My favorite tea of the year is what I’m making right now as I write this: lemon balm, peppermint, red raspberry leaf and ginseng. For the last couple of years I have gotten more into making my own tea mixes with loose leaf tea. What started out as wanting a particular tea for something like soothing my stomach, like peppermint, has turned into a daily ritual that I love.
In the last year I have given up caffeine completely. No more green or black tea, the last remnants of a lifelong caffeine addiction. I still love having a cup of warm tea as my drink of choice and so began to more seriously experiment with what combinations I wanted for a particular day. Each month it changes, and I’ve started to make larger batches of tea mix so it’s easier for me, particularly in the morning, to make my tea when I have other things going on.
It’s nice to have so many options with not just flavors but how the tea will make me feel. I have a morning tea and a bedtime tea, both fairly different. I don’t always drink the sleepy tea (catnip, lemon balm, chamomile) but I always drink tea in the morning. Lemon balm is now one of my favorite herbs, it even has its own sweet lemony taste, perfect for tea. It gives you mental clarity while physically relaxing you. What I had wanted more then anything was to wake my brain up in the morning without the jitters in my body. Lemon balm is also said to give you more of a sunny disposition, so I think of it sometimes as drinking sunshine tea. Peppermint I found out has a mild stimulating effect, helping me to wake up and feel refreshed without that boing! feeling of that first hit of caffeine. Red raspberry leaf is a staple of mine, a general tonic that surprisingly is a good source of iron, and the ginseng also helps to give me a nice boost.
I will usually drink my tea with a little bit of agave nectar, my new sweetener of choice. My whole life I have wanted some kind of sweet boost when I first wake up. When I was in high school, it was a caffeine soda of some kind, cold in a can, just to get me to the bus stop at 6am so I could then sleep for the next hour-long bus ride. Cold soda continued to be my morning drink of choice until about seven years ago when I started to try and untangle myself from that habit. Hot coffee with lots of sugar and soy milk became my morning drink for many years, taking huge stainless steel thermoses of it with me to work to last throughout the day. Ya, this didn’t help my stomach, or my nerves, or my blood sugar very much.
A few years ago I stopped the coffee, had a brief interlude of fresh carrot juice with super food nutrition powder as my morning drink but went back to wanting a hot caffeine boost during my day. Black tea for a while, again with the sugar but that had the same affect on me as coffee did and I’m one of those people that will drink a ton of it to get that supercharge boost to make up for not getting enough sleep. Switched to caffeinated green tea for a while, with lemon because I found out without lemon my stomach couldn’t handle that either. Sick of the stomach problems just from trying to get an energy boost, I stopped all caffeine completely.
This year I gave up on trying to cheat my sleep cycle. If I don’t get enough sleep now, I’ll maybe make some fresh vegetable juice to give me an immediate energy boost, but then I’ll just deal with feeling sleepy so that when it’s later time for me to go to bed, I can actually sleep and make up for what was lost the night before. It’s forced me to be kinder to myself, my body, my mind. I realized, after no longer depending on caffeine to get me through the day, that I was using it to be able to push myself too hard and to try and do too many things which was just leading to more stress, less good sleep etc. I was trying to cheat. This year, I finally came to a real breaking point with all of that, and now enjoy my mornings a lot more. And my tea.
