Nicole:
Welcome to the Frontline Herbalism Podcast with your host, Nicole Rose from the
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Solidarity Apothecary.
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This is your place for all things plants and
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liberation.
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Let’s get started.
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Hello. Welcome back to the Frontline Herbalism Podcast.
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I’m doing one of those, like, weird things where I’m recording an intro to an episode
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I’ve already recorded.
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So I actually managed to batch record some
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podcasts this morning, so this will be scheduled for a later date.
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So coming to you from the future, if that makes.
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No, from the past.
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Whatever, you know what I’m trying to say.
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Anyway, this episode is all about herbal support for depletion and fatigue.
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So I talk about the many drivers of fatigue and then I talk about the kind of,
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yeah, herbs I work with and the herbal approaches.
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I kind of take in responding to them.
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So it’s a bit of a lot.
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It’s not a long episode.
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I think it’s like nearly 40 minutes.
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But I hope it is useful.
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And yeah, let me know what you think and just
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shame as ******* plug.
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Please join the waiting list for the Herbalist
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and PTSD and traumatic stress course.
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If any of this stuff sparks your interest,
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that is the resource that, like, kind of fills in all the details, if that makes sense.
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Like, I go into all of the plants I talk about in much greater depth in comprehensive plant
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profiles,
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and I talk about things like, you know, nutritive herbs and.
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As well as all the fun medicine making stuff and harvesting stuff that makes herbalism much
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more possible.
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So anyway, I hope it is useful and yeah, thank you for listening.
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Hello.
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All right, so, yeah, let’s talk about herbal support for fatigue and depletion.
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Hopefully.
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Hopefully you listened to the last episode
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where I talked about some of the signs that you might be in a depleted state.
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I mean, I think if you’re feeling depleted, you generally know about it.
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But yeah, have a listen to that before you listen to this one because it’s probably a bit
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more helpful in terms of context,
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however. And, yeah, I guess I just want to start with that.
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Like,
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fatigue is like a symptom.
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It’s not like a thing.
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Like, it is an expression of distress in the body in different ways.
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And so having kind of like a generic here’s a herb for fatigue.
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Like, it doesn’t kind of cut it, if that makes sense, because there are so many drivers of
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why someone is fatigued, which is why.
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And I’ll talk about this in a future episode
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around stimulants.
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It’s not a case of, like,
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I’m struggling with fatigue, therefore, I need more like stimulants to have energy.
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Like, it’s all about,
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why is this person fatigued? And this is why I feel fairly confident as a
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clinical herbalist that I’m not going to get replaced by a robot, by AI because humans are
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very, very complicated and unique.
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But I guess, yeah, someone that was into AI would probably laugh at that statement and be
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like, yeah, yeah, you don’t know how good it is.
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But I just mean in the sense that, like,
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every individual is different and everyone has a different driver of fatigue and getting to
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the root cause of what that is for them.
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And cause being a plural, like the different
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drivers is what’s like, most important.
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So, yeah,
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just to kind of,
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yeah, go into some of these drivers of fatigue and then I’ll talk about, like some of the
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herbal strategies and approaches.
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And I guess this is why I,
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as a herbalist, like,
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put together such comprehensive protocols for clients and probably eat into my own kind of
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like, profits, if that makes sense.
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Because I want the approach to be really
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comprehensive.
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Because it’s not a case of just like throwing
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a sleep herb at someone if the reason they are not sleeping well is because they have a
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sneaky ******* gluten intolerance,
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which is like keeping them inflamed and therefore keeping them up at night.
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Do you know what I mean? So it’s kind of like we have to cover all the
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bases.
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And that’s why,
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yeah, I try and do that as a herbalist.
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So I will send quite kind of comprehensive
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boxes to people of like, this is a nerve tonic blend, this is a digestive tea, this is some
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milk thistle for your liver.
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Like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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Like it’s not just like one little bottle of
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herbs that’s gonna support someone.
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But anyway, I’m fast, I’m moving forward too much.
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I won’t go into the herbal strategies yet.
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I’m just going to talk about some of the
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drivers of fatigue.
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And like I said in the last episode, I went
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through the symptoms.
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So, yeah, I guess,
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number one, I’m a bit biassed when it comes to the nervous system.
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But, like, prolonged stress is like a major driver of depletion in the nervous system, but
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also like a major generator of fatigue.
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And there’s like so many explanations for that.
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But yeah, like when we are in a kind of activated stress response where our
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sympathetic nervous system is activated that mobilises so many resources in the body.
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Because if you think you’re running away from a bear.
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And I know poor bears, man, like, I’m sure they don’t attack people very often, but like
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they always get like pigeonholed in like trauma language.
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But like say you’re running away from a bear.
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Your body has to mobilise so much to, to do
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that, right? So much adrenal,
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much blood sugar.
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Like, you know, like you have to just kind of
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like move fast.
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You know, your lungs have to work, like all of this stuff.
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So it’s like when you’re in that fight or flight, like sympathetic activated state and
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that becomes your dominant state,
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you are in a kind of like position of like high resource use.
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Does that make sense? And when you’re using those resources a lot,
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you’re much more likely to end up in a place of depletion.
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And maybe if you have more of a privileged background where maybe you’ve had a lot of
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chronic stress but actually you’ve had good nutrition or you’ve been able to access like
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other supplements or healthcare or organic foods,
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like all of those things are like protective measures against states of depletion.
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Whereas I feel bad for the kids, like who grow up in high stress environments, but also in
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environments of like terrible nutrition.
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Like when I was a child, my hair literally
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fell out like after some like sexual abuse stuff when I was 6.
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But it’s like the stress response was so intense coupled with like very poor nutrition
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because my mum was like a single ******* mum on benefits.
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So like for me it was like,
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now I know about states of depletion and nutritional deficiencies.
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I can see why I was probably a foot shorter than my sister.
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I can see why my hair fel out probably because of the lack of protein and B vitamins and
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vegetables.
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Do you know what I mean?
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And like again, this activation of the stress response.
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So when people are ******* running on overdrive in terms of chronic stress but not
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also getting like nourishment to keep themselves going, like we do get into kind of
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like dangerous territory in terms of like burnout and exhaustion and collapse and
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depletion and unfortunately other like chronic states of disease.
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Even though lots of diseases have like a million and one causes, right?
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Like genetics, like all of this other stuff going on beyond just the stress response.
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But yeah, the stress response is a major driver of fatigue.
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And sometimes that can be like a long term chronic like survival response.
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Other times people can have like a significant,
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like few years of really, really intense demand.
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Like maybe they’re working and studying, maybe they’re caring for someone who’s dying.
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Maybe they are you.
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They’ve gone through a massive bereavement
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Often we have these big kind of periods of our life that take a lot of life force from us.
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There’s life force.
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Does that sound hippish?
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Do you know what I mean? But that kind of qi, as they would call it in
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traditional Chinese medicine, but will have a period of intense stress and that is nearly
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always followed by a period of exhaustion.
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And maybe that’s a short term thing if you’re kind of more resourced and resilient.
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So for example,
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when I had all of my like rib cage costochondritis, chronic illness stuff, I had
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like eight bereavements in a row.
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Like by the time.
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No, I had six.
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I had one a month for six months and then two
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later on that year.
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But by the time my ex girlfriend Anna got killed,
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I was like, done.
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Like I was so.
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Do you know what I mean? Like, I just was so exhausted and depleted.
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I was like all my herbalism stuff, I was **** hot on my nutrition.
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And so after he died, like I was ****** like for a couple of months.
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Like I was depressed and full of grief and you know, after not sleeping very well and all the
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stress hormones, but I ultimately recovered my energy,
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whereas that kind of like sudden return error of all these bereavements, like, I was much
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more depleted for a much longer period of time.
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So anyway, but yeah, chronic ******* stress, number one thing I would say.
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Okay, so the next point is like nutritional depletion.
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And I guess there’s two areas here.
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There’s like a kind of inadequacy of calories,
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so like not kind of eating enough to sustain our kind of energy.
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And then there’s a kind of like access to actual nutrients that our body needs.
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So that’s when kind of like quality comes in over quantity.
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And so yeah, there’s obviously like a million and one things in the capitalist food system
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that affect our access to quality food, right? You know, like lack of access to land.
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Like *******, you know, not every place has like a wonderful community supported
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agriculture project.
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Like lots of people live in areas of like
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intense,
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they call them food deserts or areas of food poverty where it’s not actually easy to access
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like fresh food, let alone ******* organic food or food grown without pesticides and
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fertilisers and everything else.
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So there is like that access to that nutrition, which is very, very important.
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But then there’s also what are you actually able to digest?
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So some people are really fantastic at having you know, good quality food.
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Often they’ve got to that point because they have to be.
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Otherwise they’re in, like, really bad territory with cycles of flares and chronic
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illness and things.
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So maybe they eat really well.
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But it might be that the digestive terrain is like,
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unhappy in the sense of, like, they’re not able to access energy and nourishment from
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food because they have, like, intestinal permeability or dysbiosis.
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You know, like they have a kind of disrupted ecology in their gut.
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Or maybe they have a lot of, like, inflammation, like acid reflux or a hernia or
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like all of these things.
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So it’s not just what we eat, it’s like what we digest.
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And that’s why when we move on to herbal support,
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we’ll talk about that stuff.
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Sleep. So I talked a lot about sleep in the last episode.
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But having,
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like, disrupted low quality sleep will, you know, affect all the kind of, like, baselines
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of like, nutrients in your body.
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Which is why, if anyone is postpartum, I’m,
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like, really passionate about having,
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like, nerve tonics and nutritive tonics and things like this because you are like, very,
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very vulnerable to that kind of loss of core nutrients because you’re not getting that time
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to kind of restore and replenish your naturally as someone who’s two and a half
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years postpartum.
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Woo.
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Okay.
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So,
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yeah, and also with sleep, again, I talked about it in the last episode, but as a driver
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of fatigue, it might be that,
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you know, if someone comes to me and then they’re only getting a few hours sleep a
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night, like, of course they feel exhausted all day.
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Like, of course they feel like a zombie.
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So we need to be supporting people to get as much sleep as they can or, like, as much
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quality sleep as they can.
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The other major driver of fatigue, and this is like, particularly applicable for someone who
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is in a kind of like, chronic fatigue me kind of picture it’s like inflammation or like,
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chronic illness.
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So, yeah, we’re looking at things like,
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you know, like, maybe someone has like a kind of like, long term, like, viral,
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like, reactivation pattern.
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Maybe they have like, dysfunction in their
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mitochondria, which are the kind of like energy powerhouses in our cells.
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Like, maybe they have some sort of like, infection in their gut.
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Like, there’s so many things that can cause, like, chronic inflammation.
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And that chronic inflammation is always drawing on our body’s reserves.
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So it’s pretty much always leading to a state of depletion unless we can kind of like,
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address the leaky tap if that makes sense.
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So when I was going through my periods of
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chronic illness, it was like I was trying so hard to,
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you know, have these herbs and nourish myself, blah, blah, blah.
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But if I didn’t take out the sources of like fuel for the fire,
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I wasn’t gonna kind of catch a ******* break in my body, if that makes sense.
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And I know I sound like a ******** on the Internet, but for me it really was like
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gluten.
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So as soon as I stopped having gluten and yeast, but like those two things,
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like this kind of food intolerance pattern,
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as soon as I took them out,
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I was like rapidly better six weeks, I was like a new ******* person.
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When I’d had gut healthy, when I had digestive enzymes and things helping me digest my food
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and this kind of gut restorative stuff that I use for my clients now.
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Yeah, just stopping those food intolerances just calmed the ******* inflammation down,
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which meant my body finally had a chance to recover.
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So,
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yeah, I think like digestion stuff and chronic inflammation is a major, major, major cause of
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fatigue.
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And I did a course with a herbalist called
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Paul Bergner which is all about fatigue.
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And he calls, he talks about like a food intolerance triad of like musculoskeletal
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pain, like anxiety or like emotional mood stuff and then digestive issues.
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And when there’s this like three manifestations of something that is generally
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pinpointing towards a food intolerance.
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And by cutting out that intolerance, it can just have life changing effects on the body.
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And I have hilarious emails from clients that are like hated when you said to stop having
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gluten.
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But I feel so much better.
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And it’s like, yes, because your immune system
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isn’t constantly responding to what they perceive as a threat.
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So all that energy that has,
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you know, been firefighting in your body can now be used towards kind of.
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Yeah, restoration and recovery.
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Yeah, post infectious states.
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So things like, oh, sorry, I knocked my
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microphone over things like long Covid.
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I’m not going to talk about viral stuff
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because that’s another whole podcast.
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But yeah, like this kind of post viral fatigue again.
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It’s like the body is protecting itself while it, you know, kind of is still like low key
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firefighting, this virus.
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But also Covid, really people who really are like depleted in terms of like adrenal stuff.
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So people going through like really serious like chronic stress stuff will then catch a
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COVID infection and then, yeah, they’re in long Covid territory and it’s *******
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horrendous.
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So it’s like, how do we support ourselves? So we’re,
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yeah, less vulnerable to these infections, like knocking us out.
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Does that make sense?
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Okay,
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maybe it’s something like menstruation can be a massive driver of fatigue.
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If you have really heavy periods and your iron reserves are getting really low or you have
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some other kind of like tissue stuff going on, like endometriosis that’s going to cause like
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really intense fatigue because again, your body is going into,
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you know, trying to like recover from this inflammation.
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But also, yeah, this kind of like inherent weakness of someone who bleeds is just like
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you are just losing all that precious iron.
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So, yeah, how do we, you know, work with herbs around that stuff?
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And I’m sorry I haven’t got to the herbal stuff yet, but I am just, just working through
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my list of drivers.
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So finally, yeah, like also like metabolic causes, like, maybe your insulin is
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struggling.
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Like people might have like type 2 diabetes.
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Like there might just be more kind of like low key kind of blood sugar stuff going on.
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And all of these like metabolic things can be massive, like influences of if someone is
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experiencing fatigue.
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And I think it’s probably one of the reasons
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why I’m quite a high energy person is I had this amazing French doctor called Noel who
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works in our clinic with Caleb in Calais,
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who’s been a GP for like absolutely decades.
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And she studied endobiogenic medicine and she
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got me like some really comprehensive blood tests in France.
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And she was just like, Nicole, your metabolism is like ******* epic.
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Like, no wonder you have so much energy.
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She was just like, yeah, you’re really like lucky that that is,
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you know, like so kind of optimal.
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And I think that’s why I don’t get like very
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cold, intolerant and stuff is just this kind of like intrinsic fast metabolism, which is,
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you know, why I like to eat a lot and stuff.
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But anyway,
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and then, yeah, if, if it’s not obvious then.
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And I said at the beginning of the other
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episode, but just like other drivers of fatigue are just trying to ******* survive,
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you know, like having really intense levels of work or the chronic ******* stress of poverty
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or,
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you know, caring responsibilities where you don’t catch a break.
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Like sometimes I think, oh my God, I am exhausted.
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What’s wrong with me? Like, blah, blah, blah, is it this?
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Is it this? And then I have a baby break and like
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miraculously my energy comes back and it’s like, yeah, like,
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you know, these responsibilities and these demands on us do cause fatigue.
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And yeah, obviously all the like Trauma stress response on unsafe housing, state violence.
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Like,
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yeah,
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some things that are drivers of fatigue and exhaustion are not easy to challenge.
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And that’s why we need the kind of collective responses to traumatic stress.
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Okay, so where does this leave us in terms of herbal support?
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As you can see, there are many, many, many drivers of fatigue.
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And yeah, I’m gonna kind of like map these onto some kind of herbal strategies.
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And I hate to say it, but I do think it needs to be like comprehensive in terms of what that
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person is going through.
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And as much as I love like the kind of plant ally practise of working with one plan and
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sometimes like one plan is all we need for like a specific health issue or to kind of
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like accompany us on our journeys.
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But like,
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yeah, when there is like something as intense as like chronic fatigue, like I do, I think we
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generally need like to cover lots of bases.
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So I’m going to talk through, talk through
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these.
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So yeah, the first one is like nervous system support and there’s like two.
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I mean there’s so many things here but like I guess I take two approaches.
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So I normally give someone a kind of like daytime nervous system support blend that can
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help them reduce that daily fight or flight response.
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Because that sympathetic nervous system response takes so much energy from the body
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that if we can tone that response down even by like 5, 10%,
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that is 10% that is available for something else in terms of energy.
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So yeah, working with like nervous system relaxants.
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And I don’t, I’ve done a whole podcast episode this around like *******, you know, I don’t
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mean relax, like put your feet up on the sofa, even though that would be dreamy.
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I mean like,
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yeah, let’s kind of tone down that activation.
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So working with herbs like chamomile or lemon
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balm or even hawthorn,
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like all of these like fantastic herbs which won’t like knock you out in terms of sedation
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but will, yeah, reduce that kind of stress response and also like enabling someone to
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actually access a more parasympathetic state like this rest and digest state at like
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critical times.
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So someone might have a very high demand, demand kind of lifestyle.
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And what we might be trying to do is like optimise one part of their day to have a bit
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more rest.
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So for example, their evening.
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So I do like a lush like evening nerve
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nourisher tea which is like chamomile and oat straw and bit of skullcap and some lavender.
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And that can just like mean that the two hours you have before you go to Sleep are actually
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in a state of kind of rest and repair rather than in a state of like,
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I’m still ******* wired and I’m doom scrolling because I’m just like chasing *******
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dopamine, do you know what I mean? So yeah, it’s like enabling that kind of.
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Yeah, that,
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like higher quality rest time as much as possible to reduce the demands on the nervous
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system which uses so much energy in our body.
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And then the other kind of prong is nerve tonics.
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So I have got whole episodes about these.
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But these are herbs that help with the
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structure and the communication and the functioning of the nervous system in general.
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So they have like so many different mechanisms.
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So it’s not even just like that.
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This is a single category of herbs with a
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single action.
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Like some nerve tonics help literally repair
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like the myelin sheath which is like the layer of like fat around our nerve fibres.
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Other nerve tonics will support like neurotransmitter production in the gut, you
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know, like St. John’s Wort or whatever.
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So it’s like they all have slightly different functions, which is why choosing specific
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nerve tonics is like unique for the person,
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which is why herbalism gets so ******* complicated.
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But yeah, working with nerve tonics to just give that like long term nourishment to a
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system that’s been depleted.
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So these might be herbs like milky oats or oat
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straw.
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Like I would see hawthorn as a nerve tonic for sure.
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Like Hawthorne berry especially.
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Maybe if it’s safe in terms of blood pressure.
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I might work with herbs like licorice or
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schisandra berry.
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Oh, so I ******* love Schisandra.
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I’ve just been making Schisandra in my slow cookers with my warm glycerite method.
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Absolutely ******* dreamy.
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Amazing herb.
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But yeah, so they all have different kind of mechanisms on the body, but they’re all
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ultimately supporting this goal of like nervous system restoration.
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And that is, yeah, very critical for someone experiencing fatigue.
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Okay, so then let’s talk about nutrition and nutritive herbs.
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So. So I’m gonna do a whole other episode around like supplements versus herbs.
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I think some people are way too anti supplements and I think like supplements can
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be really epic for someone with a deficiency in a way that a herb can’t.
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But I think herbs offer a much like broader spectrum of nutrients and a much broader
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spectrum of kind of plant like chemicals that are really ******* like needed by the body.
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So. So it doesn’t have to be one or the other.
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Right.
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Like it can be both.
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But yeah,
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nutritive herbs are herbs that have this kind of nourishing properties, so they might help
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with addressing certain deficiencies.
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And again,
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these herbs all have their own other actions.
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So something like nettle.
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I feel like nettles are really touted as being this, like, super safe, nourishing herb.
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You should have daily infusions of nettles.
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Buck in Owlman.
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Some people, if they had daily infusions of
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nettles, would have such a high red blood cell count in their blood that it would be
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dangerous.
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Like, you know, or for some people, they’re so
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diuretic that it would totally dry them out.
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Like, I have loved a nettle glycerite in my kind of, like, postpartum blends to kind of
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replenish myself after pregnancy.
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But,
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yeah, like, don’t hate me, Herbal World, but I hate the taste of nettle tea.
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It’s gross.
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It’s like drinking compost.
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Te.
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I’m just not up for it.
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Nettle glycerite, bit of sweetness with, like,
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a rich, strong taste of nettles.
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******* dreamy and delicious.
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So for me, I’d much rather have a little bit
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of nettle glycerite in a blend that I can swig than make, like, a daily infusion of nettles,
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which is gonna, like, ******* make me need to pee my pants, like, every five minutes.
Nicole:
But everyone is different, right? Like, some people can eat nettles galore.
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They can have, like, nettle curries and nettle this and nettle pesto.
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So we’re all very different, which is why I love herbalism.
Nicole:
So. Yeah. But there are certain herbs that are very kind of, like, nutritive and nourishing.
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And I mentioned, like,
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milky oats in terms of nerve tonics, but like, oat straw, for example,
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or horsetail.
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Like,
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horsetail is, like, full of, like, silica, which is needed by, like, the cottage, and,
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you know, a lot of connective tissue stuff.
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So it’s like, yeah, working with these
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nutritive herbs can be really powerful.
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And like I said, it doesn’t have to be one or the other, like, ultimate.
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We need great nutrition from food the best that we can.
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And supplements are, like, fantastic at covering our kind of baselines, I think.
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But nutritive herbs kind of really.
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Yeah.
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Really come into their own in many ways in terms of recovering from fatigue that’s, like,
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really driven by a nutritional deficiency.
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Okay. And then moving on to kind of, like, digestion.
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So I’ve mentioned this already, but it’s not just what we eat.
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It’s kind of, like, what we absorb and what, like, nutrients we kind of assimilate and how
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well our body and our tissues and our cells and everything else use those nutrients.
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And literally everyone I know who sees me with, like, some level of, like, chronic
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fatigue, long Covid pattern has some kind of, like, digestive stuff going on.
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I think that’s largely a product of our culture and also chronic stress.
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Like, chronic stress really affects the kind of integrity of, like, the gut lining, for
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example.
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But also, I think, yes, certain viral patterns.
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Like, there’s loads of research around long Covid and like, alterations to, like, the gut
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bacteria and stuff.
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So, yeah, it’s like really big territory.
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But when I’m supporting someone recovering from chronic fatigue, I nearly always.
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I’m supporting them around digestion.
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And in terms of herbal protocols, that looks
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like, for me, nearly.
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Not nearly everyone, but lots of people will
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be recommended to have a kind of gut restoration tea blend.
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And this is.
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And again, the quantities are, like, tweaked.
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Like, certain herbs are taken out if they’re
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not safe for someone or they’re contraindicated.
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Like, I don’t want someone to listen to this and be like, oh, I’ll make this tea.
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Because, like, everyone is a bit different and has a slightly tweaked formulation, if that
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makes sense.
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But my.
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Yeah, the gut restoration tea I work with a lot contains, like, chamomile, which is an
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amazing vulnerary, helps to, like, heal inflamed tissues in our guts, is also a
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combinative when people are experiencing,
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like, gas and bloating and things like that, that don’t get me started on these herbs and
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the microbiome and what they’re doing in terms of, like, prebiotics and stuff.
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It’s just like a whole other thing.
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Anyway, chamomile burdock, which is just, oh, my God, it’ll be a really long podcast episode
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if I go into all of these hubs.
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But burdock is a probiotic, a prebiotic, so it
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helps feed certain kind of like, selective gut bacteria in our gut.
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I’ve been doing some amazing training around this stuff and I’m like, super geeked out
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about it.
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Did you know I have a microscope tattooed on
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my leg? Like, anyway,
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so, yeah, burdock is fantastic.
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And then there’s also plantain, which, again,
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it’s amazing wound healing plant marshmallow, which is like super soothing.
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And emulsion, broad spectrum, antimicrobial,
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fantastic herb where there’s like chronic inflammation in the guts.
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There’s a little bit of yarrow in there for some people.
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So yarrow again is like really fantastic at healing kind of like inflamed tissues.
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I feel like there’s something else in there, but my brain’s gone.
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But anyway, so people get some variation of this gut hill tea and they have to drink it
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like in bulk, in the morning or with food.
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And it is very, very effective at supporting kind of the whole of the gut health system.
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So maybe if they’re someone that struggles with diarrhoea, they might kind of find a bit
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of like astringency and have like much more kind of firm stools.
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Like, a lot of these herbs are bitters.
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So they help kind of communicate to the
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digestive enzymes in the body to, like, start working and help us digest our food.
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Maybe if someone has like intestinal permeability or what is kind of colloquially
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known as leaky gut syndrome,
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that will be, you know, supported and addressed and then that means like less kind
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of waste metabolites and things like causing chronic inflammation in the, in the body and
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in the bloodstream and stuff.
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So it’s really important.
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And then like I said, like all these amazing
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like at the tip of in terms of research.
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So, yeah, so anyway.
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But by enabling the body to digest food properly,
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we are therefore supporting the body to have more energy because food is like one of our
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primary sources of energy as well as a gut tea.
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I’ll often support people with like a digestive blend.
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So for some clients, I support them to get kind of like gut health testing, just like 300
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******* quid.
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But it can just be life changing to know a bit
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more specifically about what is happening in their guts, like whether it’s a intense
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dysbiosis thing or whether it’s.
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Yeah. Whether it’s like, you know, a kind of pathogenic bacteria or whatever.
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But yeah, sometimes people are just generally struggling with digesting specific foods, like
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digesting fat is a big one, digesting protein.
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And so, yeah, giving them herbs at meal times to help them with digestion can be really
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powerful.
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Like, they’re often called bitters, but
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they’re not always bitters.
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I find strong bitters can really trigger
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nausea in a lot of people.
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So I’m quite kind of careful.
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And other people have more things, kind of
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like reflux and stuff.
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So actually having more soothing demulcent
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herbs like licorice or marshmallow is actually more effective at enabling them to kind of
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digest their food.
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Okay, so I’ve talked about sleep already but like yeah,
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someone wants to have more energy,
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they need to have better quality sleep.
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So I’ll be working with the kind of daytime
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stuff as I mentioned and I’m gonna record a whole podcast episode about this stuff.
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But if needed we will bring in more kind of stronger sedative herbs that can support with
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sleep like skullcap or passionflow flower or wild lettuce.
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And I’m not going to go into all of these now, you know, also chamomile and lavender.
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Cannot underestimate them.
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But yeah, addressing any barriers to
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restorative sleep is really, really, really important for overcoming fatigue of all kinds.
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Inflammation. So again I feel like inflammation is such a broad topic and there’s
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so many drivers of inflammation like I mentioned, whether that’s like, like you know,
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a kind of chronic disease state with some sort of like genetic component.
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You know, maybe there’s like tissue damage from like smoking or pollution or things like
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this.
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Maybe there’s like chronic inflammation because people are like you know, exposed to
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something like inflammatory in their diet or in their lifestyle or in their workplace,
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whatever.
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There’s so many drivers of inflammation and
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appropriate kind of anti.
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Hate the concept of anti inflammation but you know what I mean like supporting that person
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with their unique flavour of inflammation is really important.
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So maybe that is like actual herbs that can help address like inflammation modulation as
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like is the fancy term.
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But herbs like turmeric for example.
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Oh my God, herbalism is so complicated.
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But turmeric might not be appropriate for many
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people.
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It might be too heating and drying for
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example.
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So you know, yeah, there’s lots and lots of
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nuance as always.
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But yeah, we might be working with like specific anti inflammatories that have an
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affinity with that person’s inflammatory state but also an affinity with their kind of like
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constitution and what’s going on in their body.
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There might be inflammation in terms of like clearance mechanisms for example of like
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surplus kind of sex hormones like oestrogen for example.
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When, you know, when people have like really ******* horrific challenges like
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endometriosis, that’s commonly like kind of condition of like oestrogen excess.
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So what we’re trying to do is support the body to like clear that excess oestrogen.
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And our clearance mechanisms are things like our liver.
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So often it is supporting someone’s liver with herbs like dandelion or artichoke or milk
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thistle which will then have this kind of knock on effect of helping to clear
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inflammation.
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And a large source of inflammation in the body is the amount of stress hormones we’re
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experiencing, which is why enabling all our kind of like.
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I hate the word detox.
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It’s just been ******* taken over by like the right wing.
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But you know what I mean? Like our kind of detoxification pathways and
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mechanisms in our body which are numerous, if we can support them to kind of like optimally
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clear our wastes in our body, whether that’s like kind of waste from like the immune
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fighting responses or that’s like surplus stress hormones or surplus sex hormones,
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like if we can help clear those, then we are in kind of better stead in terms of
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inflammation.
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And the less inflammation we have, the less fatigue we experience.
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And can you see why herbalism is so complicated?
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Okay, and then,
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yeah, I’ve talked about nerve tonics, but like, there is this kind of category of herbs
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which are like adaptogens and I don’t tend to use that framework because I prefer the
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framework of nerve tonnes of.
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But I just want to name that there are stimulating herbs that can almost like,
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if someone’s kind of like energy response in their body, like their mitochondria, like
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aren’t working very well because of something like long Covid.
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Working with a specific herb with an affinity for the mitochondria might be really, really
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powerful.
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So I don’t tend to work much with like
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ashwagandha or the Siberian ginsengs and like stuff like that.
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This mostly because most people that see me have a kind of like complex trauma history.
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And I find when you give someone who’s got like intense ******* PTSD a herb like
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rhodiola, you’re in like real ******* dangerous territory in terms of like
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activation of the stress response.
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Like, I’m talking like fits of rage, like sleeplessness, like all of this other stuff
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that comes from shitloads of stimulation.
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But for some people that are in a very depleted, fatigued state,
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if you’ve addressed all these other factors, which you can see are ******* a lot of things,
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these herbs that kind of like kickstart the mitochondria, that’s like the least scientific
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way of describing it.
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But, like,
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they can be really powerful if they’re really appropriate.
Nicole:
Like if they’re chosen very appropriately and skillfully because they have like such a
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pronounced kind of profound effect on, yeah, the mitochondria and the energy in our body.
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So. So,
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yeah, use them with a lot of caution.
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I’m gonna do a whole podcast about them.
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But yeah, they are kind of part of the picture.
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But yeah, as you can see from me, blathering on for half an hour.
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The kind of goal of addressing fatigue and senses and states of depletion are,
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how do we nourish the body, how do we address those deficiencies, how do we get all of the
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processes like, like working kind of optimally in terms of we’re digesting our food well, we
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are enabling some rest and restoration in our body by supporting the parasympathetic nervous
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system.
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And how can we just, like, drop down the percentages in terms of, like,
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you know, the body’s like, acute fight or flight response?
Nicole:
Like, if we can reduce that down, we might, like, have 25% more energy.
Nicole:
If we can address,
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you know, a major driver of inflammation, like hormonal clearance, then that might take out
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another 15% and then suddenly we’ve got like, like 40% more energy.
Nicole:
Do you know what I mean?
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So that’s how I try and approach things.
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Yeah, you’ll probably listen to this, feeling really fatigued, being like, oh, God, I’m so
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overwhelmed now.
Nicole:
But the thing about my hub list and PTSD
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course is, like, there are frameworks, right.
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So all of this stuff is, like, communicated in a specific way where I support you to choose
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which plants to work with.
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And also forgot to say this the other day, but, like, the.
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This, this current course launch, I’m going to be doing a workshop for anyone who joins now
Nicole:
or who’s previously joined the course,
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all about kind of like trauma support in, like, clinical practise.
Nicole:
So, like, how do you make these decisions around which herbs to choose or what’s an
Nicole:
appropriate state, you know, herbs to choose if someone’s having a lot of panic attacks
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versus a lot of fatigue and shutdown, blah, blah,
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blah, blah, blah.
Nicole:
But, yeah, if you’re interested in how to put
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this stuff into practise, I think you’ll find that really valuable.
Nicole:
And that’s for anyone who joins, like, anyone who joins for free or at the Solidarity page
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place,
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anyone who joins at the other rates, like, everyone is welcome to that webinar.
Nicole:
And also there’s no pressure to participate.
Nicole:
You can come and lurk in the background or you
Nicole:
can just watch the replay or not watch it at all.
Nicole:
That’s also fine.
Nicole:
But. Yeah, but the approach is supporting all of these systems and not trying to force,
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like, greater energy expenditure.
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Does that make sense?
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Okay, I’m going to stop there.
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I hope that makes sense.
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I will be back soon.
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Where I am talking about.
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Yeah, kind of the dangers of some of the
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stimulating herbs.
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Yeah. As well as some other things in later episodes.
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But thank you for listening.
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Let me know if it’s been useful and take care.
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Thanks so much for listening to the Frontline Herbalism Podcast.
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You can find the transcript, the links, all the resources from the
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[email protected] podcast.
