Tracy Tutty: A few weeks ago I had a craving for a tea that I don't usually like chamomile. Sitting in my mind for two days straight, quiet and persistent while I drank something else instead. Three days later, I understood exactly why I had been fancying that chamomile. This episode is about that gap between what your body already knows and what your conscious mind catches up to eventually. It's about chamomile specifically, what it's actually doing physiologically when your gut and your nervous system need it most. And it's also about a bigger question underneath all of it. What happens when we get out of our own way long enough to hear what our body's been asking for the whole time? Let's get started, shall we? Welcome to Project Joyful, the podcast for health-centered leaders. Project Joyful is a space for conversations at the intersection of leadership, health, and lived experience. Here we explore what it means to lead in ways that honour your body, protect long-term capacity, and support a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. This episode is part of the Biology of Leadership series. In this series, We explore leadership through your body, not as a performance to optimize or a mindset to fix, but as a biological experience shaped over time. Leadership doesn't just live in decisions, strategies, or roles. It lives in your nervous system, in how responsibility is held, and how reliability and care quietly organize your body long before you're consciously aware of These conversations are for leaders who are capable, trusted, and effective, and who are curious about how leadership is experienced internally, not just how it performs externally. There's nothing you need to do as you listen, no insight you need to apply. This is simply an invitation to understand what's been shaping your experience of leadership beneath this level, and what's become possible when biology becomes possible. Let's begin, shall we? So the night before the conference started I opened the little drawer with the tea bags in it in my hotel room. It had English breakfast, earl grey, green tea. Interesting, nothing herbal. No chamomile and no peppermint. The next day, sitting in one of the breaks between sessions, this thought arrived out of nowhere. I could do with a chamomile tea. I should take some tea bags back to my room. It might help me sleep. There was chamomile at the tea station right there alongside everything else, but I didn't get up for it. Let me tell you a little bit about me and chamomile. I just don't like the taste of it. I don't like the smell of it either. I have such a strong yuck reaction to it that I can tell if it's in something a mile off. So the thought sat there and I didn't do anything with it. I kept drinking my peppermint tea because that's what I actually fancied at the time. And it was yummy. But in the background, I kept thinking I should take some chamomile tea bags back to my room. The next day same thing. Sitting in a session or in a break, and there it was again. I should take some chamomile tea bags back to my room. Same thought more or less. Chamomile still sitting there at the tea station, me still not reaching for it. Peppermint tea, chamomile tea. Both the same kind of thing when you think about it in terms of digestive teas. Both the teas you reach for when your stomach needs settling. I didn't put that together at the time. I was just drinking one and not touching the other. Nine o'clock the night before I'm flying home. And out of nowhere I know ⁓ I'm gonna be sick. I get to the bathroom just in time, and then I'm there for the next four hours on and off, throwing up. Somewhere in there between one bout and the next, the thought comes back. I wish I had some chamomile tea. Except this time it's not a background noise. It isn't the thought I've been carrying around for two days without acting on it. I am like properly craving it now. I don't have any. I never went and got it. So between the bouts, I'm doing all the things right. I'm drinking coconut water, mixing it with water intermittently, off and on, sipping it gently. And it's helping. It steadies something every time I manage a sip. I get through the night. I get myself onto the flight the next morning. Feeling all right, hydrated, the vomiting gone for about six hours by that point, but still feeling really fragile. You know that particular fragile you feel after your body's been forcibly emptying itself for half the night? I still don't feel sick anymore, but I don't feel right either. Once I'm through that X ray machine at the airport, I fill out my water bottle, drop some electrolytes in, and sitting there, the thought arrives again. Except now it's not in the background, right? I'm fully alert to it. I really do need a chamomile tea. So this is funny. I go into Starbucks. I order the biggest cup of chamomile tea that they've got. And the guy behind the counter he looks at me like I'm crazy or something. I don't think chamomile tea gets ordered very much at a Airport Starbucks. So I've got my chamomile tea, I sip it slowly, and I can feel my stomach start to settle and to relax. The background nausea, the low hum of it that's been sitting under everything since the night before, it just starts to die away. Just from drinking the tea. Just from that one thing. Now, this isn't the first time I've had this relationship with chamomile tea, right? Quite a few of my stomach bugs have asked for a big cup. of chamomile tea. I don't ordinarily reach for chamomile because I like it. I reach for it because something in me wants it. Specifically, and sometimes that wanting shows up right in the middle of being unwell and sometimes it shows up days before I have any idea I'm about to get sick at all. And sometimes I fancy it and I don't get sick. Who knows what's going on there? But anyway, let's talk about why chamomile might be helpful in situations like these in case you ever find yourself with a stomach bug overseas about to fly home. So chamomile is at its core a digestive herb and a nervine herb. Herbalists have reached for it for centuries specifically for the gut. And there's a real chemistry behind why. It contains a compound that's called apigenin, and this binds to receptor sites in your gut wall and it relaxes the smooth muscle that's there. And that's what makes it ⁓ relaxant in the proper herbal sense. So when your gut is in spasm, you know that gripping, that cramping, that ringing sensation, that's such a large part of what a stomach bug actually feels like. Epigenin's acting directly on the muscle that's causing that sensation. It's also a calminative, which means that it eases trapwind, both up and down, and general digestive discomfort. And again, the smooth muscle relaxation is doing a lot of that work. Chamomile is also anti-inflammatory. Two other compounds are thought to be largely responsible for this visible and chamazulane. These act directly on inflamed tissue. So after a night of vomiting, your gut lining is like very irritated. And these two compounds get to work on the inflammatory chemistry itself. They damp down the signaling that keeps that tissue red. swollen and reactive and they they're giving that irritated lining the chance to actually settle and start repairing. And Camel's got a long history for use for nausea as well. Some of that again comes back to epigenin because the same receptor binding to that calms the gut and it also calms the nervous system. So it's an added bonus if you're flying, right? Especially since I had three flights ahead of me, 17 hours of travel in total, and I'm already run down from a night of vomiting. Epigenin has a mild calming action on the nervous system itself and it's gentle enough that it's traditionally been used as a mild sedative. So chamel was working on my nervous system at the same time as it was working on my gut. Not just settling the stomach that needed settling but settling a body that was about to sit through 17 hours of flights, not counting those layovers in between, a bit dehydrated, feeling depleted With that ordinary low grade stress of travel sitting on top of everything else. So when I felt my stomach start to settle and relax with that chemile tea, there was a lot happening in that one cup. A relaxant working on the spasm, a carminative easing the digestive discomfort, something anti inflammatory working on the irritation itself, something anti emetic working on that background nausea. And underneath all of that, something quietly calming a nervous system that had every reason to be frayed with a lot of flying still ahead of me. Here's what I love the most about this. My body knew. Days before I understood anything was coming, some part of me already knew a stomach bug was on its way and it knew exactly what would help. Kamel tea. My body was already reaching for the one thing that would ease something that hadn't happened yet. To my knowledge. I think that's an amazing thing to sit with. We talk so much about optimizing performance, tracking everything, working harder to understand ourselves. And here's my body quietly ahead of me, already knowing. Now in that moment, I didn't listen. The impulse wasn't even to drink camel tea there and then, it was to grab some tea bags and take them back to my room. And I was in a conference. There was somewhere to be, people to talk to, a session about to start. The thought arrived and life carried on, and getting out for tea bags I don't normally reach for wasn't the thing that made it onto my list. And that's most of how we miss these signals, right? That busyness, inconvenience, a body speaking quietly while the rest of life is speaking louder. Now let me be clear on this. Our job isn't to become hyper vigilant. Scanning ourselves for every signal in case we miss something important. That is its own kind of exhausting, and it isn't what this is about. Our job is so much simpler than that. And it's kind of harder in its own way as well. Get out of the way. Let the noise of the day quiet down enough to actually hear what's underneath it. My body knew what she needed. She always does. She just needs me to stop long enough to listen. And this is part of what I love about herbal medicine. These plants are your herbal allies. They're growing quietly, doing exactly what a body needs at exactly the moment it needs it. And we get to use them. Kamomel didn't need me to understand the mechanism for it to work, although it is interesting, I think. It just needed me to drink it. For those of us leading, achieving, holding a great deal, this matters too. Not as another framework to apply, but just as a fact. We are bodies first, underneath all of it. And supporting that body, listening to her, giving her what she's already asking for is part of how any of the rest of it becomes sustainable. My body knew three days before anything happened that To my level of awareness. She already had her answer. Mum was still catching up. I don't think that's unusual to her. I think that's just how she operates, quietly all the time. Sometimes I catch it, sometimes I don't. This time I got to see the whole arc of it clearly. Came a mile, asked for early, needed later, and there when I finally reached for her. That's exactly why I built Herbs for Health. It's a free email once a month. And each one is built around getting properly acquainted with a single herb. You'll get the podcast episode featuring that month's herb, a proper introduction to it, its traditional and medicinal uses, and how to actually make a remedy from it at home. And these are remedies I use myself, so I can tell you they work, and the recipe is as per the recipe. So if you grow your own herbs or you want to, there's also tips for growing. And every month It also covers the safety side, who should be more cautious, what it is best not to be combined with when to see a herbalist instead of self treating. This isn't a course, there's nothing to buy. It's just one herb properly understood, landing in your inbox once a month. The link to join is in the show notes. If you'd like to start building that same kind of relationship with plants, go take a look. I'm sending you lots of love. Bye for now. Hey thanks for listening to today's podcast. Can I ask you a favor? 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