Why I Craved Chamomile Before I Got Sick

[00:00:01]:
So the night before the conference started, I opened the little drawer with the tea bags in it in my hotel room. It had English breakfast, Earl Grey, green tea. Interesting, nothing herbal. No chamomile and no peppermint. The next day, sitting in one of the breaks between sessions, this thought arrived out of nowhere. I could do with a chamomile tea. I should take some tea bags back to my room. It might help me sleep.

[00:00:29]:
There was chamomile at the tea station right there alongside everything else, but I didn’t get up for it. Let me tell you a little bit about me and chamomile. I just don’t like the taste of it. I don’t like the smell of it either. I have such a strong yuck reaction to it that I can tell if it’s in something a mile off. So the thought sat there and I didn’t do anything with it. I kept drinking my peppermint tea because that’s what I actually fancied at the time, and it was yummy. But in the background, I kept thinking, I should take some chamomile tea bags back to my room.

[00:01:07]:
The next day, same thing. Sitting in a session or in a break, and there it was again. I should take some chamomile tea bags back to my room. Same thought, more or less. Chamomile still sitting there at the tea station. Me still not reaching for it. Peppermint tea, chamomile tea, both the same kind of thing when you think about it in terms of digestive teas. Both the teas you reach for when your stomach needs settling.

[00:01:34]:
I didn’t put that together at the time. I was just drinking one and not touching the other. 9 o’clock the night before I’m flying home, and out of nowhere I know, oh, I’m gonna be sick. I get to the bathroom just in time, and then I’m there for the next 4 hours, on and off, throwing up. Somewhere in there, between one bout and the next, the thought comes back, I wish I had some chamomile tea. Except this time it’s not a background noise. It isn’t the thought I’ve been carrying around for 2 days without acting on it. I am, like, properly craving it now.

[00:02:11]:
I don’t have any. I never went and got it. So between the bouts, I’m doing all the things, right? I’m drinking coconut water, mixing it with water intermittently, off and on, sipping it gently, and it’s helping. It steadies something every time I manage a sip. I get through the night. I get myself onto the flight the next morning, feeling all right, hydrated, the vomiting gone for about 6 hours by that point, but still feeling really fragile. You know that particular fragile you feel after your body’s been forcibly emptying itself for half the night? So I don’t feel sick anymore, but I don’t feel right either. Once I’m through that X-ray machine at the airport, I fill up my water bottle, drop some electrolytes in, and sitting there, the thought arrives again, except now it’s not in the background, right? I’m fully alert to it.

[00:03:05]:
I really do need a chamomile tea. So this is funny. I go into Starbucks. I order the biggest cup of chamomile tea that they’ve got. And the guy behind the counter, he looks at me like I’m crazy or something. I don’t think chamomile tea gets ordered very much at an airport Starbucks. So I’ve got my chamomile tea. I sip it slowly and I can feel my stomach start to settle and to relax.

[00:03:31]:
The background nausea, the low hum of it that’s been sitting under everything since the night before. It just starts to die away just from drinking the tea, just from that one thing. Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve had this relationship with chamomile tea, right? Quite a few of my stomach bugs have asked for a big cup of chamomile tea. I don’t ordinarily reach for chamomile because I like it. I reach for it because something in me wants it specifically. And sometimes that wanting shows up right in the middle of being unwell, and sometimes it shows up days before I have any idea I’m about to get sick at all. And sometimes I fancy it and I don’t get sick. Who knows what’s going on there? But anyway, let’s talk about why chamomile might be helpful in situations like these, in case you ever find yourself with a stomach bug overseas about to fly home.

[00:04:27]:
So chamomile is, at its core, a digestive herb. Herbalists have reached for it for centuries specifically for the gut. And there’s a real chemistry behind why. It contains a compound that’s called apigenin, and this binds to receptor sites in your gut wall and it relaxes the smooth muscle that’s there. And that’s what makes it a relaxant in the proper herbal sense. So when your gut is in spasm, you know, that gripping, that cramping, that wringing sensation, that’s such a large part of what a stomach spasm is. Yeah. stomach bug actually feels like— apigenins acting directly on the muscle that’s causing that sensation.

[00:05:08]:
It’s also a carminative, which means that it eases trapped wind both up and down and general digestive discomfort, and again, the smooth muscle relaxation is doing a lot of that work. Chamomile is also anti-inflammatory. 2 other compounds are thought to be largely responsible for this. Bisabolol and camazulene. These act directly on inflamed tissue. So after a night of vomiting, your gut lining is like very irritated, and these 2 compounds get to work on the inflammatory chemistry itself. They damp down the signalling that keeps that tissue red, swollen, and reactive, and they, they’re giving that irritated lining the chance to actually settle and start repairing. And chamomile’s got a long history for use for nausea as well.

[00:05:58]:
Some of that again comes back to apigenin, because the same receptor binding to that calms the gut and it also calms the nervous system. So it’s an added bonus if you’re flying, right? Especially since I had 3 flights ahead of me, 17 hours of travel in total, and I’m already run down from a night of vomiting. Apigenin has a mild calming action on the nervous system itself, and it’s gentle enough that it’s traditionally been used as a mild sedative. So chamomile was working on my nervous system at the same time as it was working on my gut, not just settling the stomach that needed settling, but settling a body that was about to sit through 17 hours of flights, not counting those layovers in between, a bit dehydrated, feeling depleted, with that ordinary low-grade stress of travel sitting on top of everything else. So when I felt my stomach start to settle and relax with that chamomile tea, there was a lot happening in that one cup. A relaxant working on the spasm, a carminative easing the digestive discomfort, something anti-inflammatory working on the irritation itself, something antiemetic working on that background nausea, and underneath all of that, Something quietly calming a nervous system that had every reason to be frayed with a lot of flying still ahead of me. Here’s what I love the most about this. My body knew.

[00:07:31]:
Days before I understood anything was coming, some part of me already knew a stomach bug was on its way, and it knew exactly what would help. Chamomile tea. My body was already reaching for the one thing that would ease something that hadn’t happened yet. To my knowledge. I think that’s an amazing thing to sit with. We talk so much about optimising performance, tracking everything, working harder to understand ourselves, and here’s my body quietly ahead of me already knowing. Now, in that moment, I didn’t listen. The impulse wasn’t even to drink chamomile tea there and then.

[00:08:10]:
It was to grab some tea bags. And take them back to my room. And I was in a conference. There was somewhere to be, people to talk to, a session about to start. The thought arrived and life carried on, and getting out for tea bags I don’t normally reach for wasn’t the thing that made it onto my list. And that’s most of how we miss these signals, right? That busyness, inconvenience, a body speaking quietly while the rest of life is speaking louder. Now let me be clear on this. Our job isn’t to become hypervigilant, scanning ourselves for every signal in case we miss something important.

[00:08:49]:
That is its own kind of exhausting, and it isn’t what this is about. Our job is so much simpler than that, and it’s kind of harder in its own way as well. Get out of the way. Let the noise of the day quiet down enough to actually hear what’s underneath it. My body knew what she needed. She always does. She just needs me to stop long enough to listen. And this is part of what I love about herbal medicine.

[00:09:21]:
These plants are your herbal allies. They’re growing quietly, doing exactly what a body needs at exactly the moment it needs it. And we get to use them. Chamomile didn’t need me to understand the mechanism for it to work. Although it is interesting, I think. It just needed me to drink it. For those of us leading, achieving, holding a great deal, this matters too. Not as another framework to apply, but just as a fact.

[00:09:51]:
We are bodies first, underneath all of it. And supporting that body, listening to her, giving her what she’s already asking for, As part of how any of the rest of it becomes sustainable. My body knew 3 days before anything happened to my level of awareness. She already had her answer. Mum was still catching up. I don’t think that’s unusual to her. I think that’s just how she operates, quietly all the time. Sometimes I catch it, sometimes I don’t.

[00:10:26]:
This time I got to see the whole arc of it clearly. Chamomile, asked for early, needed later, and there when I finally reached for her. That’s exactly why I built Herbs for Health. It’s a free email once a month, and each one is built around getting properly acquainted with a single herb. You’ll get the podcast episode featuring that month’s herb, a proper introduction to it, its traditional and medicinal uses, And how to actually make a remedy from it at home. And these are remedies I use myself, so I can tell you they work and the recipe is as per the recipe. So if you grow your own herbs or you want to, there’s also tips for growing. And every month it also covers the safety side.

[00:11:14]:
Who should be more cautious? What it is best not to be combined with? When to see a herbalist instead of self-treating? This isn’t a course. There’s nothing to buy. It’s just one herb, properly understood, landing in your inbox once a month. The link to join is in the show notes. If you’d like to start building that same kind of relationship with plants, go take a look. I’m sending you lots of love. Bye for now.