The Drink That Can Stop Stress

Stress happens . . . even when you have a spouse you adore, a fixed-rate mortgage, and good cell phone reception. You might not be able to stop it from coming on, but you can help your body respond in only a small way and recover from it quickly. One good way: drinking black tea.

To understand what tea does, first look at what stress does: It increases your blood pressure and heart rate, makes your blood stickier, and drives up levels of the hormone cortisol -- and too much cortisol suppresses your immune system. When a group of guys drank tea regularly, they still responded to stress normally, but their bodies calmed down and reversed these nasty changes faster than did men in a different group who were slipped fake tea. It's not just the soothing act of sipping tea that simmered them down -- both groups did that, as far as they knew. So it's likely that the many healthful compounds in tea (including polyphenols, flavonoids, and amino acids) somehow did the good work.

Of course, it's even better to learn to cope with stress than to rely on tea to do the cleanup work. You can have a major impact on reducing the adverse effects of stress by spending time with friends, meditating, keeping physically active, and joining groups that share your interests. In fact, these will give back 30 of the 32 years that a really bad run of major life stressors can steal from you. And you can get some back by simply enjoying yourself: Laughing a lot, which reduces anxiety, tension, and stress, can make you between 1.7 and 8 years younger than your calendar age.