L-theanine makes it our preferred stress-busting gummy overall, but it doesn’t taste as good as Cornbread’s gummies do. It also only comes in one flavor.

Convenience

Winner: Nootropics Depot Shoden Ashwagandha

As with taste, there was a fair amount of debate within our team regarding the convenience factor of various stress-relief supplements. This was doubly important when you consider that you don’t want a stress-relief supplement to be a source of additional stress. To be fair, this is also a criterion that is more subjective than others (excluding taste), as some people would prefer the convenience of a powder drink mix over a capsule.

Our two top gummies from Green Roads and Cornbread almost won the category, but there’s an aspect of inconvenience with gummies when temperatures start to rise, as they can become unpleasantly sticky. Gummy dosing can be somewhat inaccurate, as well.6

In comparison to all of these, Nootropics Depot’s Shoden ashwagandha capsules are exceedingly convenient, as the small 120mg dose of an especially potent extract allows the capsules to be very small. These were small enough that some testers were able to take them without water.

Our top picks for stress relief come in a variety of shapes and sizes, with capsules originally designed for sleep support, mood-regulating beverages, and even CBD gummies. Here’s how they compare:

For what it contains, Innerbody Labs Sleep Support offers the greatest likelihood of success for most people, especially for those who take it nightly to support healthy sleep habits (which can significantly reduce stress). But as we’ll discuss later, many of its ingredients don’t just target sleep; they have specific benefits for stress, as well. Innerbody Labs Focus Support may be a better choice for daytime users who want to feel the calming effects of L-theanine and other stress-busting ingredients alongside a moderate amount of caffeine.

Not all stress is bad.7 When scientists and researchers talk about stress, they could mean the stress that strength training puts on muscles just as easily as they could mean psychological stress brought on by a standardized test.8 9 One form can improve muscle mass, bone strength, and longevity, while the other can send you to an early grave by raising cortisol levels, increasing blood pressure, and decreasing immunity.1

But how can stress, which is so often theoretical (that standardized test isn’t going to hurt you), cause such real harm? It’s a complicated picture, but we’ll do our best to break it down simply and clearly here.

Fight-or-flight in modern society

Evolution is a long, slow process. It can take ages for hardwired aspects of a species’ physiology to change in meaningful ways. Prior to agricultural society, which has only been around for about 13,000 years, we were hunters in a rather dangerous wilderness.10 Homo sapiens were doing their hunter-gatherer thing for around 300,000 years before that. Over those millennia, our fight-or-flight response grew more refined to allow our bodies a chance to survive encounters with wild beasts.11

It turns out, 13,000 years isn’t quite enough to undo all that evolutionary hardwiring. So we still have this powerful fight-or-flight response in the presence of perceived dangers. It’s just as strong in us today as it was in our ancestral past, but the triggers that instigate it have changed dramatically.

Nowadays, it’s not a saber-toothed tiger coming around the corner of a large rock. It’s Sadie, the intern who's gunning for your job, rounding the corner of your office building and determined to drain your will to live with a ten-minute diatribe about her “retro” Beanie Baby collection. These are very different triggers, but we’ve evolved to treat them both as life-threatening.12

This is when the hypothalamus kicks in and the fight-or-flight response causes things like:13

• Increased heart rate and blood pressure
• Dilated pupils
• Muscle tension
• Clammy or flushed skin
• Reduced pain sensitivity

These are perfectly normal responses to genuine dangers, but they’re likely overreactions to the threat that Sadie actually poses. Unfortunately, modern society — especially modern advertising and social media — has figured out how to leverage stress triggers to get attention and sell products. The result is an ecosystem of media and interpersonal relations designed to cause chronic stress.14

Symptoms and consequences of chronic stress

Short-term stress causes the brain’s hypothalamus to instigate the release of several hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol, as part of the fight-or-flight response.12 These are critical hormones for keeping yourself safe in the face of danger, but they also play specific roles at lower levels not associated with immediate peril.

The problem arises when chronic exposure to societal stressors causes these hormones to remain elevated for long periods, throwing off hormonal balance in the body.15

Chronically elevated cortisol levels are of special concern to researchers, as they’ve been associated with:16

• Sleep problems
• Digestive problems
• Anxiety
• Muscle tension and pain
• Problems with memory and focus
• Heart disease, heart attack, high blood pressure, and stroke
• Depression
• Weight gain
• Headaches

Removing stressors from your environment is an important step in reducing overall stress, but supplements can be an excellent addition to a stress-relief regimen.

A host of botanical ingredients, vitamins, minerals, and amino acids have been shown to reduce markers of stress in scientific research. That might mean that they reduced serum cortisol or another concretely measured biomarker. It might also mean that they resulted in better scores on self-reported tests for anxiety and stress, or that they allowed participants to perform better at tasks that stress typically inhibits.

This multitude of potentially useful ingredients is what you can find across the landscape of stress supplements. It's a diverse supplement class that includes not only single-ingredient supplements, but also complex formulas containing multiple components with the potential to relieve stress. Whether you go for a single-ingredient supplement or a more complex formula is up to you and your doctor. Scientific evidence suggests single ingredients can be plenty effective, but there’s a good chance that combining ingredients with independent pharmacokinetics can result in even more pronounced improvements in your stress response.

Stress supplements may work in a number of ways and at different points along the stress response chain. Many allow your body to produce less cortisol in the face of stressors, while some others might increase complementary hormones or neurotransmitters that promote relaxation.

In the vast majority of cases, these supplements will take some time to work. They aren’t like some prescription anti-anxiety drugs or muscle relaxants that can slow you down after a single dose. They usually require at least a few weeks of consistent daily use to yield results, though there are some minor exceptions to this.

The benefit to that kind of approach is that you don’t risk quite as many intense side effects as you might experience on a prescription-strength anxiolytic. There are still some risks, which we’ll discuss in a later section, but the supplements you’ll discover in this guide are, by and large, relatively safe.

To get a clearer understanding of how these supplements work, let’s start by examining the potential benefits of individual stress-relief ingredients, and then discuss their combinations in what we consider to be the market’s best complex stress-relief formulas.

There is far more scientific research into individual stress-relief ingredients than there is into specific combinations thereof. Let’s examine the scientific support behind each of the ingredients we’ve selected as your best bet for fighting stress.

Ashwagandha

Top recommendation: Nootropics Depot Shoden capsules

Ashwagandha is an adaptogenic herb with a long history of use in Ayurvedic medicine.17 It’s been successfully shown to reduce stress and anxiety, increase testosterone levels, and improve sleep in multiple scientific studies.18

Central to ashwagandha’s efficacy is a class of bioactive compounds called withanolides. Ashwagandha extracts have a higher concentration of withanolides than dried, powdered plant parts do, but standardized extracts take this even further by giving you a defined extract strength you can compare to effective research.

There are three prominent branded and standardized ashwagandha extracts: Sensoril, KSM-66, and Shoden. All three have been subjected to numerous studies, but of the three, Shoden is the most concentrated, with 35% withanolides per dose.

As a result, we often steer people toward lower doses of Shoden ashwagandha (60-120mg) to deliver the same amount of withanolides you’d get from around 500-800mg of KSM-66. Sensoril has a slightly higher concentration than KSM-66 (though still lower than Shoden), but it boasts slightly less presence in ashwagandha research compared to the other two brands, so it’s easier to verify the effectiveness of Shoden and KSM-66.

Nootropics Depot is a reliable place to find numerous nootropic and adaptogenic ingredients, and it’s one of the few places you can get Shoden outside of a more complex formula. Its capsules each contain 120mg, which may be a somewhat high dose for lightweight individuals, but it still appears to be well within safety tolerances established in research.

Saffron

Top recommendation: Natural Factors Saffron Extract Capsules

If you’re familiar with saffron, it’s probably more from the culinary world than from traditional medicine. As a spice, saffron imparts a golden orange tint to foods like rice, as well as an added element of savory brightness. But the spice has a fair bit more to offer than just color and flavor.

Extracts of saffron contain specific bioactive compounds not unlike those we discussed in our ashwagandha section above. But in saffron’s case, there are two major bioactives: safranals and crocins. Different extracts may standardize for specific concentrations of one or the other, though research is mixed as to which is more important for certain ailments.

Because research is somewhat mixed in this way, we’ve found it beneficial to look at a very well-researched branded extract called affron, which standardizes for lepticrosalides, a trademarked term for the parent category of compounds that encompasses both safranals and crocins.19

Saffron extracts are potent enough to be effective for mood and sleep at around 28-30mg per day, with 28mg being the typical dose for affron.20

Branded affron isn’t readily available as a standalone supplement from most brands. Natural Factors is one of the few companies out there offering it on its own. We recommend that most customers consider Amazon as a pathway for this product, as it costs about 30% less there than through the Natural Factors website.

Magnesium

Top recommendation: Micro Ingredients Magnesium Glycinate

Magnesium is a critical enough mineral that even those in perfect Zen states would do well to consider supplementing with it. For those of us who aren’t on a highway to Nirvana, magnesium can significantly help with sleep, depression, and anxiety. One systematic review of anxiety studies in humans found that more than half of the studies they reviewed reported positive outcomes in anxiety with magnesium supplementation.59

However, two aspects of the mineral dominate the considerations surrounding magnesium supplementation: dose and form. Form will affect dose, as different forms of magnesium (e.g., magnesium glycinate, magnesium oxide, magnesium citrate) will deliver specific amounts of elemental magnesium. Those different forms will all absorb at varying rates, as well.

Magnesium glycinate is among our preferred magnesium forms because of its high bioavailability and relatively high concentration of elemental magnesium.21 Our synthesis of research into magnesium for sleep and stress puts a minimum effective dose of elemental magnesium at around 127mg, which you can get from just over 900mg of magnesium glycinate.22

We recommend Micro Ingredients Magnesium Glycinate. Each capsule delivers 166.6mg of elemental magnesium. That’s a little more than our baseline for efficacy, making this an economical way to try magnesium for your stress and titrate up as needed without breaking the bank. The company’s recommended dose is three capsules, but you should be just fine starting out with one (so long as your doctor concurs!).

Rhodiola

Top recommendation: Triquetra Siberian Rhodiola

With rhodiola, we once again run into the question of extract standardization, this time looking at the concentration of two bioactive compounds: rosavins and salidrosides. Prominent rhodiola research looking at its stress-relief and cognition-boosting abilities often uses a standardized extract with 3% rosavins and 1% salidrosides.

In relevant research, a range of 100-1,500mg/day of rhodiola extract showed improvements in stress, mood, fatigue, and more.23 Studies varied in the extract strength used, with the best-designed studies relying on the aforementioned 3% and 1% split. One study using a 400mg dose of a similar extract showed improvements in as little as three days of treatment, with stress continuing to improve for up to four weeks.24

It’s relatively easy to find complex formulas and single-ingredient supplements containing this exact extract standardization, but some brands offer superior strength. Triquetra’s Siberian Rhodiola is a little more potent than its competitors, delivering 5% rosavins and 2% salidrosides in a 200mg dose per capsule. This allows you to start out small but strong and titrate up as needed without resorting to anything too expensive or taking a fistful of pills every day.

Lemon Balm

Top recommendation: Vitacost Lemon Balm Extract Featuring Cyracos

Lemon balm is another ancient medicinal herb that’s been turned into teas, tinctures, and other remedies over the centuries. In modern use, its standardized extracts have been shown to significantly improve symptoms of stress and other mood disorders in dozens of studies. One impressive review breaks these studies down by participant group age and reveals that adults under stress could benefit from around 400-1,000mg of lemon balm extract daily.25

Like many other botanicals, lemon balm is available in standardized extracts. In this case, standardization occurs in hydroxycinnamic and rosmarinic acids, with many studies focusing on a 6% rosmarinic acid content, and a few considering the mid-teens to low-20s as a nice percentage concentration for hydroxycinnamic acid.

While a branded form of lemon balm called Relissa is our preferred form based on available research, it’s only available in more complex formulas, not on its own. For a standardized standalone lemon balm extract, we look to Vitacost, which offers a 14% hydroxycinnamic and 7% rosmarinic acid standardization. That's not quite the levels reached by Relissa’s 17-23% hydroxycinnamic acid, but it’s slightly more than what we see in research using non-Relissa extracts.

L-Theanine

Top recommendation: Swanson Ultra Suntheanine

L-Theanine is an amino acid that’s most commonly found in tea. Studies have shown that its calming activity is an ideal complement to caffeine’s nootropic benefits, providing a steadiness to your buzz.26 This is one of the reasons tea can make you a little less jittery than coffee. Without caffeine in the picture, its calming effects are even more pronounced.

Research into a 200mg daily dose reveals that “L-theanine has the potential to promote mental health in the general population with stress-related ailments and cognitive impairments.”27 Further research points to a range between 200mg and 400mg per day being safe and ideal for both acute and chronic stress.28

Suntheanine is a branded form of L-theanine that’s non-GMO certified and thoroughly third-party tested for safety and purity. Swanson has an outstanding price on Suntheanine and delivers it in 100mg capsules. That way, you can easily take the 200mg dose shown to be effective in studies, or you can start lower to make sure it doesn’t have more of a calming effect than you’d like.

CBD

Top recommendation: Cornbread Organic CBD Gummies

Cannabidiol (CBD) is a compound found in hemp alongside THC (the psychoactive compound associated with the high induced by marijuana).29 It’s important to note that CBD lacks the psychoactive qualities of THC when it’s effectively isolated; you won’t feel high when you take it.

That said, the most effective CBD products are full-spectrum extracts, meaning that they contain a whole host of other compounds from hemp — including small amounts of THC — that vary from brand to brand, and even from batch to batch.30 You can select broad-spectrum extracts or CBD isolates to ensure that THC is excluded from the product if you either want to avoid any risk of that high feeling or have any drug tests in your future.

With or without the psychoactive effects of THC, CBD can undeniably provide stress relief. A review of seven double-blind placebo-controlled studies of CBD for stress found that “all [seven studies] showed that CBD was effective in significantly reducing the stress response and was non-inferior to pharmaceutical comparators, when included.”31

There are likely hundreds of CBD brands on the market at this point, many of which offer edibles like gummies. Our team has certainly tried dozens of them through the years. Among them, Cornbread stands out for its commitment to using organic hemp and giving its gummies a better flavor than just about any others we’ve tried.

Part of this flavor advantage comes from the fact that Cornbread isn’t afraid to coat their gummies in large-grain pure cane sugar, but even the underlying taste of the gummies, specifically their level of acidity, balances extremely well with the earthiness of the CBD. They’re also among a smaller group of manufacturers that offer larger doses than the average producer, which aligns better with studies showing CBD’s potential for stress and anxiety.

Tongkat Ali

Top recommendation: Nootropics Depot 10% Eurycomanone

Like ashwagandha, tongkat ali offers numerous potential benefits, including testosterone support and exercise performance, in addition to its stress relief.32 33 One relatively small study found that 200mg/day of tongkat ali both increased testosterone and reduced cortisol.34

And like the withanolides in ashwagandha or the rosavins and salidrosides in rhodiola, quassinoids are touted as the drivers of tongkat ali’s benefits. One quassinoid in particular is regarded above the rest in tongkat ali’s chemical makeup: eurycomanone.35 Some tongkat ali extracts will standardize for eurycomanone content, while others will not.

As it says in the name, Nootropics Depot’s tongkat ali extract is standardized to 10% eurycomanone. That’s the highest concentration we’ve seen on the market, and it gives the product a definite edge in dosing. Each small capsule contains 100mg of tongkat ali, delivering 10mg of eurycomanone per dose.

Vitamins

Certain vitamins have been linked with lower risk of stress, anxiety, and depression. A recent meta-analysis of studies looking at B vitamins concluded that “a higher intake of dietary B vitamins ... was associated with a lower prevalence of depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms.”60 And a study on vitamin D found that about 3,500IU daily (delivered in the study as 50,000IU every two weeks) could significantly improve scores on self-reported stress and depression tests.61

Thanks to the variety of both potential stressors in everyday life and the various stress-relief supplements on the market, there’s likely a good option among these supplements for everyone. Stress-relief supplements should be especially appealing to anyone who wants or has to avoid pharmaceutical interventions for stress and anxiety. And the variety of options ensures that certain limitations — age, body composition, underlying conditions, or other medications — shouldn’t get in the way of you finding something that works.

Different ingredients may exclude certain populations from using some supplements, but it’s almost guaranteed that you can find something from within the large pool of well-researched, relatively safe individual ingredients and complexes out there that can effectively rescue your stress levels.

All that said, you’ll still want to check in with your doctor before adding anything new to your regimen.

For the most part, stress-relief supplements are relatively safe. However, there are certain safety risks associated with specific stress-relief ingredients that could make one option an inferior choice to another. For example, zinc or magnesium may be easier to recommend to pregnant people, as many botanical ingredients lack sufficient testing in pregnant populations.

Let’s take a brief look back at the individual ingredients we outlined above to discuss their respective safety profiles:

Instead of delivering a single ingredient, the scientific research around which indicates serious potential to relieve stress with minimal side effects, complex stress-relief supplements combine two or more of these ingredients in an attempt to ratchet up the stress relief. That could possibly improve outcomes without necessarily increasing side effect risks, and it could end up being a lot less expensive than buying several single ingredients and combining them yourself.

In some cases, companies will combine lower doses of individual ingredients than scientific research would indicate to be potentially effective. For example, while research points toward a 200mg daily dose of L-theanine and a 28mg dose of saffron as minimums for efficacy, a supplement company may choose to include just 100mg of L-theanine and 15mg of saffron.

Why would they choose to underdose like this? Well, they’re banking on the idea that the whole may be stronger than the sum of its parts, and the less of an ingredient you include in a supplement, the cheaper it is to manufacture. The problem is that there’s usually no evidence that this specific combination of ingredients delivered at lower doses can be effective. So we steer our readers away from supplements with combinations of many theoretically effective ingredients that appear at suboptimal doses.

Complex stress-relief supplements have nearly as wide a potential audience as single-ingredient supplements, and there are certain populations for whom they may be an even better option.

Suppose you like the research you’ve seen that touts the stress-busting power of saffron, and you also know from drinking green tea that L-theanine has a nice effect on you. Maybe you’re also curious about ashwagandha. Well, you could go out and spend $20 on an L-theanine supplement, $20 on a bottle of Shoden ashwagandha, and another $30 on a branded saffron extract for a total of $70. Or you could spend $54 on a bottle of Ritual Stress Relief, which combines all three at effective doses.

So, anyone interested in combining two or more stress-relief ingredients who also wants to save some money would do well to consider a complex formula.

People whose stress is especially intractable might want to consider a multi-ingredient approach, as well. Perhaps a combination like the one in Ritual Stress Relief appeals to you, but you want a little more ashwagandha and some caffeine to prevent it from making you drowsy. You can get all that and more from Innerbody Labs Focus Support for as little as $69 per month. That could help you tackle your stress from multiple angles.

The big potential downside to a more complex formula is that it increases the likelihood of adverse effects. If you look back at our earlier breakdown of individual ingredient safety, you’ll notice that things like GI upset and headache are common at effective doses. When you combine those effective doses, you multiply side effect risk by the same factor.

That’s why it’s important to look for a complex formula from a company with a good return policy, ideally one that will let you try a supplement and return it if you experience side effects. Innerbody Labs, Thesis, Green Roads, and Ritual each have a 30-day money-back guarantee, but Recess only allows returns for up to 14 days.

Best complex daytime stress relief (Focus Support) and best complex nighttime stress relief (Sleep Support)

Innerbody Labs offers two supplements with great formulas for mitigating stress. Although one is technically a nootropic and the other is a sleep aid, stress is a very useful target for improving both focus and sleep. What’s more, the focus support only contains a moderate amount of caffeine offset by a proper dose of L-theanine, ensuring that the caffeine doesn’t contribute to stress. And the sleep support is designed to improve sleep quality over time, so it doesn’t contain ingredients that will knock you out.

Sleep Support may be the stronger of the two supplements for tackling stress. Here’s a look at the formula:

• Magnesium (from bisglycinate): 127mg
• Relissa lemon balm extract: 400mg
• Lactium casein hydrolysate: 300mg
• L-Theanine: 200mg
• Shoden ashwagandha extract: 100mg
• Venetron rafuma leaf extract: 50mg
• Saffron extract (2% safranals): 30mg
• Astaxanthin 10%: 12mg
• Lycopene: 5mg
• Vitamin D3: 38mcg
• Vitamin B6: 1mg
• Vitamin K2: 110mcg
• Zinc: 17mg
• Copper: 0.21mg

In addition to sleep-centric ingredients like Venetron and Lactium, the ashwagandha, lemon balm, D3, magnesium, and saffron all have anti-stress qualities, which we’ve discussed. Meanwhile, improving sleep should have a positive effect on your daily stress levels.62

Focus Support contains several ingredients that can improve focus by mitigating stress, as well as several nootropic ingredients that can improve brain function, including focus and memory performance. Here’s a quick look at the Focus Support formula:

• Cognizin citicoline: 500mg
• Rhodiolife Rhodiola rosea extract (5% rosavins, 1.8% salidrosides): 350mg
• Phosphatidylserine 50%: 300mg
• KSM-66 Ashwagandha: 300mg
• N-Acetyl L-tyrosine (NALT): 200mg
• L-Theanine: 160mg
• Lion's mane extract (20:1 extract): 100mg
• Caffeine (from Coffeeberry Energy organic whole fruit extract): 80mg
• Saffron extract (2% safranals): 30mg
• Pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ): 20mg
• Vitamin B3: 16mg
• Vitamin B5: 5mg
• Vitamin B6: 2mg
• Vitamin B9: 400mcg
• Vitamin B12: 2.4mcg

That 80mg of caffeine is about the same as you’d get from a double shot of espresso, while ingredients like saffron, L-theanine, ashwagandha, and rhodiola provide significant stress relief.

If you really want to get the biggest possible anti-stress effect with the added benefits of sleep and focus improvements, you can safely combine these two products, taking Focus Support in the morning and Sleep Support shortly before bed.

Innerbody Labs pricing

Innerbody Labs employs the same price structure for its Focus Support and Sleep Support supplements, but the individual price points and discounts for subscribers are a little different in each case.

Here’s how the pricing works out for Sleep Support:

And here’s the price breakdown for Focus Support:

Shipping on either product is free, which is common among complex stress-relief supplements, but some companies, like Ritual and Recess, require that you subscribe to unlock free shipping.

It's worth noting that Innerbody Labs only ships within the U.S. at this time. If you’re in the market for stress relief from outside the U.S., the next-best option for you is likely Ritual’s BioSeries Stress Relief, which provides three well-dosed and clinically supported ingredients for a reasonable price, with shipping available to Canada and the U.K.

Innerbody Labs also provides a relatively common 30-day money-back guarantee. It’s long enough to feel the effects of either product. Only Recess offers a poorer guarantee among the products in our guide at 14 days.

Best complex for customers in Canada and the U.K.

Ritual tends to keep things simpler than other companies. Whereas Thesis might include one or two ingredients that are slightly underdosed or lack rigorous data gleaned from human studies, Ritual prefers to include only ingredients with robust scientific support at doses that align with the research. That said, sometimes the company chooses the lower end of the dose range from that effective research, as is the case with the ashwagandha in its BioSeries Stress Relief.

Here’s the ingredient bill:

• Shoden ashwagandha extract: 80mg
• affron saffron extract: 28mg
• Suntheanine L-theanine: 200mg

One thing that also sets Ritual apart in its stress-relief formulation is the employment of its BioSeries technology. Essentially, this is a manufacturing method that encapsulates each ingredient in its own time-released tablet and then puts all three of them inside a regular capsule. That’s why each capsule of Stress Relief appears to have a trio of balls inside of it.

The company claims that this helps deliver fast-acting ingredients like L-theanine in a more timely fashion and allows saffron and ashwagandha to be absorbed more slowly. There isn’t much in the way of evidence to back this up, but it’s theoretically sound and may make a difference for some users.

Ritual Stress Relief pricing

Ritual’s Stress Relief costs $60 for a one-time purchase, but you can subscribe monthly for $54 or quarterly for $153 every 90 days. That works out to $51/bottle with the quarterly subscription. Even at the $60 level, though, it’s less expensive than buying all three ingredients separately and then taking them together.

Best stress-relief beverage

One shortcoming of a lot of magnesium products on the market is that it takes a fair amount of refined magnesium forms (e.g., magnesium citrate, glycinate, etc.) to provide enough elemental magnesium for reliable efficacy. This is even truer in populations with magnesium deficiencies. A reliable way around this obstacle is to include magnesium in a drink mix rather than capsules.

Recess Mood is such a drink mix, combining a 1,561mg blended dose of magnesium with several other ingredients associated with relaxation and sleep improvement. The frustrating part of this blend is that it includes different forms of magnesium but doesn't specify how much of each is present. Since these forms have different absorption rates and different concentrations of elemental magnesium, it’s impossible to know how much elemental magnesium you're going to get in each dose.

Other ingredients include sodium, potassium, L-theanine, and passionflower extract. Doses of passionflower extract are often higher in studies, but L-theanine is provided at a recommendable 200mg dose.51

Compared to some similar drink mixes we’ve tried, our testers appreciated both the flavor of Recess Mood (especially the berry) and its mixability. With little more than a spoon, almost the entirety of the drink dissolves in plain water.

Recess Mood pricing

You can get Recess Mood in a tub of loose powder that comes with a scoop for measurement or as individually packaged stick packs. Here’s how the pricing works out:

Recess also offers premade canned drinks that it also calls Mood, but it’s important to note that the formulas in these cans are different from the formulas in the powders. The canned beverages are less potent than the powders, containing only a fraction of the magnesium and none of the other botanical ingredients or amino acids.

Recess has the shortest return window of any complex formula in our guide, offering just 14 days for you to try its products before returning them. That’s compared to 30 days from Innerbody Labs, Thesis, Ritual, or Green Roads.

Best stress-relief gummies

Gummy supplements can be something of a gamble. Some ingredients absorb more poorly as gummies. Others absorb better. And some gummy ingredients degrade quickly, making it hard for manufacturers to dose accurately from batch to batch.6 For this reason, gummy companies would do well to provide a reliable return policy — something that Green Roads has.

In tests of several dozen CBD companies for our various CBD-related guides, Green Roads Stress Aways has always stuck with us as a product that provided more impact than we expected. Here’s a quick look at the ingredients:

• Broad spectrum CBD extract: 25mg
• KSM-66 ashwagandha: 150mg
• L-Theanine: 100mg

In a capsule form, these ingredients might not seem like they’d rise to the occasion. But in gummy form, they all seem to thrive, at least as our testers reported it. Stress Aways provided one of the most reliable calming sensations we experienced in testing. This may be attributable to the gummy format, as we’re more used to KSM-66 requiring at least 300mg and L-theanine needing 200mg to be effective.

Green Roads Stress Aways pricing

You can get Green Roads Stress Aways in a 10-count or 30-count bag for $20 and $50, respectively. You can also subscribe to the 30-count bag for $40. Compared to Cornbread, the other CBD gummy mentioned in this guide, Green Roads’ price is just as good or better. The difference is that Cornbread only uses CBD — no ashwagandha or L-theanine — but also employs full-spectrum CBD made from organically grown hemp.

Green Roads guarantees your purchase for 30 days with a full money-back guarantee. That’s the same as Innerbody Labs, Ritual, and Thesis, and longer than the 14-day guarantee from Recess.

Thesis is one of the better nootropics companies out there, with four compelling blends of ingredients to boost focus, reduce stress, and protect brain health. Each formula contains a handful of key ingredients, and three of them allow you to purchase with or without caffeine and L-theanine.

Among its four blends, Stress Reset has the combination of ingredients that science would suggest holds the greatest potential to ameliorate stress and anxiety when taken in the morning. Because the caffeine-free formula also loses its L-theanine when you select it, the power of the ingredient bill takes a hit.

Here’s a quick look at the ingredient list:

• Vitamin D3: 125mcg
• Magnesium (from bisglycinate): 84mg
• Shoden ashwagandha extract: 120mg
• SalidroPure fermented salidrosides: 30mg
• Affron saffron extract: 28mg
• Zembrin: 25mg
• Dihydrohonokiol-B (honokiol extract): 10mg
• Caffeine: 100mg
• L-Theanine: 100mg

Of those ingredients, saffron, Zembrin (Sceletium tortuosum), ashwagandha, salidrosides, and vitamin D are present at doses that research shows can combat stress.48 In fact, that vitamin D dose is higher than we’d like to see, as the NIH puts a daily upper limit of 4,000IU on supplemental vitamin D, and Thesis’ 125mcg equates to 5,000IU — well above that limit. If you get supplemental vitamin D from fortified foods or take a multivitamin on top of your stress supplement, you could experience adverse effects.

The magnesium is close to a solid anti-stress dose here, but it’s slightly underdosed. We also can’t fully vouch for the efficacy of salidrosides in isolation. Typically, this bioactive compound is part of a rhodiola extract that would include salidrosides alongside another critical component, rosavins. There isn’t enough evidence that salidrosides would be efficacious in the absence of rosavins for us to recommend them alone at this time, though we’ll note that a dose as high as Thesis’ would come from an effective dose of rhodiola extract.

DHH-B from magnolia bark extract is compelling, as its bioactive compounds — specifically honokiol — have been shown to decrease stress and stress biomarkers in animal and in vitro studies.49 50 Unfortunately, human evidence is severely limited.

Thesis pricing

Thesis offers its supplements in monthly shipments that each contain 25 total doses delivered every 25 days. A one-time purchase of any Thesis formula is $129. That price has recently risen from the $119 the company used to charge when we first reviewed it several years ago. Fortunately, the cost of a 25-day supply on a subscription basis has remained $79 over that time, and $79 is actually on the lower-middle side of pricing for effective nootropic supplements.

The company has recently added bulk purchasing to its subscription platform, allowing you to schedule larger deliveries to occur at more infrequent intervals for a deeper discount. Here’s how the pricing works out:

Thesis ships for free, and every purchase is covered by the company’s 30-day money-back guarantee, allowing you to try its formulas for a month and get a full refund if they aren’t for you. That’s the same policy you’ll get from Ritual, Innerbody Labs, and Green Roads, and it's 16 days longer than the 14-day policy from Recess.

To learn more about Thesis, including the ins and outs of its other five formulas, check out our complete Thesis review.

If you don’t think that supplements for stress relief are quite the answer for you, there are a few other approaches you can take to lower cortisol levels and reduce the impact of stress on your daily life and long-term health. Some of them are as easy to employ as a supplemental capsule, while others might be a little less convenient (but potentially even more effective).