Does Ashwagandha Actually Work? A Skeptic Reads the Research

There's a bodega near my apartment that sells ashwagandha gummies at the register, between the lighters and the lotto tickets. That's how you know an herb has made it. It's in sleep teas, stress powders, protein blends, and approximately every wellness influencer's morning routine, usually with the word 'cortisol' doing a lot of unpaid promotional work. So let's do the thing this column does: ignore the marketing, read the actual trials, and figure out what this root does and doesn't deserve credit for.

What ashwagandha is

Ashwagandha, Withania somnifera if you're fancy, is a shrub whose root has been used in Ayurvedic practice for centuries, traditionally as a general tonic. The modern sales pitch calls it an 'adaptogen,' a word that means 'helps your body adapt to stress' and that, I'll note, is a marketing category, not a regulated or precisely defined scientific one. None of that makes the plant useless. It just means the burden of proof sits where it always sits: on the clinical trials.

The trial everyone cites

The study you'll see quoted most often is a 2019 randomized controlled trial by Adrian Lopresti and colleagues, published in the journal Medicine. Sixty stressed but otherwise healthy adults took either a standardized ashwagandha extract or a placebo for 60 days, double-blind, meaning neither participants nor researchers knew who got what. The ashwagandha group reported greater reductions in anxiety and stress measures than the placebo group, and showed a larger drop in morning cortisol. That's a real result from a real design, and it's why ashwagandha gets taken more seriously than most of the supplement aisle.

Now the fine print, because there's always fine print. Sixty people is small. Sixty days is short. The effects, while statistically significant, were moderate rather than dramatic; this was 'the stressed group felt meaningfully less stressed,' not 'participants achieved inner peace.' And across the ashwagandha literature generally, trials are often small, run for weeks rather than years, and frequently funded or supplied by supplement manufacturers. That doesn't automatically invalidate them, but it's the kind of thing a careful reader keeps one eyebrow raised about.

In supplement research, 'promising' is a word doing a lot of heavy lifting.

The extract problem

Here's the part the gummy jar won't tell you: 'ashwagandha' is not one thing. Trials use specific standardized extracts at specific doses, often in the range of a few hundred milligrams of concentrated extract per day. The product at the bodega may use a different extract, a different concentration, or a dose that's decorative rather than functional. Supplements also aren't held to pharmaceutical quality control, so the distance between the thing that was studied and the thing in your cart can be substantial. If the research is the reason you're buying, the extract and dose on the label should match the research.

Safety, briefly and humbly

In the short trials we have, ashwagandha was generally well tolerated, with side effects similar to placebo for most people. But short trials can't tell you much about long-term use, and herbs are not inert: anything strong enough to move your cortisol is strong enough to interact with other things. If you're pregnant, have a thyroid condition, or take any medication, this is a conversation with a professional, not a checkout-line impulse buy. I'm a writer with a search bar, not a clinician, and this is exactly the kind of decision that deserves better than either.

The boring stuff still wins

Here's my actual issue with the ashwagandha moment, and it's not the root's fault. A supplement with a moderate effect in 60-day trials cannot out-argue five hours of sleep, six coffees, and a phone that lives in your hand until 1 a.m. The unglamorous interventions still own the leaderboard: consistent sleep, morning light, actual breaks, and a nervous system you occasionally downshift on purpose. A few slow minutes of breathing costs nothing; I'm partial to running the 4-7-8 exercise in Feelsy with some slow texture drifting behind it, which reliably does more for my 11 p.m. shoulders than anything I've ever bought at the register. If the basics are in place and you want to test ashwagandha on top, that's a reasonable experiment. If the basics aren't in place, the gummy is a rounding error.

If you're going to try it anyway

• Pick a product that names a standardized extract and a dose in the range the trials actually used, rather than a vague 'proprietary blend.'
• Look for third-party testing, since supplement labels are closer to suggestions than guarantees.
• Change one variable at a time and give it several weeks, because the trials that found effects ran for about two months.
• Track something concrete, like how you rate your stress each evening, so you're not grading the experiment on vibes.
• Clear it with a professional first if you're pregnant, have a medical condition, or take medication.

Verdict: ashwagandha is one of the few register-adjacent supplements with legitimate randomized evidence behind it, and that evidence points to a modest, real effect on stress for some people over a couple of months. It is not a cortisol delete button, it is not a personality transplant, and it is not a substitute for sleep. As usual, the most honest sentence in wellness is the least marketable one: it might help somewhat, the basics help more.

Feelsy is a wellness product, not medical advice. If stress, anxiety or sleep problems persist, please speak with a qualified professional.