Herbs for Stress & Anxiety

Herbal possibilities for stress & anxiety mitigation.🌿              

Initially I thought to post all of this on my IG stories, but decided the topic was best served here. Please note: I am not advising here, nor suggesting to ignore medical help, just sharing a bit of my herbal experience-knowledge if you are inclined to add herbs to your own personal health tending .

🌸Fear, anxiety and stress are catnip for opportunistic, rogue microbes as they weaken your non-specific  immune system response. People with already compromised immunity, trauma or health issues have compounded stress from their illnesses as well.

🌿Some of my favorite anxiolytic herbs are: lemon balm, hawthorn, milky oat tops, schisandra, passionflower, rose, tulsi and skullcap. Stress & anxiety aren’t “ all in your head “, our nervous systems affect each organ and our glands. Ultimately, our nervous systems are directed by our conscious spiritual self. That’s why getting centered in a warm hearted, clear headed way is so important in these times.

🌹The gentle, warming, comforting Rose is my favorite plant for acute anxiety, feeling vulnerable, grief stricken or traumatized. Rose gently places your awareness into your heart and coaxes it to expand and take space, much as the image of the flower blossoming and opening its layers of petals to the atmosphere. Schisandra and Hawthorn are lovely on their own merits, but also as handmaidens to Rose.

🌿Schisandra is an adaptogenic herb, meaning it helps your body/mind to cope better with stress. I prefer to use adaptogens with nervines, hence the pairing with Rose or Hawthorn mentioned above. As a balancer for blood pressure..whether high or low, and a mediator of calm between the heart and breath, Schisandra is wonderful for when anxiety keeps you from being able to get up go. You just don’t have the motivation or energy because your energy is deficient somewhere. So Schisandra moves it to where you need it.

🌿Lemon Balm, an aromatic mint of warmth & light is calming to hysteria states, feeling gripped through the gut/brain axis in a somewhat nightmarish manner. Indeed, Lemon Balm assists with upset stomachs and clear thinking, some forms of insomnia and being caught by fear-provoking mental images. It’s a great herb for children, especially in the glycerite form. Lemon Balm picked and/or processed in the right stage is never bitter.

🌿I like Lemon Balm paired with Tulsi, aka Holy Basil . Tulsi is known best for its ability to modulate & lower cortisol, and as a neuroprotective . It imparts a feeling of cozy mellow calm when adrenaline takes over or chronically exhausts. It affects the pituitary area, and thus opens the headspace to calmer thinking, ie, thinking not taken over by emotions. The idea is to have balance, with heart centered thinking, and feeling guided by mental clarity. Tulsi helps us accomplish this. Tulsi is appealing to overstimulated children, too, with its cinnamon-y taste.

🌿Fresh Milky Oats is made from a stage in the oats’ growth when a milky white substance emerges from the seedhead when squeezed. It only occurs for a few days, and growing it for my apothecary ( it’s found in the Adapt formula) involves lots of squeezing & checking to choose the best harvest time. Immediately these fresh seed heads are tinctured to capture the “milk”. Indeed Milky Oats seems like the plant kingdom‘s version of mother’s milk to me, with its nerve nourishing, deeply contenting magic for frayed nerves, tension, exhaustion & irritability. The kind of stress one feels in a Milk Oats crisis is coming apart at the seams”, helpless or angry. Pairing this nervine alongside most of the herbs listed here works well.

🌿Skullcap is a nerve toner for tautly wound, nervous, tense people. As if they are caught in one big body/mind cramp. It’s effective as part of a formula to aid sleep, as in TF Sleep elixir, in part from its ability to encourage endorphin release. Stay on the smaller dose with this herb, as over doing it can cause dizziness and hypersensitivity.

🌿When circular thinking takes over, or when thinking just gets stuck on repeat when trying to fall asleep, Passionflower is my go to. It lowers a quick, taut pulse and sedates without creating any addictive or narcotic hangover aftereffects.The crazy whorl of the flowerhead’s petals makes me think of nerves being hypnotized to relax. Passionflower can be really helpful for twitchiness, including restless legs. For young children & HSPs, a micro dose is strongly recommended to avoid stimulation. Too much is too much of a good thing and backfires.

🌿Lastly, Hawthorn is my friend for general heart strengthening and blood pressure balancing, but also for those times when my heart feels squooshed and achy from emotional stress and unpleasant external influences. Its indications are for the heart muscle & capillaries, and any kind of internal hot agitation states: the heart fire over expresses and there is a sense of doom, panic, and siege, maybe irritability, distracted inability to think. Here, Hawthorn is a regulator par excellence for the Shen, the consciousness of mind which can only speak through a heart that is also physically balanced .

🍄I’ll conclude this with a bonus mention of Reishi, the adaptogenic mushroom that imparts a deeply grounded, earth rooted calm, without sacrificing our capacity to rise above in our thinking. Reishi grows on trees, which are, in their cambium, a kind of elevated soil. Steiner was the first to notice this tidbit of plant science, and you can certainly see this possibility if you examine how life grows on tree trunks, or decaying logs and stumps. Bitter, amber Reishi double extract is an excellent immunity builder, and from there we can connect the dots from nervous system to immune system and consider how understanding plant remedies for our health involves multi angled perspectives as well as careful self assessment.

💚💚💚💚💚💚💚Thanks for reading!