Plant Medicine: restorative powers from Mother Nature — with help from sun, soil, and water to form healing substances.
What are adaptogens exactly? Adaptogens are precious botanicals that aid the body in balancing and adapting to stress; supporting the body’s ability to adapt to change. Whether it’s increasing the body’s resistance to environmental stressors, shielding acute and chronic stress, or other stressors. These remarkable plants may also improve, stimulate or modulate immunity and immune responses, heighten stamina, and regulate sexual function, amongst other things.
Adaptogens are sometimes referred to as “tonic herbs,” in Daoism, or “nutritive tonics” in Western herbal medicine. They are important because of their neuroprotective and anti-fatigue elements, anti-depressive effects, and stimulant effects on the central nervous system. elements.
There is such a wide range of healing benefits in using adaptogens to address any area of the body, which makes these herbs so unique, given their ancient history and even modern scientific studies of adaptogens more and more.
The brain (the hypothalamus, actually) communicates with the nervous system and inflow of hormones and then sends for help (to the pituitary gland) on what to do, then this activates tissues to help, this includes visceral organs (heart, lungs, kidney, pancreas, and liver). You see, all of them relate to each other. This is why adaptogens are so helpful.
Cortisol often called the stress hormone, is the primary hormone that comes from the adrenal glands. managing stress is important because if your body over adapts to stress constantly (when there is an oversecretion of cortisol), the immune system is sort of cut off in a way, which leads to hormonal imbalances, weight gain insomnia, fibromyalgia, infertility, depression, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and inflammation, amongst other issues.
Adaptogen Benefits:
Have you ever been stressed out? No matter how big or small a problem might be, the effect of stress is different for everyone. You may be a person that never looks stressed when you’rehaving a stressful day, or you might be a person who looks frazzled or upset when you are in stressful situations. Each person has a different threshold when it comes to stress, and it’s important to know how our bodies can adapt in response to levels of stress.
One of the wonderful things about adaptogens is their balancing power to influence the changes in your body, especially the immune system, nervous system, and hormonal (neuroendocrine) systems. Our body’s stress response involves our nervous system and endocrine system, as they are so closely related and oftentimes talked about as one unit. To keep the body healthy, the nervous system’s job is to protect by bringing stability to internal responses.
There are many forms of stressors: Physical, environmental, spiritual, and chemical are just several to be mindful of – most of us know about biological stressors as well (think, bacteria, viruses, mold or parasites, etc.). But there are other stressors such as toxic and consumable substances that can contribute to stress in someone (alcohol, processed foods, or even vitamin-based deficiencies, etc.).
Learn more about adaptogens and examples here.
