Is stress eating you from the inside out? Peace of mind could be growing in your backyard.
Stress kills. If you just started sweating inside, take a deep breath and hear me out. You probably know stress is the leading cause of chronic illnesses like heart disease, high blood pressure, and insomnia.
What you probably don’t know is there’s a simple, all-natural remedy to banish stress once and for all: adaptogens.
Adaptogens are herbs, roots, and mushrooms that help the body adapt to stress and restore balance.
It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? That’s what I thought.
Until adaptogens saved my hide when I needed them most.
My Postpartum Disaster
When I became a mom, I had dreams of nursing my baby in the sunshine while sipping nourishing mugs of bone broth. Instead, my daughter was born with debilitating oral ties that made it impossible for her to latch.
She couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. The crying (hers and mine) was unbelievable.
That’s when an angel (my mom) showed up at my door with an herbal tincture to help me “calm down.”
Insisting I’d never been calmer, I looked over the ingredients: chamomile, lavender, ashwagandha, and catnip. Desperate and more than a little skeptical, I took the adaptogens every morning.
The herbs didn’t fix our nursing issues, but within a few weeks, my heart rate settled. I stopped crying and my brain fog cleared long enough to have my daughter’s oral ties revised.
Did adaptogens solve all our problems? No. A lactation nurse diagnosed my daughter’s ties and a pediatric dentist performed the revision.
But without the adaptogen tincture, I would have festered in my panic. My postpartum hormones would have swallowed me whole. I wouldn’t have thought clearly enough to get my daughter the help she needed.
This wasn’t a mind over matter situation. I needed help now and I needed it to be gentle enough for a healing mama and baby.
That’s the beauty of herbs. They’re powerful enough to get the job done, safe enough for the most vulnerable among us, and they work in a way you wouldn’t expect.
The Fight, Flight, or Freeze Epidemic
Remember when I said stress kills? Let’s revisit that.
Stress triggers one of three responses in living creatures: fight, flight or freeze. These responses are functions of the sympathetic nervous system and are excellent if you find yourself face to face with a lion.
How often are you faced with a hungry lion? Probably as infrequently as I am.
It doesn’t matter how far society has progressed. Our stress responses are the same as our ancestor’s. Temporarily triggering your sympathetic nervous system is manageable. But if you live in a constant state of stress, your body will spend all it’s time in fight, flight, or freeze.
Which means you are surviving, not thriving.
Living in a constant state of survival means your body can’t devote the proper attention to other crucial functions like:
- Digestion
- Detoxification
- Tissue repair
- Learning
- Sleep
- Hormone function
- Thyroid function
This isn’t a comprehensive list if what goes wrong when we live in survival mode, but I’m guessing you, like me, have experienced at least one impaired function on the list.
We aren’t faced with lions in our daily lives, but our jobs are overwhelming. Our to-do lists are unending. We’re overinformed about global catastrophes in a way our mind’s cannot process. And to top it off, most of us aren’t nourishing our bodies the way they need.
This is what modern day fight, flight, or freeze looks like. And it’s killing us.
How Adaptogens Work
A bottle of herbs might sound too simple to be effective. Most of us are used to aid coming in the form of a pharmaceutical drug we can barely pronounce.
What did our ancestors do before the “pill for every ill” mentality?
They used their resources. They harnessed the power of nature to treat their ailments and didn’t break their budget doing it.
Ancient people knew something we’ve forgotten: plants are powerful.
Adaptogens reduce cortisol (stress hormones) and minimize time spent in the sympathetic state by preventing overreactions to stress. They don’t eliminate stress, but act as a buffer between triggering events and the body’s natural survival responses.
A balanced nervous system helps the body stay calm and collected when dealing with everyday stress. Adaptogens like lavender, chamomile and ashwagandha help reduce the mind-body stress load so you have more bandwidth for crucial bodily processes like sleep and digestion.
In my postpartum days, the stresses were a baby who couldn’t nurse, lack of sleep, and a whole lot of crying. I lived in fight, flight, or freeze so long I couldn’t think straight or string a sentence together.
Adaptogens balanced my nervous system naturally. The herbs helped restore healthy cortisol levels so I could think clearly enough to get help.
It was that simple and it was safe for my baby too.
The Bottom Line: It’s Not Too Good to Be True
Adaptogens really do work. They’re natural, safe, and more affordable than chemically-laced pharmaceuticals.
Plus, you don’t have to take them long-term. Adaptogens are meant to restore balance naturally. They work best when taken for only six to eight weeks. Then, you can cycle off and reevaluate.
It might sound too simple to be effective, but our bodies respond beautifully to natural treatments. You’ll be amazed by how restorative herbs and mushrooms can be.
Jordan Thompson 