Tea and Stress

White tea, green tea and oolong tea are gaining in popularity in the western world, but perhaps you may want to rethink your plain old cup of black tea before jumping on the new tea bandwagon. As it turns out, black tea may actually be best at promoting relaxation and fighting stress.

Researchers set out to discover if the tea itself had this de-stressing effect on people, or if it was the ritual of drinking the tea that worked the magic. Perhaps just making time to enjoy a cup of tea in the afternoon was enough to make a difference in managing stress.

As it turns out research proves that you can lower stress hormone levels simply by drinking black tea. In just under an hour black tea drinkers could unwind after a stressful event which was more quickly than their non-tea drinking counterparts. The tea drinkers ingested four cups of black daily for a month. In study after study researchers found that not only did the tea drinkers de-stress more quickly, but they also had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol and lower blood platelet activation which is linked to heart attack risk.

However, it is important to note, that while the tea drinkers returned to normal stress hormone levels more quickly than non-tea drinkers, drinking tea does not seem to reduce the actual levels of stress that people experience. However, being able to get back to normal after encountering a stressful situation is very important because prolonging the stress causes the body to retain high levels of cortisol and increases the risk of developing conditions like coronary heart disease.

To address the question of ritual versus ingredients, researchers ran a six-week study where two groups drank an identically flavored fruit-flavored drink containing caffeine. While one batch of the fruity drinks contained the active ingredients found in tea, the other did not, and this study also found that the group with the active tea ingredients recovered more quickly from stressful events than the placebo group.

While enjoying a soothing cup of tea is a wonderfully relaxing ritual, as it turns out it is not the ritual but the tea itself that may be saving your life.