Why You Need To Be Drinking Tea During The Winter

While tea is a seemingly simple drink, it’s in fact an incredibly versatile drink that is the most widely consumed beverage in the world (next to good ol' plain water). An average of around 159 million Americans drink tea every day. 

Tea’s popularity is well deserved. One of our favorite things about tea is that it can fit perfectly into so many moods, situations, and temperatures. Whether it's extremely hot or cold outside, tea works for any occasion. You can flawlessly wind down at the end of a cold day with a cup of tranquil tea and on a hot day, a cup of iced tea can cool the heat of the day. Tea can even give you a boost of energy during your midday crash.

Tea gets even better when you discover how regularly drinking tea can have a positive lasting impact on your wellness, with numerous studies backing the abilities teas have for boosting your immune system, fighting off inflammation, and even potentially reducing your risk of cancer.

These benefits for our mind, body, and soul are just too amazing to be ignored. Tea has been considered a miracle drink that most people adore, so it's no wonder why us humans have been endlessly sipping on herbs for centuries. 

Warm, iced, or steaming, with so many varieties of flavor from herbs to try to fit your palate, tea is best enjoyed during every season. 

However, to be completely honest, while we don't need more “reasons” for drinking tea, there really isn’t a better time of year to drink tea than during the winter. Shorter days, bone-chilling temperatures, and lack of sunlight, can lead to cabin fever, poor eating habits, stagnation, and of course, our bodies are at a higher risk for catching a viral and bacterial infection during the winter.

This is why now is a crucial time to work on incorporating smart strategies into your lifestyle to best support your body in fighting off those pesky cold-weather infections and diseases.

If you want to learn more about bolstering your diets with the best herbs and spices to keep yourself, healthy, warm, and hopefully sickness-free this winter, then click here to read our article on Winter Spices And Herbs To Protect Your Body! 

Now, this doesn't mean we'll need a mystical miracle cure. No matter what someone tells you, there isn't a 'one size fits all' magical pill, treatment, or food that can ensure that you stay sickness-free all autumn. However, drinking tea in the winter is like bathing the inside of your body with warmth, vitality, comfort, and rich nutrients and compounds.

Sipping on tea is not only like wrapping yourself in a warm cozy throw blanket to help you survive the struggles of cold, short days, but also the plethora of nutrients in tea helps revitalize and aid your body through all your winter ailments. 

Whether you love tea, occasionally drink tea, hate tea, or are obsessed with tea, a regular cup of tea makes for an excellent winter companion and can help you to stay healthy throughout the wintertime, in many ways! Here are just some of the incredible reasons why you should regularly drink tea during the winter season.

Digestive Improvement

Gut health is paramount during the winter when your digestive system isn't running at optimum. When your body is exposed regularly to colder temperatures, it starts attempting to save energy and heat, resulting in a slower metabolism, consequently negatively affecting your digestion system.

During the winter months, we tend to engage in more food indulgences with friends and family. Holiday foods are generally high in sugar and fat, lack fiber, and contain larger portions. This all puts more pressure on our digestive health and can cause acid reflux, heartburn, and slow down your whole digestive system, leading to stomach aches and constipation.

Drinking tea will support good digestion and boost populations of healthy gut bacteria because it contains antioxidants and polyphenols which have been found to aid in digestion and fat breakdown. Tea can also help minimize digestive upsets and streamline gut function.

Boosts Your Metabolism

As we all know, holiday eating can also lead to the dreaded seasonal weight gain. All those sweet, fatty, greasy, and high carb foods, and the decrease in physical activity due to dark days, terrible weather, and holiday obligations, leave us with a sluggish metabolism and a higher propensity to gaining weight.

While it's very easy to fall into winter hibernation and indulge, tea provides you with some support. Tea can help you fight holiday weight gain and aid your lazy metabolism.

Many teas have been shown to suppress appetite and research has found that a regular cup or two of tea a day can promote fat oxidation and boost your metabolism — both of which can save you a few calories and get your blood flowing.

Green tea, in particular, has thermogenic properties. 'Thermogenesis' which comes from the Greek word thermos for heat is a process that aids in the burning of calories while digesting food while you're eating it. This can positively and significantly impact weight loss.

Studies have found that drinking green tea regularly has the potential to reduce body fat by up to 19 percent.

What makes tea so incredibly healthy? Let's take a look at some of the science supporting the health benefits of green tea, black tea, and others. Click here to read our article - Drinking Tea: The Elixir Of Life

Mood Enhancement 

With all the holiday stress, traveling, and lack of sunlight, the cold weather season can bring a whole lot of depressive feelings of melancholy, dullness, and Seasonal Affective Disorders. 

Luckily a nice cup of tea can sometimes fix your mellow moods. This is not only due to the healthy indulgence and ritualized relaxation of tea, but also because tea has actual beneficial key reasons for balancing your mood.

This is because L-theanine, an amino acid found in the tea can induce the increase of the happy hormones: dopamine and serotonin levels. This assists in keeping depression and dullness away. 

More research needs to be done to find out exactly why this is - but researchers have also found that drinking tea lowers levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. Because green tea contains folate, it might be able to lower the risk of developing depression. Tea consumption may also have a positive effect on post-stroke depression. This effect correlates to the antioxidant activity and phytochemical composition of tea. 

A 2015 meta-analysis of 11 studies and 13 reports, with over 22,000 participants found an association between tea consumption and the risk of depression. For every three cups of tea consumed daily, there was a 37% decrease in the relative risk of depression. 

So, if you're feeling the winter blues, keep on sipping on tea to nourish your body, mood, and soul.

Immunity Boost & Cold-Soothing

With the fact that viruses that cause colds spread more easily in lower temperatures, you must protect your immune system. Strong immunity will help fight infectious bacteria, keeping cold, congestion, coughing, and flu at bay. 

Fortunately, tea is well-known for its incredible anti-inflammatory properties like flavonoids (an antioxidant) and can help in boosting our immunity system and reducing symptoms of flu and sicknesses like chest congestion, fever, and sore throat. 

You can also add some honey to your tea to help with coughing and add lemon in your tea for an extra boost of vitamin C, a popular vitamin for weakening colds.

During the winter, illnesses spread like wildfire - drinking tea can hit you up with some of the extra protection your body needs to defend itself.

Avoid Winter Lethargy

The fewer hours of sunlight that accompany the winter season, affect your sleep cycle and make us feel lazy and tired known as "winter tiredness." Because we receive fewer hours of sunshine, our bodies produce more of the sleep hormone melatonin making you feel sleepy and lethargic more frequently. 

However, tea gives our bodies a boost to keep us thriving during the winter. 

Tea contains many useful stimulants such as theophylline, caffeine, theobromine, and L-theanine, that energize your body and stimulate the brain, great for keeping you up and running throughout a cold day. 

A great perk about the caffeine hit from tea is that 'caffeine high' doesn't come with a quick high and crash like that caffeine boost from coffee. Tea slowly absorbs the caffeine and has a stable energy release, making it a longer-lasting and more effective energy stimulant than most caffeine-containing beverages.

Sip On Tea All Winter Long For A Healthy Mind And Body

All things considered, we don't need another reason to drink our favorite beverage tea. Nonetheless, you have just read just how amazing tea can be for soothing your body, mind, and soul during the winter. There are so many sweeping benefits of tea that press the vital importance of making sure tea is a regular part of your life, especially during the colder months. 

Tea is the ideal beverage for the winter, keeping us warm, refreshing our bodies, revitalizing our minds, and hopefully helping us avoid needing to take trips to the pharmacy. 

What Tea Should You Drink?

Many incredibly healthy tea options will work for both your palate and winter wellness. However, we highly recommend you check out our limited edition Wise Ape Gingerbread Fortress tea blend - a fortifying seasonal blend that combines cinnamon, cloves, licorice, pu-erh tea, and other winter-wellness driven spices and herbs like fenugreek, ginger, etc.

Spirited herbs and spices converge in this blend to bolster your body and empower your microbiome this winter. Oh, and did we mention the flavor is a rich mix of classic gingerbread spices, decadent aromas of vanilla, and the combination of our Yunnan black tea and Puerh tea creating a smooth texture with a kiss of sweetness?

Click here to check out our limited edition Wise Ape Gingerbread Fortress tea blend.

What are you waiting for? Get brewing some tea and we hope you enjoy a happy and healthy season.

This informative article is written, by Sophia McKenzie. Sophia is head content creator and writer, for several premium websites, where her expertise lie in health, nutrition, and wellness. Her content is heavily focused on providing and sharing doable solutions to help people truly thrive, and live their happiest, healthiest, fulfilled life.