I'm not a “Tea Person”

Most people think tea is boring. Flavorless. Something you politely drink when visiting your grandmother. Let’s be honest, it’s not exactly the beverage people associate with performance, resilience, or recovery.

“I’m just not a tea person,” I used to say just a few years ago.

Yes, I realize that might surprise you, considering I’m now the co-founder of a tea brand. And yes, ours has adaptogens, which makes it different from my Ita’s tea—but it’s still tea.

When my sisters started building Dösis Tea, I was helping from the sidelines. I believed in them and the idea behind the brand, but I had one small problem: I didn’t actually like tea. I even used to brag about it. “I’m just not a tea person.”

Then something interesting happened.

I had struggled for years with digestive discomfort, including symptoms consistent with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). At some point, I was desperate. I felt like I had tried everything. Meanwhile, I had these two sisters obsessed with what they called “ancient medicine,” and I realized I hadn’t really given it a fair shot.

So I did.

Not because I suddenly wanted to become “a tea person,” but because I was curious about what plants might do differently than all the pharma I had been consuming since I was a teenager. After a few weeks, I noticed my body responding in ways I hadn’t experienced before. That was the moment I went back to my sisters—and I’ll never forget what I said:

“Okay… I think I want to be a co-founder after all.”

The moral of the story?

Sometimes the biggest shift is simply letting go of the sentence:

“I’m just not a ____ person.”

Over time, I learned just enough to understand why this might be happening, without turning into a full-time plant researcher.  The basics? Some plants and mushrooms like Reishi and Ashwagandha are classified as adaptogens, a category scientists study for how they may help the body adapt to stress and maintain internal balance.

Most of the research looks at how your body deals with stress—how you react, how your immune system responds, and how well you bounce back. The language can get technical quickly, but the idea itself is simple: some plants and mushrooms appear to support the body’s natural ability to regulate, rather than forcing or ignoring it.

It’s also important to be honest about what this is not. This is not a quick fix, and it’s not something that works instantly. If you try it once and expect everything to change, you’ll probably miss the point.

What made the difference for me was consistency—giving something enough time to actually show me what it could do. We actually wrote more about this in our post on why adaptogens work slowly, because understanding that part makes the whole experience feel a lot more realistic.

Looking back

The biggest shift probably wasn’t even the tea itself. It was letting go of the “I’m not a ___ person” thought. It sounds harmless, but it quietly limits what you’re willing to try. Once I stopped holding on to that idea, I gave myself permission to approach something new with curiosity instead of resistance.

And just to clear this up, because it always comes up: no, these are not the kind of mushrooms that make you see colors or question your existence. Reishi is a functional mushroom that has been used for centuries and is now being studied for how it interacts with normal biological systems. If you want to learn more about psilocybin and hallucinogenic mushrooms, visit our post on Exploring the Fascinating World of Penis Envy Mushrooms. So no hallucinations here—just plants doing their thing, slowly but surely. .

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this experience, it’s that you don’t need to understand everything about medicinal plants to benefit from them. You don’t need to memorize compounds or read every study. Sometimes, you just need to be willing to try something you’ve already decided isn’t for you—and give it enough consistency to actually notice.

With love,

Vanessa