It’s hot today, and it’s going to get even hotter. This is an herbal strategy for summer heat.
The thing about heat is that it accumulates. In Ayurveda, we talk about how heat rises in the body just like it does in a house.
“Heat rises in the body just like in a house.”
If it’s hot out and you’re starting to get irritated, agitated, your eyes are burning; maybe you have a dry mouth or a headache—think about it in terms of heat rising in the body. Those are some of the symptoms that can manifest when it’s hot, so you always want to be tempering or finding a balance with the elements.
Dehydration affects the nerves and can elevate anxiety, restlessness and irritation. Dehydration also increases your body’s use adrenal hormones, which are hot hormones that make you even hotter… whew! Time to hydrate!
Here’s a simple hack that’s been well-received in my household that I’ve been doing for a long time. I also would love to hear; how do you deal with summer’s heat in your house?
Do You Have a Hydration Station?
Being healthy is a series of small habits that add up. When you try to set up health habits for your household, they fall into two categories. What your family will do and what they won’t do.
I’ve had a clinical herbal practice for over 20 years, and am always looking for simple hacks that support making good lifestyle choices easier. Setting up a hydration station is one of the things that I figured out early on that falls into the ‘will do’ category for creating household habits.
How Do Most People Hydrate?
Where do most people hydrate? I’ll tell you. It’s when we’re eating. Most people—so many people—work and work, or play, and then rehydrate while they are eating.
Nope, you don’t want to do that. Ayurveda teaches us to drink ½ cup of room temperature or warm fluid—not ice water—with our meals. When you take a lot of fluids or drink ice water with your meals, it dampens the digestive juices and inhibits stomach function which means your body is going to have to spend a lot of extra energy trying to extract the nutrition from that meal.
You want to think of your stomach like a pot of soup on the stove. You’re putting in food, and your stomach’s job is to ripen and rotten the food and get it all ready so that your nutrition can be absorbed further on down the digestive tract.
If you have a pot of soup on the stove and you keep pouring water in it, what happens? It never cooks, right? Compare this to drinking a bunch of fluids while you’re eating.
So, what you want to do is hydrate IN BETWEEN meals.
Okay, so we’re talking about a hydration station, setting up a nice place where people can get something to drink in between meals. Take a look at the video and see what our summer hydration station looks like!
I usually put out a nice place mat with some glasses, and that’s it. It’s waiting for you when you get home. You walk in and see these herbs, fruit, colors and you think, “I want that.”
You want to set up some kind of hydration station that your family gets used to seeing when they get home, so it becomes a habit. Again, health is about all the little habits that add up.
Your Summer Hydration Station
Mint is cooling. A lot of times when it’s hot out, we get overheated, our brain doesn’t function as well. Mint increases your brain power.
Rose petals are cooling. Rose petals are also nervine. They’re calming for the nervous system. One of the things that happens in summer time when the heat rises to the head, we can get irritated. Your rose petals are really good for that. They’re cooling and can help with irritation caused from over-heating.
Lavender is full on in the garden right now. Lavender is also calming. Summer time is great to drink nervine herbs, herbs that are calming, because of the agitation caused from overheating.
Cucumber is very cooling. It’s moistening. It’s full of minerals and electrolytes. You want the electrolytes. I hear clients say, “I drink a ton of water, but I just pee it all out,” it’s because you don’t have enough electrolytes to hold the water in your body.
There are a few more tips in the video, so scroll up and check it out.
Ready to set up your hydration station?
I’m interested in knowing what you do to stay hydrated. How are you teaching your family to stay hydrated?
Hi Kami, I so love your website and all of your wonderful tips and tricks to incorporate herbs into our daily diet. So, after seeing this video I got inspired over the weekend and I got out a pitcher, added my water and proceeded to drop in spearmint, chocolate mint, stevia and pineapple sage leaves to create a flavored water. I think I got carried away with mismatched herbs. I couldn’t really detect any flavor and then when I did, it was weak and like I said mismatched. The only thing I could think of was that I didn’t wait… Read more »
HI Cathy,
i would use room temperature water and I leave it out on the counter.
Start with one herb. Try mint first, let it sit out on the counter and see how long it takes until you like the taste. Remember this is going to be a LOT more subtle than a tea and the other thing is we are so used to all the store bought flavor drinks that have tricked our taste buds into responding to chemical flavors. So there also might be some taste bud adjustment going on…..
Thank you, Kami, for this posting and video. It arrived just in time, as we are now having a heatwave. I wasn’t thinking enough about hydration, and now I am going to make a hydration station! I so appreciate your herbal wisdom.
Beautiful as well as healthy!!! Do you put ice in the water???
I don’t use much ice. But you can put a few ice cubes in. Just remember, no ice drinks around meals, it dampens your digestive process
Very helpful. I can see this being more fun for kids to drink than a plain glass of water.
Can any type of rose be used? I have a wild rose plant that was growing in my friend’s empty lot.
Yes, all rose petals are edible, i just try to stay away from the store bought roses that are grown with chemicals. You want organic roses.
Enjoy!