Chamomile tea doesn’t simply lower cortisol the way many wellness sources claim. The relationship is more nuanced and, in some ways, more useful. The best clinical evidence available shows that chamomile helps normalize your cortisol rhythm rather than suppressing the hormone outright. In people with generalized anxiety disorder, successful chamomile treatment was actually associated with an increase in morning cortisol and a steeper drop throughout the day, which is the pattern seen in healthy, well-regulated stress systems.
What Chamomile Actually Does to Cortisol
Your body follows a natural cortisol curve: levels spike in the morning to help you wake up and feel alert, then gradually decline through the afternoon and evening. Chronic stress and anxiety flatten this curve, leaving cortisol either too high at night (making it hard to sleep) or too low in the morning (making it hard to function), or both.
A clinical trial at the University of Pennsylvania studied 45 adults diagnosed with moderate to severe generalized anxiety disorder who took chamomile extract over the course of treatment. Researchers measured salivary cortisol four times a day, before and after the treatment period. The participants whose anxiety improved the most didn’t show a blanket reduction in cortisol. Instead, their morning cortisol rose significantly, and the drop from morning to evening became steeper. In other words, chamomile helped restore the healthy daily rhythm that anxiety had disrupted.
Interestingly, participants who started with the flattest cortisol patterns (lower morning levels and less variation throughout the day) experienced the greatest symptom improvement. This suggests chamomile may be particularly helpful for people whose stress response has become dysregulated over time.
How It Affects Anxiety and Stress
A 2024 systematic review examining 10 clinical trials concluded that chamomile “potentially has an anxiolytic effect,” meaning it can reduce anxiety symptoms. The review noted that chamomile’s key active compound, apigenin, appears to influence the body’s central stress management system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which is the same system that controls cortisol production. Apigenin does this by modulating neurotransmitter pathways, particularly those involving calming brain receptors.
So while chamomile may not “lower cortisol” in the way you’d expect from a supplement marketed as a cortisol blocker, it does appear to calm the upstream machinery that produces cortisol in response to perceived threats. For someone dealing with chronic stress, the practical result is similar: less of that wired, on-edge feeling, better sleep, and a body that ramps cortisol up and down at the appropriate times.
Tea vs. Extract: What the Studies Used
Most clinical trials used concentrated chamomile extract in capsule form, not brewed tea. This is an important distinction. A capsule of pharmaceutical-grade chamomile extract delivers a standardized dose of apigenin and other active compounds that’s difficult to replicate with tea bags. That said, drinking chamomile tea does deliver measurable amounts of apigenin. After consuming chamomile tea, apigenin metabolites reach peak concentration in the bloodstream within about two hours, indicating it’s absorbed in the upper digestive tract relatively quickly.
If you prefer tea over supplements, steeping matters. Research on polyphenol extraction shows that most of chamomile’s beneficial compounds are released within the first five minutes of steeping in near-boiling water (around 96°C or 205°F), but the total polyphenol content continues to increase significantly through 10 minutes. Letting your chamomile steep longer than the typical three to four minutes printed on most tea box instructions will give you a noticeably stronger dose of active compounds.
When to Drink It
Given what the cortisol research shows, timing your chamomile tea makes sense. If your goal is to support a healthy cortisol decline in the evening, drinking a cup in the late afternoon or evening aligns with the biology. Apigenin reaches peak blood levels about two hours after consumption, so a cup around 6 or 7 p.m. would deliver its calming effects right around the time your cortisol should naturally be tapering off for sleep.
Drinking chamomile first thing in the morning is less strategic. Morning is when you want cortisol to be high, and the research suggests chamomile therapy actually supports that natural morning peak rather than blunting it.
Safety and Interactions
Chamomile is well tolerated by most people, but it does interact with certain medications. It can amplify the effects of blood thinners like warfarin and increase the sedative effects of other calming substances, including alcohol. It may also interfere with tamoxifen, hormone replacement therapy, and estrogen-containing birth control pills. If you take any of these, check with your prescriber before adding regular chamomile to your routine.
For most people drinking one to three cups a day, chamomile tea carries minimal risk. The more relevant concern is expectations: if you’re dealing with significantly elevated cortisol from a medical condition like Cushing’s syndrome, chamomile tea is not a treatment. Its effects are modest and gradual, best suited for the kind of everyday stress and anxiety that leaves your system slightly out of balance over weeks and months.