Tea and Mental Health

Tea and Mental Health

By Inka Itkonen (IG: @teemieli)

Life can be hard. We all know that, and life often makes us unhappy. It can make us tired and sad, and sometimes it can feel hard to find a point in it all. I firmly believe that we must make it matter ourselves. We must find beauty and happiness ourselves, in the little things. I believe that tea is good for your mental health, because when life tries to make us unhappy, tea does the opposite. It is a beautiful thing with the power to bring happiness and joy into our lives.

Let’s imagine there is a set of scales. There might be a lot of things on the other side to weigh it down. A lot of things that make us unhappy. Somehow, we must try to balance it with happiness. Somehow, we must bring enough reasons to be happy into our lives to tip the scales. It doesn’t matter how small these things are. There just has to be enough of them.

In this article I want to tell a little bit about my tea practice and its benefits for my mental health. I’m going to share my experiences about how my tea practice has helped my mental health. (Please note that I am not a professional and I am only writing about my personal experiences.) I suffer from anxiety and I have suffered from it for many many years. Because of this I know how hard it can be to load the set of scales with happiness. Anxiety is great at making me feel that there’s nothing good in this life. It makes me worry constantly about everything, and that’s just honestly no way to live. And I realize that. With the logical part of my brain I can understand that there’s no need to worry so much and that that way I’m only making my life miserable. But there’s no reasoning with anxiety. Sometimes I just need to get myself out of my own head.

I can cope with my anxiety a bit better these days, because I have found several tools to help me with that. Yoga and journaling for example are important things to keep me calm, focused and in the moment. When my anxiety hits, it makes my mind run a mile a minute, and sometimes it’s so hard to make it slow down. At those moments I just need to keep my head together and to bring myself back to the present moment. That’s when tea comes into the picture. Having a good gongfu session can ground me like nothing else. Brewing tea gives me something to do with my hands and something I can fully concentrate on. It slows my buzzing mind by giving me something to focus on entirely. It can be quite meditative.

My point is that tea fights mental illnesses and general unhappiness by simply giving us a doze of happiness and joy. These dozes and good moments can sometimes be enough to get us through bad days. Sometimes life just is too much and tea can simply help us by bringing us a moment of peace. Tea and especially gongfu practice can be an island of calm in the chaos of everyday life. To me there is also an aspect of self-care and self-love. Tea is something I thoroughly enjoy, and my daily tea practice is important to me. It gives me a break and I do it solely because it makes me happy. Because it’s good for me. It is sometimes difficult for me to put my wellbeing first. I’m not good at taking care of my health and especially of my mental health. It’s sometimes hard to put myself and my needs first, because there is so much in life. So many things I need to do and accomplish that sometimes I think I don’t have time to rest or exercise. Even though I know that those kind of things should be a priority. My daily tea practice is therefore an act of self-love. Something I do every single day solely because it’s good for me. I do it because it is my way of taking care of myself and showing myself that I love myself and I do deserve to do things I enjoy. It’s a reminder.

This way tea can also be a tool to help with my mental health. It can be one of the small things to help balance out the unhappiness. And at the very least, it can be a way to make sure there’s at least something good in every day. That every night I can at least think that there was something that brought me joy today. It can be something to be grateful for: the fact that there was this one good thing. And joy, honestly, we can’t get enough of that. It’s what makes life worth living.

For me tea is a rewarding hobby and a lovely habit and therefore already very helpful for my mental health. But it can also work for me as a bit more substantial tool. There’s this thing called 5-4-3-2-1 Coping Technique for Anxiety and if you’ve never heard of that it basically means that you name five things that you can see around you, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell and one thing you can taste. This can help with anxiety by grounding you in the present moment when your mind is buzzing with anxious thoughts. And what I do is I apply this technique to my tea practice.

Already setting up my tea session is very grounding in itself and this technique can enhance that. It can also make the tea session more enjoyable. Basically what I do is I start asking myself questions. How does my kettle sound when it boils? How do the tea leaves look and smell when they are dry? And when they are wet? How do they feel? How does the tea taste? How does my gaiwan feel in my hand? Things like that. That way you can also get the most out of your tea session and it can really help reduce panic and anxiety. Just a little tip for my fellow teaheads who might find this sort of thing helpful.

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I wrote this piece in the beginning of 2020, before the COVID-19 thing started to really tip all of our scales over. Before it turned our lives around and filled them with fear and worry. But since this is getting published now, I thought I might add a short chapter regarding our current situation. I’m sure this pandemic has taken a toll on everyone’s mental health, and despite I really don’t have any tips on how to make it easier (I have probably been just as wrecked as you are), I wanted to acknowledge the situation and our shared feelings. It feels like it is needed in an article like this.

If there has been anything good about the current situation (don’t you just hate the phrase “current situation” at this point) it has been that I’ve had more time for my tea. I haven’t really gained any new insights about tea and mental health, but tea has really helped me through all this. I have of course been staying at home much more than I usually do and I have had more time to drink tea and really pay attention to it. My tea practice has grown more meditative and more grounding than ever. It has become what I’ve needed the most after hearing only bad news all day. Tea has been there to calm and comfort me every day. I wish that my fellow teaheads have also been able to find the much needed comfort in their teacups.

I hope that maybe something I shared today might be helpful to you. I wish that you are alright and well and healthy. And if you are not, know that that’s okay too, and I hope you will soon be. You can always contact me @teemieli on Instagram if you want to talk.

So let’s hang in there. Drink tea. It’s all going to be alright.

Love, Inka