The Most POWERFUL Sleep Tea (Medical Herbalist Guide & Recipe)

Today I'm going to show you how to make the best herbal tea for the deepest night's sleep. So coming up in this episode I'm going to take you through the whole process of creating this sleepy time herbal tea. I'm going to be showing you which herbs we're going to use and why. I'm going to show you how to put them together and blend them and of course how to make them up into your nice bedtime tea. So what we're going to do here is to make up about enough for one person for a week or if there are two of you and you both have trouble sleeping then we can do that for maybe three or four days with the amounts that we've got here. So first of all introducing our herbs. The main herb in the mix is going to be passion flower. Lots of scientific evidence to back up passion flower as a sleep tea and the nice thing about passion flower and the reason it's our main herb is because it's effective for almost everyone. So it's a good general herb tea for sleep. To that we're going to add our second herb which is skullcap. Skullcap is, I've chosen basically because as well as being relaxing and a good sleep remedy it's also strengthening, regenerating and restoring to the nerve system. So while you are merrily sleeping away it will be working to strengthen up, nourish and restore your nerves as well as just relaxing them. Next up we have California poppy. Now this is quite a strong herb. It's not the sort of thing that you would want to take just before getting in a car. So we're going to use moderate quantities of this. Any of these herbs by the way by themselves would make great sleep teas. Why we're blending them is because the causes of poor sleep are different from different individuals. We're all different. So whilst we could in the right circumstances use any of them for anybody what we're going to do is blend them so that they're more generally appropriate to pretty much anybody who would like this kind of assistance. So we've got our California poppy. Again a well-known sleep relaxant, slightly sedative herb this one. So as I said we need to be careful about the qualities. We don't want to knock people out. Next to that we've got chamomile. Obviously a very well-known remedy. Very good for children for example but maybe not strong enough for the average stressed out adult. So we're going to put a little bit of that in. It's a kind of warming herb. It's comforting. It has a nice taste obviously. So it's going to contribute not only because of its relaxing properties but also because of its colour which is always nice to look at something colourful and its taste as well. Next herb to that is quite similar. This is lavender. And again lavender would make a great sleepy time tea all of its own. But if you want to make it a really strong tea too much lavender has a very bitter taste. So maybe it wouldn't be the best thing to be going for just before you go to bed. So we're going to use a moderate quantity of lavender just for that lovely aroma that lavender can give. Of course lavender is also very well known for helping us sleep just by its smell. So it's going to contribute in that way as well. Next to it, this is my secret ingredient, this is rose petals. Now rose petals have an absolutely phenomenal fragrance as you probably know. And my students at the college also refer to rose petals as the hug, a herbal hug. So this is kind of a warming and kind of comforting mood enhancing ingredient that we've got going here. And lastly but not least we have valerian. Now this is a herb you've probably heard something about. It's a very powerful sleep aid but again we don't want to use too much of it. One of the reasons for that is that in herbal medicine we say this is a heating herb. So it's very warming. So if you have a cold or chilly constitution it's fantastic for you but if you're a little bit hot yourself then it's probably going to be working in the wrong direction. In fact if I have too much valerian before I go to sleep it's going to keep me awake. So very moderate quantities of that as we'll see. Now we've got exactly 20 grams of passionflower here and that's as I said it's going to be our base herb. We've got exactly 10 grams of skullcap here and that's about right. So I'm going to start by adding the skullcap straight into the passionflower and then we're going to go for our other herbs starting with california poppy. Now we've got 5 grams of california poppy in here so half of the skullcap and as I said we don't want too much of it but 5 grams is fine. So we're going to tip the whole lot into the mix but when we come to our next herbs we're going to be measuring them a little more precisely. So here we've got our chamomile herb, our chamomile flowers and that I reckon we're going to need about 2 teaspoons. So just 2 fairly, fairly full teaspoons just like that and now we come to lavender. Now lavender again has these very strong essential oils or volatile oil properties so it's quite a strong plant. You can smell it, you know the smell of lavender. It's quite powerful, very powerful for sleep actually. You don't need all that much of it again. So we're going to just take 1 heaped teaspoon of lavender flowers and that's going to be quite enough. And when we come to rose we've got a similar thing going on. Very fragrant but we don't want it to totally overpower the mix. So the one thing about rose petals is they are extremely light. So if I take a teaspoon of that it's probably going to be about half a gram. So I'm going to put a little bit more than that in. We're going to get a teaspoon and maybe a half in there. And our final herb is valerian and this again is quite powerful. Again if you know valerian you know it has a very, very powerful smell. Again we don't want it to overpower our herbal mix so we're going to use just about a level teaspoon or half a teaspoon of valerian in that mix and that's all we need. So let's mix this up. You need to do this several times because as you can see it can tend to clump together. What we're trying to achieve here is a really even mix. And there we have our finished Sleepy Time tea blend. So as you see we've stored our Sleepy Time tea in a sealable glass jar. You could in fact use a brown paper bag if you wanted. It's very easy to get, very simple. Just pack it up nice and tight, put it in the back of a cupboard, cool dark place. So we're going to go forward and make our infusion now. So we've got a kettle freshly boiled and our infuser teapot. Now this is a special design for making herbal tea. It's very, very useful for herbal therapy and it has this mesh which goes into the middle which allows the herbs to steep and also release their properties into the water. So we're going to make just one cup. So this is a one person dose. When we're making a herbal tea we want a medicinal tea, we want a medicinal action. We want more than just the amount that we would dispense for a normal beverage. So we're going to use a couple of teaspoons. And by the way, some of the ingredients of this may settle in time. So just give it a quick stir around before you put any of the herbs in the teapot. So now dosage, I'd say two teaspoons, but you could use more if you have a real problem. So you can judge that on how bad your sleep problem is, but I'd say between two and four teaspoons is about right. We're going to use two heaped teaspoons in here. There we go. That's for one cup. And then about half the teapot would be around the right size, the right amount of water here. Now the other thing about making a herbal tea is that we steep it a little bit longer than we would for an ordinary beverage. So this is going to stay here now for about a minimum 10 minutes, maximum 15 minutes. So let's see what this tastes like. We're going to pour ourselves a mug right here. This has been brewing for 15 minutes now, so it's nice and strong. Absolutely beautiful. A really nice blend. So there we have it. My ultimate sleepy time herbal tea. Don't forget to subscribe to our channel for future episodes and I'll join you on one very soon. Meantime, sleep well.