Tame your Moods, Destress and find Balance using Herbal Remedies and Aromatherapy Rabbi Friedman is the number one voice of clarity on moral and social issues. In this episode of Ideas that Change the World podcast, Rabbi Friedman talks to Sara Chana about her new Moodtopia. Timestamped Notes [2:57] Medications work on the dopamine and serotonin levels in the brain. Studies are coming out slowly that are showing that herbs can have the same effect. The world today is hectic and full of stress. This has led to rise in cortisol levels which has made normal moods seem bigger than they are. Let's just say 300 cortisol level is your point where you really feel out of control and feel really stressed and you're living at 250. The smallest things are going to get you. If you can drop your cortisol levels down to maybe 150, then the little incidents that happen in life are not going to put you to that point where you feel like you can't cope. Herbs work on the central nervous system and they lower cortisol levels. [5:04] If all your kids are coming home from school at 4:20 and they're going to cause all sorts of terrors and run around the house like maniacs, destroying your house, taking some skullcap before they come home will let you not have the strong reactions that you may feel inside of you. So just place the skullcap in a little bit of water diluted 20 minutes before they come home. Skullcap is a great herb for nervousness and agitation. Skullcap is in the mint family and it's a very gentle herb. It's safe for people that are pregnant and breastfeeding and kids. You can drink it in tea form or in tincture form. Tincture form is when you take a herb and you put grain alcohol over it. Then you would let it sit for six to eight weeks and then you would strain it and you would have medicine in tincture form. Sara suggests to people to take all herbs in this form. [10:57] When people are sleep deprived and haven't eaten enough, sometimes their intellect goes out the window. Bad things happen to good people. These bad things can be just getting a flat tire and missing a very important appointment or as you're leaving the house, two of your kids get their cereal all over them. This can be very frustrating. Sara believes that people can and need to learn intellectually how to control their moods. Some women have really challenging times when they have their cycles, before their cycles and during their cycles after their cycles. This is just because it's a hormonal imbalance. If these
women can take a herb like motherwort, it can help push aside that black cloud. Motherwort can help you feel more balanced when your body is in an imbalanced state. You can take motherwort for any gloominess and you can mix it in the same cup with some skullcap for agitation. [12:56] There's a herb called oats. This herb is not like oatmeal. It's made from milky oats. Oats is for when people have burnt both candles by maybe doing too much chesed or by having too many guests in their house. You can intellectually say, I'm doing good deeds so I shouldn't be feeling grumpy now. But if you take a herb like oats, it really helps calm and cool the central nervous system. Sara believes that this is a strength to know. [14:30] When you look at plants, they have colors of white flowers, purple flowers, yellow flowers and white flowers. There's no research at this point done on whether the colors of the flowers affect our moods. However, we see a lot of common threads. For instance, chamomile flower is yellow and lemon balm's flower is yellow. They're both safe for people of all ages. It calms you down and relaxes you without you having that hung over or drugged feeling. There's a herb called blue vervain which is a blue vibrant purple color. This is for severe panic and agitation. Sara is of the opinion that the intensity of this color helps with the intensity of the emotion that's going on. [18:57] When it comes to guilt, Sara would not give something for it. However, she would look at what the guilt does to you physically. If it gives you a pain in the stomach, then there's a herb called meadowsweet which is calming and will help you relax. If you get muscle pain from it, Sara would give you a herb called kava. Kava is a wonderful muscle relaxant. If a person is guilty and feels tense and has muscle pain, then kava would greatly help them. In fact, in the Philippines, when they do meetings between two companies, they serve kava because it relaxes the muscles and relaxes all that tension. They therefore find that the negotiations work better. People can take kava before they go to sleep. [20:52] Sara's book, Moodtopia, talks about herbs and essential oils. It goes herb by herb and it tells a little story about a person's experience with that herb, so it's not clinical. It talks about someone who was very sad and depressed on the inside, but on the outside he was very smiley and looked like everything was okay. This person had a lot of nerve pain from their sadness and Sara found that St. John's-wort was the perfect herb for them. Sara also goes through all the essential oils available and she talks about their history and how to use the essential oils. Finally, Sara goes through the importance of color.
[21:39] Another thing that Sara looks at is Feng shui. Feng shui was developed in China and it looks at how to set up your home so that you don t get aggravated or moody. Feng shui is just about making your home clutter free, removing leaky faucets, replacing sticky doors and repairing drawers that don t pull in and out. These small changes can reduce the frustrations in your life. In Feng shui, your home should be as smooth flowing as possible. When Feng shui was first spoken about, it was about taking the environment and making it work for you. Like if you had to carry up water from the stream, you would want to make sure that where you keep your water stored is the shortest distance. So Feng shui originally began as a way to make your environment safe and to use the atmosphere as much as possible. [27:06] Through her book, Sara targets people who will not be building their houses from scratch. The book focusses mainly in creating the environments that you have. For example, when you live in big cities like New York or LA, you can't really choose your homes. You just look at what you can afford and then take it. But once we have these environments, how can you make them as positive and less stressful as possible. In Japan, there are people who won't build houses without consulting a Feng shui specialist first. In Feng shui, they don't want you to have pictures of your family in your bedroom. They prefer pictures of plants and flowers. This is because, you could be sitting there in your bedroom and all of a sudden you see a picture of your son and all of a sudden you're worried. He's losing his job, he doesn t have enough money, how am I going to help him find a job? So in Feng shui, if you want to have a good night's sleep, you want to not be thinking of the challenges that your family's having. In your living room, in your kitchen, you can have tons of pictures of your family, but they shouldn't be in your bedroom environment because that's a place where you need to sleep and rejuvenate. Feng shui is also into keeping the bathroom door closed and keeping the toilet seat down. If you keep the toilet seat up in your bathroom and you flush, bacteria comes out and goes all over your toothbrush and all over your hairbrush and all over your soap bar. So it's very important for being healthy to keep your toilet seat down. So Feng Shui knew about this a long time ago. They wanted to make sure that bathrooms were covered and the bathrooms were not by the kitchen, because that was a place where you took off all the excess stress and dirt from the day. [30:32] Sara believes that a person that has a propensity towards stress, a propensity toward sadness, that struggles with being in control of their moods, the more organized their environment is, the less little triggers they encounter. For people living in small spaces like in Brooklyn, this doesn t mean that they can't be organized. There should be hooks for everybody's
backpack or a little bag where shoes can be put when you enter the house. Small things like this can make a huge difference. It doesn t mean the house has to be perfect, but it means that everything should have a place. [36:36] Studies have shown that when you make a fake smile, you see humor in a better light. You see things as funnier. When you make your mouth in more of a frown, you see things in a more negative way. In Moodtopia there is a whole chapter called Fake It. This chapter is based on studies that have shown that when you fake a smile, even if you're not happy, you lower your cortisol levels and you get more of an oxytocin rush, which is the good chemical rush. So if you're having a really bad day and you go through your day just kind of smiling at people, you'll project better energy. People will usually respond better. This can change the chemical reactions in your brain. In fact, when women get Botox and they paralyze a lot of the muscles around the lips and they can't smile as broadly, they tend to get more depressed, more melancholy and do not respond to joy as well. So in this chapter, Sara talks about a lot of different ways to fake it. [39:52] There's three kinds of fluids that come out of our eyes. There's fluid in our eyes to clean our eyes. Generally when you blink, it cleans your eyes. There's also another fluid when you get something in your eye and you start tearing and trying to push the thing out of your eye. Thirdly, we have tears. Interestingly, tears from crying are filled with cortisol. So when you cry, you drop your cortisol levels. In some parts of the world there are even cry groups where people watch sad movies and talk about tragedies and then cry. These people walk out of these groups feeling more in control of their moods and feeling better. [44:52] In Chinese medicine, you don't want stuck energy. So if you get too much congestion in your sinuses, you'll get a sinus infection. It's stuck energy. If you get too much inflammation in your knees or your joints, it's stuck energy and you can get arthritis. Things should be fluid and moving all the time. So when people get stuck in that anger, stuck in that depression, stuck in that sadness, it creates a state of not being well. You need to be fluid. That might mean getting a massage, jogging or taking a walk. However, your goal needs to be to acknowledge the mood, know it's there for a reason, know it's real and know that it's there to teach you something but don t get stuck in it. Support Rabbi Friedman itsgoodtoknow.org/support Resources
Moodtopia: Tame Your Moods, De-Stress, and Find Balance Using Herbal Remedies, Aromatherapy, and More - Sara Chana Silverstein