Want to improve your alertness and mood prior to training? Peppermint tea could be the answer

If you feel you are flagging, then a mug of peppermint tea could prove the pick-me-up you need prior to training.

Researchers from Northumbria University found the herbal drink had an immediate but temporary effect on alertness in studies on 180 volunteers.

Peppermint tea was shown to enhance and arouse both mood and cognition, helping to improve working memory and alertness, while chamomile tea had a calming and sedative effect which significantly slowed attention speed.

“Peppermint has a reputation for being psychologically or mentally alerting. It picks you up and makes you feel a little bit brighter, so we endeavoured to test this out by giving people peppermint tea, or chamomile tea, which is a more calming drink and then put them through some computerised tests,” says Dr Mark Moss, the lead author of the study.

“We found that those people who had drunk the peppermint tea had better long-term memory. They were able to remember more words and pictures that they had seen.

“In contrast, the people who had the chamomile were slower in responding to tasks.”

Findings were presented at the annual British Psychological Society Conference in Nottingham.

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