Passionflower for Sleep and Overthinking: What the Research Shows
Herbs with Rosalee
Rosalee de la Forêt
4.9 • 564 Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2026
⏱️ 4 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Have you ever found yourself lying in bed unable to sleep, thoughts spinning in your head like a hamster wheel? Passionflower (Passiflora incarnata) may just be the herb for you!
In this short episode, I discuss what I love about passionflower, when it truly shines for dealing with insomnia, and my favorite ways to work with it.
As you’ll hear, passionflower can be a wonderful herbal ally for certain types of insomnia—but unfortunately, sometimes all the herbs in the world can’t help if chronic stress is what’s keeping you from being able to sleep. When this happens, it’s time to work on things at a deeper level.
That’s why my friend Rebecca Altman and I created our free Building Resilience mini course, which will help you to start shifting your relationship to stress at its core—and yes, there will be herbs involved, too!
You can sign up for the free mini course here. We’d love to have you join us!
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On the podcast, we explore the many ways plants heal, as food, as medicine, and through nature connection. Each week, I focus on a single seasonal plant and share trusted herbal knowledge so that you can get the best results when using herbs for your health.
Learn more about Herbs with Rosalee at herbswithrosalee.com.
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Rosalee is an herbalist and author of the bestselling book Alchemy of Herbs: Transform Everyday Ingredients Into Foods & Remedies That Heal and co-author of the bestselling book Wild Remedies: How to Forage Healing Foods and Craft Your Own Herbal Medicine. She's a registered herbalist with the American Herbalists Guild and teaches many popular online courses. Read about how Rosalee went from having a terminal illness to being a bestselling author in her full story here.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you've ever found yourself lying in bed at night with your mind just running, |
| 0:05.0 | replaying the day, making lists, worrying about things you can't do anything about at 11 p.m. |
| 0:10.0 | I want to talk to you about one of my favorite herbs for exactly that moment. |
| 0:13.0 | Passion flower. |
| 0:14.0 | Passiflora incarnata. |
| 0:17.0 | It's this stunning native North American vine. |
| 0:20.0 | If you've never seen it in bloom, definitely look it up. |
| 0:22.6 | It's just one of those plants that stops you in the tracks. |
| 0:24.6 | You look at those flowers and think, is that real? |
| 0:26.6 | It has a long history of use as a relaxing nerve vine, meaning it works directly on the nervous system to calm and settle. |
| 0:33.6 | What I love about Passion Flower is how specific it is. It's not really a general stress herb, although you could try it like that, but it's particularly well suited to that mental spinning quality, that kind of overwhelmed that just lives in your head more than your body, where you're tired, but your thoughts just won't stop, right? Where you lay down and your brain apparently has |
| 0:55.2 | 17 more things it needs to process before it's going to let you rest. |
| 0:58.6 | Well, there's actually an interesting study on this. |
| 1:01.4 | A 2019 double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial |
| 1:05.8 | looked at Passion Flower extract in adults with insomnia. |
| 1:09.6 | So there's 110 participants. |
| 1:11.6 | They had two weeks of Passion Flower with overnight sleep monitoring, and the Passion |
| 1:16.9 | Flower Group saw meaningful increase in total sleep time compared to the placebo group. |
| 1:22.1 | So that's pretty cool, right? |
| 1:23.6 | I always love the clinical studies showing that herbs work. |
| 1:26.6 | But here's something I find worth |
| 1:28.9 | mentioning when we talk about herbal studies. Passion Flower increased total sleep time in the |
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