Triple Leaf Relaxing Tea (Chinese herbal tea).Brewing 10 sweet mint leaves in boiling or very hot water.Chamomile steeped in hot water along with lemon verbena, with some lemon and sugar added.Sleepytime tea mixed with chai white tea and Rooibos red tea.Chamomile Nights by Stash, with chamomile, spearmint and lotus.How many of them have you tried already? If it’s more than half, I’ll be impressed! With so many great suggestions, I’ve compiled the list below. In the six years since I first wrote this article, many readers have shared their favorite nighttime teas in the comments.

It turns out I was wrong though, as Earl Grey has the perfect softness to sip in bed while reading a book (yes, we Brits really do take our mugs of tea to bed). I hated it when I was a kid and always thought the name was a bit posh and the color too milky. On the subject of black tea, when I’ve had enough of the herbal teas, my other favorite is decaffeinated Earl Grey. So this research doesn’t let all black tea and coffee addicts off the hook you’ll still need to experiment to see if black or green tea, or even coffee, is a feasible bedtime drink for you personally.

The researchers point out that they didn’t look closely at dosage, tolerance, and sensitivity to caffeine.

In contrast, caffeine had no significant effect on sleep duration, sleep efficiency or time of first waking after falling asleep. Looking at the sleep patterns of 785 African Americans, the researchers found that alcohol and nicotine within 4 hours of going to bed both negatively affected sleep. However, in August 2019, some new research suggested that caffeine might not be such a fearsome sleep slayer after all. For a long time, the standard advice has been to avoid caffeinated drinks in the lead up to bedtime.

Vanilla sleepytime tea