Lemon balm is a humble herb with a rather illustrious history.

It has been used medicinally for over 2,000 years now, beginning all the way back in Ancient Greece.

Homer made reference to it in The Odyssey, Charlemagne treasured it, and now, thanks to the advances of Western science, its popularity on the rise yet again.

What is it, though, how can it benefit us, and how does it work?

Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about in this article, along with clinically effective doses, side effects, recommended supplements, and more.

By the end, you’re going to know whether lemon balm is right for you, and how to get the most out of it.

What Is Lemon Balm?

The lemon balm plant originated in southern Europe and is now found throughout the world. The lemony smell and pretty white flowers of the plant have led to its widespread cultivation in gardens. The leaves, stems, and flowers of lemon balm are used medicinally.

Lemon balm goes by several names:

• Melissa officinalis, which is its official, scientific name.
• Melissengeist
• Bee balm
• Garden balm
• Melissa
• Erva-cidrerira

It’s most commonly found as a tea, standalone supplement in capsule form, or ingredient in other supplements (usually natural sleep aids).

Lemon balm is rather unique in that it contains quite a few biologically active molecules, and that has made it very difficult to understand scientifically.

To make matters more complicated, how it’s grown, collected, and processed influences the levels of these various components, which means that while two lemon balm supplements can look identical on paper, they can be quite different in reality.

These variables have a lot to do with why lemon balm hasn’t received much attention from the research community until recently.

Better scientific techniques were needed to make a real go of it, and now that they’re becoming available, researchers are able to study the herb more effectively and better understand its effects in the body.

What Are the Benefits of Lemon Balm

Before the year 2000, just 5 studies were conducted on lemon balm since 1950. In 2015 alone, there were 22.

This work is paying off, too, because as the data continues to accumulate, so do the discoveries about how lemon balm can benefit us.

For example, here’s what we know so far about lemon balm…

• It induces calmness and relaxation.
• It helps you sleep better.
• It reduces anxiety, stress, fatigue, and aggression.
• It improves memory and cognitive function.
• It mitigates DNA damage.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these points.

How lemon balm helps you relax

Technically, lemon balm is classified as a sedative because it decreases stress, anxiety, and alertness, and induces calmness and relaxation.

It accomplishes all this through one primary mechanism: by reducing the activity of the brain.

You see, lemon balm contains molecules that increase your body’s levels of a chemical called gamma-Aminobutyric acid (GABA).

GABA makes brain cells less “excitable,” or responsive to stimulation, by inhibiting the activities of the neurotransmitter glutamate, which fires neurons into action.

The more GABA that’s floating around to “settle your brain down,” the less alert, stressed, and anxious you become, and the more relaxed and calm you feel.

How lemon balm helps you sleep better

After reading the above, you’re probably not surprised to learn that research shows that lemon balm can help with insomnia.

It pushes the brain toward a more sleep-like state and removes the obstacles of stress and anxiety, so better sleep just follows naturally

How lemon balm can improve your memory and cognitive function

Two studies show that supplement with lemon balm can improvement memory, whereas others have failed to observe these effects.

The discrepancies come down to how the data was interpreted in these studies.

The ones that demonstrated benefits concluded that “memory quality” had improved, which is a way of summarizing the results of many memory tests, while the ones that didn’t demonstrate benefits found that specific aspects of memory hadn’t noticeably improved.

For example, when scientists looked at how lemon balm affected “working memory” specifically, no benefits were observed.

(And in case you’re not familiar with the term, working memory is a system for temporarily storing and managing information for various cognitive tasks like learning, reasoning, and comprehension. A simple test of working memory is the number of items (usually words or numbers) that you can hold in your mind and recall.)

So, basically, what these studies have found is that, on the whole, our memory works slightly better in several different ways when we’re supplementing with lemon balm.

How lemon balm can reduce DNA damage.

DNA is a chemical in our cells that governs more or less everything important that happens in our bodies. It’s quite literally the blueprint for life.

One of its basic functions is replication, which allows every cell that divides from its “parent” to carry its own set of instructions (DNA).

So long as DNA maintains its proper chemical structure and activity, all is well, genetically speaking.

If its structure becomes damaged, though, which can result from many things naturally occurring and otherwise, its instructions become warped.

If this happens too much, it becomes dangerous, which is why DNA damage is associated with various diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s, and even natural processes like aging.

Well, lemon balm helps our bodies better manage this by decreasing DNA damage rates.

How exactly it does this is not yet known, but scientists are continuing to investigate.

Other Health Conditions for Which Lemon Balm Can Be Beneficial

Cold Sores