Tea – Drinking My Stress Away

Self-Care – Tea

To continue the series about self-care, proper food and drink are vital. My relationship with food is complicated, as I’ve described in this post. My relationship with drinking isn’t much better but has come a long way from where it once began. I want to make clear I’m talking about hydrating your body in this post. It has nothing to do with alcohol. Luckily that has never been an issue for me, as in, I never drink too much alcohol. Just a few sips of whiskey per month and I’m okay. But my regular daily drinking has not always been that easy.

Healthy, but not Enjoyable

As a child, I never drank much. I think that’s where my patterns have started to go awry. I was given enough to drink, but I could not take a drink myself whenever I felt like it. We weren’t allowed a lot of sugar, so no sodas or tasty sweet lemonades. The lemonade we had was watered down.
Every now and then, my mother would give my brother and me beetroot and carrot juice. I shudder thinking back to it now. That stuff was horrific. It was given to us with the best intentions. My mother wanted us to be healthy. Especially as a kid, it didn’t feel that way.

No Need

As a teenager, no longer living with my mother, but with my father, I was allowed to drink all the sodas that I wanted. That didn’t make it any better. I still didn’t drink enough. It wasn’t part of my routine. I’m quite a lazy person, so getting up for such a thing is easily ignored.

Tea Has Taste!

In my early twenties, I dropped the habit of drinking tea with sugar. For the first time, I could actually taste what tea tasted like. I used to drink flavoured black teas, but when I found star mint tea, which contains anise, fennel, liquorice and peppermint, I converted. This actually tasted good!
Ever since I’ve always only drunk herbal tea.

Herbal Teas

My favourite is chamomile, which I drink nearly every day. Other varieties that I enjoy are fennel and mint. When we’re doing groceries in Germany, I always stock up on a lot of herbal sorts. There’s way more choice there than here in the Netherlands. Over here, Pickwick and Lipton dominate the market. Unfortunately, these companies are very good at taking the worst quality leaves and slap on a lot of marketing to make you buy it anyway. In Germany, there’s a broad range of all sorts of herbal mixes, both expensive and cheap in the regular supermarket. I wish we’d had the same here.
At the moment I do drink mixes I buy locally, but at Lidl, which is still a German business. I love their Morning, Relaxation and Good Night mixes.

Daily Quote

I drink this beverage from a beer glass which holds half a litre of liquid. The upside is that I definitely drink enough per day, finally. Only four glasses and I’m at my daily limit of what I should be drinking. Add to that two cups of coffee and an occasional glass of soda, and you can see I finally drink enough. It has only taken me thirty-five years plus to get here.

Under Control

So yes, I’m happy to report this is one part of my life that is finally under control. I drink enough, it’s very healthy, and it makes me feel good. I hope to keep it up. I only hope to control my food the same way one day. Ah well, you can’t have it all, now can you?