Chamomile and Cortisol: Does the Bedtime Tea Actually Lower Stress Hormones?

Chamomile tea has been a bedtime ritual for so long that it barely registers as a "wellness trend" anymore. But recently, some social content has pushed the claim further, framing a nightly cup as an active tool for lowering cortisol rather than just a calming habit. That is a more specific and more testable claim, and the actual research on chamomile is narrower, and comes from a different form of the plant, than a tea bag steeped for a few minutes.

Most of the relevant clinical research uses standardized chamomile extract in capsule form, at doses far higher than what ends up in a cup of tea, and it focuses on generalized anxiety disorder rather than everyday stress. A series of trials led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, including a long-term randomized controlled trial, found that daily chamomile extract produced significant reductions in anxiety symptoms compared with placebo over several weeks, with effects researchers have generally described as modest rather than dramatic. Apigenin, one of chamomile's main active compounds, is thought to interact with some of the same receptor pathways as anti-anxiety medications, though the mechanism in humans is not fully worked out.

Cortisol specifically was examined in a smaller, exploratory follow-up published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. Researchers measured saliva cortisol four times a day, before and after chamomile extract treatment, in 45 adults with moderate to severe generalized anxiety disorder. They found that people whose anxiety symptoms improved the most also tended to show a healthier morning cortisol pattern after treatment. That is a genuinely interesting signal, but it was an open-label, non-placebo-controlled, exploratory analysis in a clinical anxiety population, which is a meaningfully different claim than "chamomile tea lowers your cortisol."

This is a useful place to separate what is proven from what is marketing. What has some real support, from actual randomized trials, is that concentrated chamomile extract may modestly ease anxiety symptoms in people with diagnosed generalized anxiety disorder, alongside a preliminary signal linking that improvement to cortisol patterns. What is not established is that a cup of chamomile tea, at typical steeping concentrations, produces a measurable cortisol change in an otherwise healthy person having an ordinary stressful day. The "cortisol-lowering tea" framing borrows credibility from extract studies it was not actually tested in.

On safety, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health considers chamomile likely safe in the amounts found in food and tea, and probably safe for short-term supplemental use in adults. The main documented risk is allergy, particularly in people sensitive to ragweed, chrysanthemums, marigolds, or daisies, since chamomile belongs to the same plant family; reactions have ranged from mild skin irritation to, rarely, more serious allergic responses.

None of this makes an evening cup of chamomile a bad habit. Winding down with a warm, caffeine-free drink is a reasonable piece of a broader sleep routine, and better sleep is itself linked to healthier cortisol rhythms, as covered elsewhere on this site. It just is not, on the current evidence, a validated standalone "cortisol hack," and the studies that come closest to supporting that idea were run on a concentrated extract in a clinical population, not on tea.