Health
6 Best Teas for Everyday Anxiety and Stress
6 Best Teas for Everyday Anxiety and Stress: Drink these herbal teas to ease your stress and anxiety without caffeine jitters.
I can’t drink coffee. As someone who has had anxiety the majority of my life, I’ve never been able to tolerate caffeinated beverages well — they give me jitters. According to Harvard Medical School, the caffeine from coffee can mimic anxiety symptoms, making any baseline anxiousness even worse.
Luckily, tea became my coffee substitute. Herbal and decaffeinated teas are perfect for my body to handle and even ease some of my symptoms. Now, I drink a cup of tea in the morning and at night to manage my anxiety and stress. You can too.
This curated list took into account the best brands and selections of teas with ingredients that have been scientifically tested to ease stress and anxiety. I considered customer reviews, price, ingredients and my own experience. Here are the best teas for anxiety and stress.
6 Best Teas for Everyday Anxiety and Stress

Tazo Refresh Mint Tea
Ingredients: Peppermint, spearmint and tarragon
Tazo is one of the top tea brands on the market and one of my personal favorites. Not only does it produce quality caffeinated teas, but it also offers plenty of non-caffeinated and herbal tea selections.
Tazo’s Refresh Mint tea is an infusion of peppermint, spearmint and a little tarragon. Mint is a natural anxiety and stress aid. A pilot study on peppermint, in particular, suggests mint tea also enhances memory and improves sleep quality.
This tea comes in a pack of six, and each box contains 20 tea bags.
- For the best brewing: boil water (212 degrees Fahrenheit), pour a cup of water over the tea bag and let steep for five minutes.

Buddha Teas Organic Passionflower Tea
Ingredients: Organic passionflower
Buddha Teas uses clean ingredients, unbleached tea bags, 100% recycled and recyclable cartons, no artificial flavors, colors, preservatives or GMOs. Its organic passionflower tea is also non-caffeinated.
Passionflower is a powerful yet natural sleep aid. Recent studies suggest that it has the potential to treat sleep disorders that are often associated with anxiety, such as insomnia. However, consult a doctor if you are pregnant or nursing, as passionflower may be unsuitable for you.
6 Best Teas for Everyday Anxiety and Stress
Each Buddha Teas box comes with 18 tea bags.
- For the best brewing: boil water, pour over the tea bag and let steep for three to five minutes.

Twinings Lemon and Ginger Tea
Ingredients: Ginger root, natural lemon and ginger flavors, blackberry leaves, linden, lemon peel and lemon grass
Twinings, a tea company based in London, has been providing tea products for over an impressive 300 years. Its quality teas are often moderately priced. Twinings Lemon and Ginger tea is described as zesty, warming and lightly spicy (due to the ginger).
Ginger root has many health benefits to the body. Ginger reduces anxiety — in one study, ginger extract seemed to treat anxiety as effectively as Diazepam. It also serves as an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory and may even lower blood sugar in those with diabetes.
One large box comes with 100 tea bags.
- For the best brewing: boil water, pour over the tea bag and let steep for four minutes.

Yogi Bedtime Tea
Ingredients: Organic passionflower extract, organic valerian root extract, organic licorice root, organic chamomile flower, organic spearmint leaf, organic skullcap leaf, organic cardamom pod, organic cinnamon bark, organic rose hip, organic lavender flower, organic stevia leaf and organic orange flavor.
The Yogi brand is going to be the most expensive on this list. Yogi teas are all wellness-based — meaning its teas are made with your health in mind, only ever using organic ingredients — and offer products for cold season, immune support, detoxing and sleep. Each tea is USDA-certified organic, non-GMO, vegan, kosher, gluten-free and free of artificial flavors and sweeteners. Its Bedtime Tea is also caffeine-free.
6 Best Teas for Everyday Anxiety and Stress
Best enjoyed an hour before bed, Yogi Bedtime Tea relies on the natural sleep aids of passionflower, valerian root, chamomile, mint and cinnamon — which cinnamon extract has shown to increase melatonin levels.
This pack of four comes with 16 tea bags each for a total of 64 tea bags.
- For the best brewing: boil water, pour over the tea bag and let steep for seven minutes. Use two tea bags for a stronger cup.

U.S. Wellness Naturals Lemon Balm Tea
Ingredients: Lemon balm cut and sifted
This bulk of loose leaf lemon balm is natural, organic and caffeine-free. The leaves come from the Republic of Serbia and are packaged in the US. Note that you will need a strainer to brew this tea, as it doesn’t come in individual tea bags.
Lemon balm is very similar to mint leaves, yet with a lemony smell and flavor. In addition to stress and anxiety, it is often used to ease depression and sleep conditions. Lemon balm aids in depression and mood by boosting GABA-T levels — the neurotransmitter that soothes the body.
Additionally, this is the best bang for your buck — one package is one pound of lemon balm leaves. One package can yield about 100 plus cups of tea, depending on how many teaspoons of herbs you add to one cup of water.
- For the best brewing: add 1 to 2 tablespoons of dried herb into a strainer. Bring water to boiling and add the strainer to the cup. Let steep for three to five minutes.

Bigelow Cozy Chamomile
Ingredients: Chamomile flowers
Bigelow, like Twining and Tazo, is a big brand name and has been producing tea for over 75 years. Bigelow offers teas that are gluten-free, non-GMO, kosher and packaged in the US. The Cozy Chamomile tea is also naturally caffeine-free.
Not only is this tea known for its calming properties, but chamomile also supports a healthy digestive system. It is an anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and research suggests that it may aid systems of diarrhea, nausea and stomach ulcers.
This tea comes in a pack of six, and each box contains 20 tea bags.
- For the best brewing: boil a cup of water, pour over the tea bag and let steep for four minutes.
Teas for anxiety and stress FAQs
How do herbal teas help to reduce stress?
Herbal teas are warm, calming and often enjoyed while sitting down. Teas also have been shown to lower cortisol levels (the stress hormone) in a randomized double-blind study. Herbal teas also often include ingredients such as chamomile, lemon balm or mint that have been linked to relieving anxiety and stress.
Is green tea good for stress and anxiety?
One cup of brewed green tea contains about 28 mg of caffeine, while a cup of coffee contains 96 mg. Depending on the amount of caffeine that your body can handle on top of lingering anxiety, this might be enough caffeine to exacerbate symptoms of anxiety. However, some studies have found green tea to ease stress and anxiety. Longer studies need to be done to fully support this claim.
What tea is good for anxiety and depression?
Mint, ginger, lemon balm, chamomile and other teas on this list have shown to help aid anxiety. However, lemon balm, specifically, has been used to ease depression symptoms and studies have shown promising results.

Health
How Clinical Studies Can Benefit From Metadata Repository
Metadata is about data and describes the nature of given information. Metadata can be any one of the following:
- Data about data – metadata, in other words, data about itself and its content.
- Data about the database – data that describes the database schema or structure.
- Data about the database management system (DBMS) – data that describes capabilities of the DBMS, such as performance and security features.
- Data about the users and their interaction with the database – data that describes how users are using the DBMS.
A metadata repository is a place where all this information is stored and managed to support decision making, business use cases, operations, and IT processes such as change management or database maintenance on a day-to-day basis. For example, a metadata repository can store all types of information such as trial design, protocol documents, study setup specific information like sites participating in the trial, study instruments used for collecting patient data, team leads for each study site, and so on. It is essential in various groups involved in clinical research, from study setup to monitoring to the analysis phase.
There are several benefits to using a repository, such as the ryze clinical metadata repository and similar ones for clinical studies, and this article will list some of them:
- Improves Efficiency
Researchers create, maintain, govern, and use standards consistently throughout their projects with a metadata repository in place. The repository can be configured to automatically generate standard reference documentation for each study. It improves efficiency because researchers spend less time creating documentation, manually populating spreadsheets, and responding to audit requests.
The repository also enables researchers to collaborate on projects since it can share information seamlessly. In addition, researchers can more easily perform critical tasks such as tracking changes made to the study design or identifying which internal and external parties will require data sets during the trial.
- Helps Researchers Reuse Existing Assets
The pharmaceutical industry is facing increased demands for speed and efficiency in the discovery, development, and approval of new drugs. Pharmaceutical companies are under the gun to bring more drugs to market faster. And once on the market, these companies must demonstrate that their products are safe and effective while maintaining federal regulations.
Many pharmaceuticals have started to use metadata repositories to help them store and extract data that they have used before to assist them in new projects.
For example, researchers working on developing a new treatment for women with breast cancer could use a metadata repository to access the thousands of clinical records that have already been collected through previous studies (with patient consent, of course). The researchers could then selectively review those records for specific characteristics that may be applicable to their research.
Additionally, if their study will focus on a specific ethnic group or patients at a certain age, they can review past studies for those same characteristics. They can also look for information about factors that may affect the effectiveness of the treatment they are developing, such as using other medications or patient lifestyle choices.
- Enhances Traceability
A metadata repository can benefit clinical studies by enabling researchers to improve traceability.
Traceability is the ability to trace a study back to its source and forward it to the destination, including how data is collected and validated, how it changes as it moves throughout the organization, and how information is used in real-time.
Data coming into an organization often comes from multiple sources — such as study site systems, laboratory data management systems, and more — and gets integrated into one or more platforms.
With all of these different methods to collect data comes several formats that are challenging to translate into a standard format. It can strain the research organization because they must manage multiple systems while maintaining data integrity.
Institutions that have already invested in an enterprise metadata repository (EMR) have found that their study data can be quickly mapped into another platform, allowing for a universal view of the data.
Once all the systems are connected through an EMR, it’s also possible for researchers to use artificial intelligence tools like machine learning or deep learning (a subset of machine learning) to develop predictive models that can identify specific outcomes from particular types of data.
- Helps In Creating Accurate Mappings
A metadata repository can benefit clinical studies by allowing researchers to create accurate mappings.
The mappings are subsequently used to extract data from the metadata repository to populate study-specific databases. By studying the relevant information to the project and making it available, a metadata repository will help you get an overview of your project environment and gain insight into how it works.
The information relevant to your project is also valuable to other projects, and they will be able to use the information you have made available from your metadata repository.
In other words, you can make the information available to others but still keep control over it.
Conclusion
The framework for clinical data sharing is here, and it will only get stronger. The future of clinical trials is bright now that metadata repositories can provide the foundation for unified access to clinical study data.
Health
Scabies: major causes of scabies skin disease
Scabies is a skin condition caused by the parasite Sarcoptes scabiei.
The intense itching associated with scabies is thought to be caused by the immune system reacting to the mites and their saliva, eggs and faeces.
The scabies mite life cycle
A scabies infestation starts when a female mite burrows into your skin.
Male mites move between different burrow sites looking to mate. After mating, the male mite dies and the female begins to lay eggs, which hatch around 3 to 4 days later.
After hatching, the young mites move to the surface of the skin, where they mature into adults after 10 to 15 days. Male mites stay on the surface of the skin, while female mites burrow back into the skin to create a new burrow. The life cycle is then repeated.
Without effective treatment, the life cycle of the scabies mite can continue indefinitely. Scabies mites are resistant to soap and hot water and can’t be scrubbed out of the skin.
How scabies is spread
Scabies mites can’t fly or jump, which means they can only move from one human body to another if 2 people have direct and prolonged physical contact.
For example, scabies mites can be transmitted by:
- holding hands with an infected person for a prolonged period of time
- having sex with an infected person
- sharing clothing, towels and bedding with an infected person (although this is rare)
- It’s unlikely that scabies will be transmitted through brief physical contact, such as shaking hands or hugging.
Scabies mites can survive outside the human body for 24 to 36 hours, making infection by coming into contact with contaminated clothes, towels or bed linen a possibility. However, it’s rare for someone to be infected in this way.
Scabies infestations can spread quickly because people are usually unaware they have the condition until 2 to 3 weeks after the initial infection.
There’s an increased risk of catching scabies in confined environments, such as schools and nursing homes, where people are in close proximity to one another.
Health
Why Does My Sleep Become Worse as I Age?
Research has found that sleep quality does indeed get a little rusty as you grow older, but it’s not a fate you have to live with, experts say.
A lot of people complains that as they get older, they found it difficult to sleep and why is it so?
Dr. Abhinav Singh, medical director of the Indiana Sleep Center and a sleep professor at Marian University College of Osteopathic Medicine, likes to answer this question with an analogy. Think of your ability to sleep as though it were a car, he said. As it ages and clocks more miles, it begins to fall apart; it needs more repairs, and its ride becomes less smooth.
The same thing happens with your sleep, Dr. Singh said.
Researchers have found that sleep quality does indeed get a little rusty with age: Older adults are more likely to take longer to fall asleep, wake up more frequently throughout the night and spend more time napping during the day compared with younger adults. They also spend less time in deep, restorative sleep, which helps with bone and muscle growth and repair, strengthens the immune system and helps the brain reorganize and consolidate memories, Dr. Singh said. Your melatonin levels, which play an important role in sleep-wake cycles, also go awry with age, he said.
It is no surprise, then, that when researchers surveyed more than 9,000 people ages 65 and older in a landmark study published in 1995, they found that 57 percent of them reported at least one sleep complaint over three years. These included trouble falling or staying asleep, waking up too early, feeling unrested and napping during the day. In a different study, published in 2014, scientists found that a little more than half of the 6,050 older adults surveyed had either one or two insomnia symptoms over the past month.
Research suggests that women are more likely than men to report poorer sleep quality in general. And sleep begins to elude them earlier in life, usually starting around the menopausal transition (or the years leading up to menopause), which typically begins between 45 and 55, according to the National Institute on Aging.
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What exactly causes these changes?
The truth is that no one knows for sure. “We’re only just starting to understand why all of this happens,” said Luis de Lecea, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University.
One explanation might have to do with an aging brain. In a study published in February, Dr. de Lecea and his team found that a particular cluster of neurons responsible for wakefulness became overly stimulated in aging mice, disrupting their sleep cycles. This shift “likely also happens to humans,” he said, because the part of the brain that regulates sleep in mice, called the hypothalamus, is similar to that of humans. (Many sleep studies are conducted in mice for practical and ethical reasons.) Researchers have also found that the suprachiasmatic nucleus, another brain region that regulates the body’s circadian rhythms, deteriorates in mice with age. This results in sleep disorders, including trouble falling asleep at regular times.
Certain lifestyle changes can lead to sleep disruption later in life, too, said Adam Spira, a professor and sleep researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. As people retire, their days become less structured and routine. They may wake up later or nap during the day, which can make it harder to fall asleep at night, creating a vicious cycle.
Researchers have also found links between depression, loneliness, grief over the loss of a loved one and poor sleep in older adults. And in a 2014 study, Dr. Spira concluded that older adults who struggled with certain activities or household chores, like laundry, grocery shopping, meeting with friends or taking a walk, were more likely to report insomnia symptoms than older adults who were able to participate in those activities.
For women, hot flashes, night sweats and higher rates of depression, anxiety and stress — common symptoms of the menopausal transition — are also correlated with poor sleep. But researchers are still not exactly sure why those perimenopausal symptoms might be more severe and frequent in some women, and how best to address them.
Of course, certain medical conditions that are more prevalent in older adults can also wreak havoc on sleep, Dr. Singh said. Weight gain, for example, can increase the risk of developing a condition like sleep apnea, which can cause you to snore, gasp for air or feel like you’re choking while you’re sleeping. And medications, like diuretics for blood pressure, can also impair sleep because they can lead to more trips to the bathroom. They really can “act like darts into your sleep board,” Dr. Singh said.
Are sleepless nights a fate you have to live with?
The good news is that the same habits that improve sleep for people in general will work for older adults with changing sleep patterns, too, Dr. Spira said. Going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, avoiding naps and late-afternoon caffeine, following a healthy diet and exercising regularly are all things that will help your sleep, research suggests. In fact, one small study published in 2022 found that at least 40 minutes of either aerobic or resistance training four times a week helped older adults fall asleep faster and stay asleep for longer.
Keeping consistent mealtimes every day can also help maintain a routine, which, in turn, can help regulate sleep, Dr. Singh said — as can spending time outside in sunlight, which helps keep melatonin production and the body’s circadian rhythm in check. Older adults who are on medications should also check with their doctors about whether the drugs might be interfering with their sleep and if there might be alternative options or a different dosage, he added.
Tips for Better Sleep
Tired of tossing and turning? There are some strategies you could try to maximize your hours in bed.
Turn Your Bedroom Into a Sleep Sanctuary With Wirecutter’s Recommendations
- Good rest starts with a great mattress.
- Next, you’ll need a good pillow.
- White noise machines have the power to mask yapping dogs, clanky radiators and late-night parties. Consider buying one.