Here's Everything Beta Blockers Can—And Can't—Do, According to Doctors

Reported by Women's Health Magazine.

By now, you've seen the headlines: Khloe Kardashian borrowed one from Kris Jenner mid-anxiety spiral on camera. Rachel Sennott credited them on the Oscars red carpet. Most recently, Summer House's West Wilson confirmed he'd taken one before filming a reunion appearance where he was visibly flat — barely reactive as he fielded questions about his love life. Cue the cultural conversation about what, exactly, these pills do. According to Women's Health Magazine, the answer is: something specific, and not what most people assume.

Beta blockers are cardiac drugs — prescribed primarily for high blood pressure, abnormal heart rhythms, and chest pain. They work by blocking beta receptors that respond to epinephrine, the hormone your body floods itself with when it perceives stress or danger, explains Sanjiv Patel, MD, cardiologist at MemorialCare Heart & Vascular Institute at Orange Coast Medical Center. Because adrenaline is also what triggers the physical symptoms of anxiety — the racing heart, the shaking hands, the visible sweat — the drugs have found an off-label life among the performance-anxious. The version most commonly used for anxiety is propranolol, a non-selective beta blocker that accounts for roughly 90 percent of anxiety-related use, per Gail Saltz, MD, psychoanalyst and associate attending physician at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical. If you've noticed more people talking about them, Dr. Saltz says that's less about a spike in prescriptions and more about a cultural shift: "As the stigma goes down, more public figures and people in general are able to say, 'Yes I struggle with this and I take medication for it.'"

What They Actually Treat — And What They Don't

Here's the distinction that matters: beta blockers don't touch the mental or emotional experience of anxiety. They intercept the body's physical response. "It's not that the adrenaline isn't around — it's just prevented from binding and doing its function," Dr. Saltz explains. That makes them genuinely useful for discrete, high-stakes moments of performance anxiety — a speech, a live appearance, a flight. Wilnise Jasmin, MD, deputy chief medical officer at Oregon State Hospital, confirms their most common off-label use is exactly that: acute performance anxiety driven by the sympathetic nervous system's fight response.

But if your anxiety is generalized — the persistent, background-hum kind — beta blockers aren't the answer. "It's not for 'when I go to parties, I get nervous,'" Dr. Saltz says plainly. A 2025 review in the Journal of Affective Disorders found no robust evidence supporting beta blockers as an effective anxiety treatment broadly. They're a Band-Aid, not a fix — and even short-term users are eventually going to need to address the root cause through therapy, SSRIs, or SNRIs.

There's also the small matter of these being heart medications. Side effects include dizziness, fatigue, and breathing difficulty. Anyone with asthma, COPD, diabetes, low blood pressure, or a slow heart rate shouldn't take them at all, per Dr. Saltz — which means getting them through a telehealth shortcut is exactly as risky as it sounds.

Beta blockers can be a legitimate, doctor-supervised tool for specific situations — but they are not a personality setting, and they are definitely not a substitute for actually dealing with your anxiety.

Read the original at Women's Health Magazine.