Herbs for Highly Sensitive People: Daily Herbal Practices for Wellbeing
After a few years of working on and off with clients in-between teaching and running my small remedy shop, I started to notice a pattern with the types of folks who were drawn to my practice and the ones that I felt most capable of serving. A lot of them were herbalists or in similar fields. Most of them were activists and organizers. There were folks who were neither, many who were both, but all had similar issues with burnout, some variation of emotional fatigue, and generally what you end up with when you make sure everyone else at the table is fed but you don't always remember to feed or be fed yourself.
At first I thought that this was just how herbalists and activists are, but I've met enough of both to know that not all had a deeper sensitivity to life when compared to their peers like so many of my clients and students. It was a pattern I saw in myself but didn't have a name for until a few years ago when a wise therapist I was working with suggested I look up what a "highly sensitive person" was.
I balked. I wasn't sensitive and especially not highly sensitive. I was a force to be reckoned with, indefatigable, and I had long disproven the critics of my childhood who called me "too sensitive" by pushing myself beyond my limits again and again. I thought the idea of a highly sensitive person sounded like pseudoscience and even if it wasn't I was trying to overcome or at least tame my sensitivity, not embrace it. But I also trusted my therapist, read some books, and was relieved to realize that what I read was surely what everyone experienced, right? Right?
Not really. Of course, everyone has moments of intense sensitivity but some folks live in a heightened state of sensitivity to their environment as their everyday baseline.¹ As I began to explore my own high sensitivity, I started to slowly realize that the pattern I was spotting among those I served and many of my students was high sensitivity. While it took a few more years to unlearn lessons of false dichotomies of sensitivity versus toughness and begin to embrace the way I feel my way through life, eventually I learned to love sensitivity as a gift. Sensitivity has served well as an herbalist drawn to working with sensitive folk as well as helping everyone I serve reconnect to the rich wisdom of their sensory worlds.
Being highly sensitive can be overwhelming when we live in a multitude of noisy worlds whether you live in a car-centric noisy city to all of our increasingly unavoidable digital spaces. There is a stigma with sensitivity within cultures that rely on productivity as a sign of strength and worth, as sensitivity points out ways that many of the systems we set up serve few of us well, and modern definitions of high sensitivity don’t always take into account the intersectionality of identity and experience when helping someone navigate sensitivity.²
Honoring and connecting with our sensitivity allows us to explore the experience of "something doesn't feel right" which can lead to all sorts of transformative rabble-rousing within our lives and communities. Sensitivity is an essential part of changing culture, but as individuals within those culture-changing communities, we need to find ways of supporting our sensitive needs.
image via @anniespratt
Through the Herbs for Highly Sensitive People series we'll be exploring ways of creating these little zones of peace throughout our days, weeks, and months, making space for us to reconnect with our sensitivity in ways that feel empowering. Herbalism is a sensory rich healing tradition, full of sights, scents, tastes, and sensations, that draws us back into the collective wisdom pooled in our body and pulled up by our plant allies. Working with plants is one way that we, as sensitive folks, can honor the sensitive ways of our body by strengthening a resilience that reconnects while alleviating the symptoms of overstimulation.
When I write of the body, I am referring to the body in its most expansive form including the physical, emotional, mental, and mythological body. I'm not trying to describe the emotional body as a separate part from the physical body, but rather that our bodies have emotional experiences intertwined with physical experiences intertwined with mental and mythological experiences. Part of the practice of highly sensitive people is to explore through our bodies what we have been asked or forced to separate rather than create a healthy boundary. Being called "too sensitive" over and over again, for example, asks us to separate from our very real lived experience instead of creating healthy boundaries that help us feel less overwhelmed by our depth of feeling.
And for those who might balk at the term "highly sensitive" but find yourself reflected in a lot of the descriptions of high sensitivity - I feel that - and you might want to check out my first post in this series exploring some of the limitations of the "highly sensitive" moniker and how folks like Chris D. Hooten has proposed more culturally expansive and inclusive terms like highly responsive to your environment or HREs. I really like the term HRE and I highly encourage you to give Hooten's article a read. I'm all about expanding on language to invite more folks to the table.
I hope that these simple practices will fit in alongside any mental health services, community support groups, and the general network of good company in your friends and family. Plant medicine thrives as a stress-reducing, nervous system reparative, and preventative modality while helping us to return to a more earth-centered and affirming way of being in the world - a great path for any highly sensitive person to be on.
Daily Herbal Practices for Highly Sensitive People
image via @meguminachev
Drink Your Tea
The combination of hot water, healing plants, and a sturdy vessel to hold it in, makes herbal teas one of the loveliest healing practices to partake in daily. I love tea for its familiarity and ease of making as well as how it physically acts in the body - drinking warm water is one of the ways we can help calm our nervous system and adding in healing plants make the experience that much more useful. Teas are relatively inexpensive, easy to find pre-made, and if you grow your own little patch or windowsill of herbs, a great way to bring fresh herbs into your routine. Your daily tea can just be a tea that you love to drink and that feels good in your body and doesn't need to be specifically geared towards a healing need or full of nervines.
Making tea is also a simple way to participate in the process of creating remedies and being an empowered participant in answering your healing needs. Whether a pre-made blend, something you've put together or combining herbs each day as you need them, making tea helps us answer the question "What is it that my body needs?" with a practical curiosity.
Practice Recommendations
Choose the same time each day to prepare and enjoy your herbal tea. A rhythm of calming practice is one of the ways that we invite our nervous system to settle. Of course, if it makes sense for you to have two or three tea-making times a day, go for it! A morning brew can help us create calm first thing in the morning, whereas tea at the end of the school or work day can help us ground and center after being out in the world (whether physically or mentally if you work or study from home), and evening tea helps prepare our body for rest.
Make your ability to access healing practices as easy as possible. For me, this means making a quart jar worth of herbal tea first thing in the morning that is ready for me whenever I need it for the rest of the day. You can also make a tea concentrate to keep in your fridge, adding it to hot water whenever you need it (a tea concentrate will keep for about 3 - 4 days in the fridge).
Needing extra emotional support or just want to add to the feeling of making magickal potions? Add a few drops of whatever flower essences (see below) you're working with. When you're dealing with overwhelm and dysregulation, trying to figure out what is happening, how to feel better, and the all the feelings that can accompany the process can feel serious, complicated, and daunting. Adding play and light-heartedness into our practices can not only help us experience moments of relief, but helps cultivate hope and the ability to spot pathways of possibility where they exist.
Tea Plant Allies for Highly Sensitive People
🌿 Milky Oat (Avena sativa): If I could only stock a handful of herbs in my apothecary, Milky Oat would be at the top of my list. Milky Oat is my favorite nervous system herb and as stress is an underlying factor for most of the illnesses and symptoms that I see in my practice, and gets in the way of folks being able to sit with and explore their experiences, it is a vital and beloved plant ally of mine. Milky Oat is a nervous system trophorestorative making it an ideal plant ally to work with for most any nervous system needs.
🌿 Lemon Balm (Melissa officinalis): An herb of joy, Lemon Balm is the ideal companion for those who are dealing with issues of energetic overextension. Indications for Lemon Balm include signs of brain fog connected to social burnout or bring on the precipice of social burnout (including social media driven fear of missing out), nervous anxiety and worry that results in insomnia and/or digestive issues (i.e. a nervous stomach).
🌿 Chamomile (Matricaria recutita): A gentle and calming nervine, a key indicator that Chamomile may be useful is digestive issues. A classic remedy for those sensitive folks with sensitive stomachs where they feel emotional upset in their gut.
🌿 Rose (Rosa damascena): Beautiful, amazing, unfolding Rose! Rose has gentle nervine qualities with the extra magick of thorn medicine. Rose is an ancient herbal ancestor and they’ve been a guide of healing wisdom through the ages - who better to turn to when life feels too big and overwhelming than to one who has seen it all and thrived? One of my favorite herbs for sensitive folks and empaths alike.
🌿 Skullcap (Scutellaria lateriflora): Skullcap is great for folks with lots of anxiety, especially when experiencing a lot of hurried and worried thoughts that leads to disrupted sleep. Indications for Skullcap include nervousness, fear of overwhelm, overwork, difficulty resting or focusing because of constant mental chatter, insomnia, and general hyperactivity.
Standard dosage for tea is 1 heaping teaspoon of dried herb per 1 cup of water, steeped for 15 to 20 minutes. If you’re looking for tea blend recommendations, my Bliss Blend recipe is one that I recommend often to highly sensitive folks. You might also like one or more of my Tea for the Tired blends.
image via @ornellabinni
Play With Flower Essences
I love flower essences and their subtle healing ways. They seem to operate somewhere within the world of psychoneuroimmunology and are an interesting way of connecting to the emotional wisdom of the body to help with healing. They are very easy to make and I find them a wonderful way to get to know local flora through the essences that local practitioners will create (it is here that I encourage you to start up a flower essence exchange with your fellow plant folk friends).
There are plenty of ways to choose what flower essences to work with, but I like the traditional approach of reading statements of challenge (i.e. the difficult emotional state that you're currently in) and affirmation (i.e. the emotional state you want to be in) and observing the somatic responses of the body to those statements to discern the right flower essence. I have found again and again that highly sensitive folks thrive with this sort of feelings-based method of working with plants. And, sense flower essences are a form of vibrational remedy and contain no actual plant material within them, it's also a safe way to work with plants without having to know all of their physiological uses.
Practice Recommendations
While you can find my full guide to using flower essences over here, in general, you use flower essences by adding a few drops to your drinking water or tea each day. They can also be used directly under the tongue or massaged into the skin.
Flower essences are great to keep right by the door so that when you walk back in the house after being out and about you can take a few drops to help you settle back into your body. They can also be added to a spray bottle and used like an aura spray for the same results.
Flower Essences for Sensitive Folks
Below you'll find a list of some of my favorite flower essences with their corresponding emotional statements. I recommend reading them aloud and if you have a sensory response to one of them, you might consider working with it on a daily basis.
🌿 Water Violet (Hottonia palustris)
Challenging Emotional State: I hide my sensitivity with extreme independence which creates a barrier between me and other people.
Affirmation: I use my sensitivity as a point of connection in my relationships.
🌿 Oak (Quecus robur)
Challenging Emotional State: I push myself even when exhausted.
Affirmation: I have healthy boundaries and know when to stop and rest.
🌿 Elm (Ulmus procera)
Challenging Emotional State: I consistently take on too much which leads to fatigue.
Affirmation: I know and respect my limits.
🌿 Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus)
Challenging Emotional State: Energy moves erratically throughout my body and I feel little control.
Affirmation: Energy moves through my body efficiently and effectively so I may use it wisely.
🌿 Larch (Larix decidua)
Challenging Emotional State: I lack confidence in my abilities.
Affirmation: I am confident in who I am and what I am capable of.
You can find my complete list of flower essences (and plant ally) recommendations for highly sensitive folks over here.
image via @pladdermf
Nourish Your Nervous System with Tonics
A tonic is a type of herbal remedy that is restorative to our vitality and can be taken over an extended period of time to reestablish harmonious function in the body. Whether a tea, tincture or other form of remedy, having a rotation of nervous system tonics that you can take on a daily basis will help develop agility in your response to stimuli and ability to access healthy emotional responses while protecting against stress.
While a daily tea practice is as much about the process and experience of drinking tea as it is about working with herbs, a nervous system tonic is a focused approach to specific healing needs. A nervous system tonic might be something you use throughout the day as acute needs arise and/or simply use alongside other practices like a daily tea. A tonic might also feature herbs that don't make it into your tea practice because of their taste but you can still bring them into your rotation in tonic form.
I like to have a few prepared blends or simple (i.e. single herb tinctures) on hand that I can choose from day-to-day based on my needs. Various nervines bolster the health of different body systems which means, for example, that we can work with a plant like Gotu Kola (Centella asiatica) when we're looking for mental clarity in addition to nervous system support or California Poppy (Eschscholzia californica) if we need help relaxing deeply for sleep.
Practice Recommendations
I think nervous system tonics shine as tinctures and glycerites, where they can be easily carried in a bag or pocket as you go about your day. Of course, they are excellent in tea or capsule form - I always have a few pre-made nervous system tea blends made up and ready to go so that I don't have to spend too much time or energy preparing a mix when I'm feeling out-of-sorts.
Add keywords to your labels, whether you've purchased or made your nervous system tonics, so that you can easily figure out which remedy is for which need. Adding "sleep aid" to your tincture bottle of California Poppy (Eschscholzia californica) or "brain fog buster" to your Gotu Kola (Centella asiatica) capsule container goes a long way in helping you figure out what herb is the best for your current needs. Welcome in playfulness and pleasing aesthetics (you can put stickers on your containers, have fun!) to help make the process of working with herbs that much more enchanting.
Nervous System Plant Allies for High Sensitivity
All of the plant allies recommended in the tea section as well as:
🌿 Gotu Kola (Centella asiatica): The brain-shaped leaves of Gotu Kola speak to its affinity for mental health and brain vitality. As a brain tonic (i.e. nootropic) it supports general cerebral health as well as alleviating conditions such as brain fog and mental fatigue. Indications include mental fatigue that can occur alongside sensitivity, hyperactivity, mental and emotional exhaustion, and recovering from illness.
🌿 Motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca): Motherwort is like a hug in a tea cup and is an herb that shifts energy for the better faster than most other herbs I have encountered. A great ally for times of intense change where you feel like you've lost your energetic balance. The herb works on the sympathetic nervous system, bringing calm and soothing energy. Indications include heart palpitations due to stress, indigestion, nervousness, insomnia, depression, restlessness, and general anxiety.
🌿 Eleuthero (Eleutherococcus senticosus): If you're dealing with issues of fatigue, but find caffeine too stimulating, a gentle adaptogen like Eleuthero might be a good plant to consider. The herb helps to regulate the endocrine system, including the adrenals, which in turn reduces fatigue and helps to protect against the damaging effects of stress. Indications include brain fog, fatigue, and sensitive folks who are affected by environmental pollutants, social noise, and the stress of living in busy urban areas.
🌿 Linden (Tilia x europaea): Linden is a wonderful plant to work with where excess states of tension has led to feeling stuck and low. A good plant ally when it feels like you're struggling to settle back into oneself. Indications for Linden include difficulty sleeping, signs of excess heat like irritability, impatience, high blood pressure, heart palpitations caused by stress, and a general state of agitation.
Vervain (Verbena spp.): Vervain is a great ally for those sensitive folks who struggle with excess tension and a feeling (whether literal or metaphorical) that they can't even turn their head for another perspective because they have so much to hold together to just get through the day. Indications include stiff neck and shoulders, tension headaches, low moods, and general irritability.
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If you take away anything from this guide, I hope it is to begin a daily tea-drinking practice as a way to invite in the wisdom that all of us deserve to be cared for on a daily basis.
For those of you looking for a more in-depth approach to herbalism and high sensitivity or if you work with a highly sensitive client base (including family members), I invite you to join me in Solace: Herbs & Essences for Highly Sensitive People.
And for those of you just coming to know the joyful possibilities that exist because of your high sensitivity, welcome! I hope that you find comfort and inspiration in knowing that you’re in good company and that there is a world full of plants and people here to help welcome you back home.
This post was made possible through patron support.
❤︎ Thanks, friends. ❤︎
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Footnotes
1. High sensitivity is, of course, not limited to highly sensitive people, but is a common trait in many neurodiversities including autism and ADHD.
2. I highly recommend this essay by Neurodivergent, Intersex, and Gender-expansive writer Chris D. Hooten - I would have loved to have had an article like this to read when I was first learning about high sensitivity nearly a decade ago.
