Next time your anxiety flares up with a vengeance, maybe try a... sour sweet?!

While it’s not a cure by any means, if you struggle with anxiety or panic attacks, therapists and doctors alike have shared the quick trick could briefly stop them in their tracks.

There are dozens of videos online from a range of medical professionals highlighting that eating something very sour, whether a sweet or something else, could help alleviate anxiety or even stop a panic attack in its tracks.

In one video, Dr Joe Whittington, an A&E doctor known as Dr Joe MD on social media, described it as “one of the coolest ways to break a panic or anxiety attack”.

“How sour? The more sour, the better,” he noted.

Why does this work?

As you can imagine, scientific literature on sour sweets’ impact on anxiety is pretty hard to come by – that said, anecdotally people have noticed it seems to distract them from their impending anxiety attack.

Professor Chris Williams – Emeritus Professor of Psychosocial Psychiatry at the University of Glasgow and author of

© HuffPost