Whether you're taking a break from alcohol for a month, a season, or forever, herbalism offers supportive tools for your journey. From providing relaxation to introspection, several plants can ease your transition and contribute to your overall sense of well-being while you embark on this important work.
The Case for Removing Alcohol
Reducing or eliminating alcohol has significant benefits. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, alcohol negatively impacts not only the liver - but the brain, gut, and immune system, contributing to over 178,000 deaths annually in the U.S. Current research even suggests there's no completely safe level of alcohol consumption, and the U.S. Attorney General has recently announced a call for cancer warning labels on alcohol. Suffice to say, transitioning to a sober lifestyle can improve your health and reduce your risk of alcohol-related diseases.
Why We Drink
Alcohol has deep cultural roots and has been used throughout history to help celebrate milestones. Many turn to alcohol as their go-to after a long day of work to relax and unwind, while others depend on it as a “social lubricant” to feel more at ease in group settings. For some, it becomes a coping mechanism for grief or emotional voids. Acknowledging these patterns is the first step toward making positive changes.
How Herbs Can Help
To be clear, there is no plant analog for alcohol. Herbs can, however, help you to relax and unwind, be more sociable, celebrate milestones, gain introspection, and even work through loss and grief.
Herbs for Relaxation: The Nervines
When it comes to herbs for relaxation, you have many choices! There’s a whole category of plants with an affinity for the nervous system. In herbalism, these plants are referred to as “nervines.”
This category of plants help calm nervous tension and improve the body's resilience to stress. Some of these plants you’ve surely tried before - chamomile for example is a popular nervine. Other relaxing nervines we love to work with include betony, silk tree, catnip, passion flower and lavender.
These herbs are lovely as tea on their own or combined, and the flavor can be adjusted to your liking with additional herbs like fennel and ginger.
Herbs for Social Anxiety
Our favorite herbs for diminishing social anxiety are: damiana, betony, rose, yarrow, and motherwort. If you’ve been around here for a while, you already know that damiana and betony is one of our very favorite herb combinations, as well as a key pair of ingredients in our Nice Time tincture.
Betony gets you grounded in the present, allowing you to disconnect from work and other life distractions. Damiana stimulates the circulatory system and sends energy outward, helping you to feel more open, engaged and enlivened.
Yarrow, motherwort, and rose each offer emotional protection, alleviating the anxiety and uncertainty that can creep up in social situations.
Herbs for Celebration: The Exhilarants
We like to think of exhilarants as “happy plants” perfect for any occasion that calls for a toast. Try including Lemon balm, elderflower, white pine or dandelion flower in the build of your next mocktail.
These plants also make excellent herbal elixirs, a favorite with the kiddos.
Herbs for Introspection
If alcohol consumption has become habitual, or you feel you need it in order to be social, there are herbs that can help you work through the reasons why this is happening.
One herb that comes to mind is calamus. Calamus is a relaxing bitter, and we find it helpful for getting into a meditative or reflective state. Unlike most of the bitters, calamus is warming rather than cooling. Perhaps this is why it is so helpful for breaking free from cold patterns, such as depression, which can often lead to addictive patterns like alcohol abuse.
Another effective plant for initiating meaningful lifestyle changes is tulsi. Like previous herbs discussed, tulsi is both a nervine and an exhilarant. Tulsi also shares the warming quality of calamus and is thereby helpful for helping you break free of cold, stuck patterns. If you have some emotional release to do, tulsi is an excellent ally. It also provides support to the adrenals which suffer when there is excess consumption of alcohol.
Herbs for Grief
If your heart is heavy due to loss, be it the loss of a dream or loved one, try experimenting with violet, tulsi, linden, rose, and hawthorn. Each of these herbs has an affinity for the heart and offer protective qualities.
If your grief or loss is accompanied by insomnia, a lavender & hops foot bath or wild lettuce tincture before bed can help you get the rest you need for recovery. Prioritizing movement, social connections, and hobbies is also integral to this type of healing work.
Herbs to Repair and Rebuild
If alcohol has been a regular part of your lifestyle for a prolonged period of time, there are two herbs we find helpful for restoring the liver: St. John's Wort and Milk Thistle.
For those not on prescription medication, St. John’s wort accelerates liver clearance exceptionally well. So well in fact, that it can render your prescription medication ineffective.
If you do currently take prescription medication, Milk Thistle is a great alternative. It is a hepatoprotective herb that won’t overstimulate or strain the liver. It is antioxidant and anti-inflammatory, offering gentle and effective liver support to aid in recovery from many states of dis-ease.
Lastly, if alcohol use tends to result in gut discomfort, we suggest marshmallow root. Cold infusions of marshmallow root are soothing and repairing to the gut lining, which can be degraded by alcohol over time.
Final Thoughts
Changing habits is hard. When embarking on this type of work it is important to give yourself grace, trust the process, and remember that healing doesn’t happen in a straight line.
We hope you find these suggestions helpful, and commend your efforts! If you have any questions, don't hesitate to drop them below. As always, this article is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice.