My Chamomile Tea and Sleep Quality Experiment

One of the most often things repeated about Chamomile Tea is that it improves sleep quality. For many people, this means being able to fall asleep faster. I wanted to test this assumption. For my experiment, I used a total Sleep Quality score. I brewed a single mug of loose leaf Chamomile between 3 and 5 minutes at a temperature of around 200F. The beverage was consumed within 60 minutes before going to sleep.

After 60 days of data, here are the numbers. The Sleep Quality number is a score between 1 and 5, with 5 being perfect sleep.

30 Nights with Chamomile Tea = 4.17 average

30 Nights without Chamomile Tea = 3.77 average

Wow! At first glance, it appears that Chamomile Tea is really helping my Sleep Quality. But this test overlapped with my Side Sleep Experiment. So I went back and just looked at the Chamomile Tea data taken after I adapted to Side Sleep.

26 Nights with Chamomile Tea + Side Sleep = 4.077 average

14 Nights without Chamomile Tea + Side Sleep = 4.071 average

I’m not a statistics guru (yet), but it now appears the sleep improvement did not come from the Chamomile Tea. It came when I switched from being a back sleeper to a side sleeper.

Loose leaf Chamomile by cjhuang

According to Ori Hofmekler, the author of the The Anti-Estogenic Diet and The Warrior Diet, chamomile is a “powerful estrogen inhibitor”. His book covers how estrogens are in the modern food supply and our environment. Excessive estrogens can make us sick and overweight. So I will continue to drink Chamomile Tea as cheap insurance against estrogens.

I don’t find the taste of Chamomile Tea that appealing, but I discovered that adding a pinch of red roobios tea makes it taste much better. Roobios is a South African bark tea that has no caffeine and its own health benefits.