The Green Guild Formulary
Headaches
A Green Guild Formula Handbook
Headaches are miserable.
Sometimes you can feel one building for hours. Your neck gets stiff, your jaw is tight, and by the afternoon your whole head hurts. Other times it's completely different. Your temples are pounding and you feel hot. Or your head feels heavy and dull and you can barely think straight. Some come around your period. Some turn up when you've been exhausted for days. Others come with blocked sinuses and that horrible pressure around your eyes and forehead.
I made this handbook for those different kinds of headaches.
There are six headache patterns in it, with three herbal recipes for each one.
So there are 18 recipes altogether.
The handbook is digital, so you can open it on your phone, tablet or computer straight after buying it and keep it there for whenever you need it.
One payment. Instant access. Yours to keep.
I didn't want to make another list of “herbs for headaches”.
There are already plenty of those.
Ginger gets mentioned. Peppermint gets mentioned. Feverfew gets mentioned. Lavender gets mentioned.
The problem is that headaches don't all feel the same, so it never made much sense to me to put all the herbs into one big headache basket.
A headache where your jaw has been clenched all day and your shoulders are tight is one thing. A headache where your temples are pounding and your head feels hot is another. A dull, sluggish headache where you feel cold and foggy is another again.
That difference is what the handbook is built around.
You start with the headache itself. You look at what else is going on, find the section that sounds closest, and then choose from the three recipes in that section.
The six sections are simple.
The Tight section is for the kind that comes with a stiff neck, tight shoulders, a clenched jaw and that feeling that the headache has slowly worked its way upwards.
The Hot & Pounding section is for the one where everything feels more intense. Your temples are throbbing, your head feels hot, and there's a sense of pressure building.
The Cold & Dull section is for the opposite kind. Heavy, slow, foggy. Sometimes your hands and feet are cold too, and warmth sounds much better than anything cooling.
The Period section covers headaches that reliably appear around your cycle, with different recipes depending on whether the main picture is throbbing, cramping or cold and crampy.
The Exhausted section is for when you've been running on empty for too long and the headache seems to come with the whole worn-out feeling.
And the Sinus section is for the obvious sinus ones: pressure around the forehead, eyes or cheeks, a blocked or streaming nose, or that full feeling around the ears.
You don't need to name the headache perfectly.
You just need to notice what kind of day your head is having.
Then you go to the recipes.
- For the everyday tight headache, there's a simple Wood Betony and Common Vervain tea.
- For deeper muscular tension, there's Wood Betony, Skullcap and Passionflower.
- For the cold, dull kind, there's a very simple fresh Ginger tea.
- For the foggy version, Wood Betony and Rosemary.
- For the crampy period headache, Cramp Bark and Chamomile.
- For the exhausted one, Oatstraw and Skullcap.
- For an ordinary sinus headache, Basil.
And there are more specific formulas for the other variations inside each section.
I kept the recipes practical. You get the herbs, the amounts, how to prepare them, how much to use, what you can substitute if something is hard to find, and the cautions that matter.
So you're not left with “try some ginger” and no idea what that actually means.
It's meant to be used, not studied.
You don't need to sit down and read the whole thing before it becomes useful.
There's a Which Headache Do I Have? section near the beginning that gets you to the right chapter, and there's a Quick Reference at the back for when you've already used the handbook a few times and just want to find the recipe again.
That was important to me.
I wanted this to be something you could keep on your phone and actually reach for when your head hurts.
Not something that looks nice in a folder and gets forgotten.
You also don't need to buy every herb in the handbook.
Some of the recipes use everyday plants such as Ginger, Rosemary, Basil, Peppermint and Chamomile.
Others use more specialist herbs like Wood Betony, Vervain, Skullcap and Cramp Bark.
There's a section on buying the herbs in the UK, including the botanical names worth checking, which plant parts to buy, the difference between things like Oatstraw and Milky Oats, and what to do when you can't find something.
Sometimes there's a sensible substitute.
Sometimes the better answer is just to leave something out.
I'd rather give you a simpler recipe that still makes sense than tell you to throw in some random herb because it also appears on a headache list somewhere.
Headaches
A Green Guild Formula Handbook
Six headache patterns.
Three recipes for each one.
18 herbal recipes altogether.
The handbook is £14.97 and you can access it straight away.
Digital handbook. One payment. Keep it permanently.
One important part of the handbook is knowing when not to use it.
It's written for adults with familiar, mild or recurring headaches.
At the beginning there's a section called Before You Choose a Recipe. It covers the warning signs that need medical attention instead of a herbal tea, along with pregnancy, breastfeeding, medicines and headaches that are new, changing or getting worse.
I didn't want to hide that away in small print.
Knowing when a headache needs proper medical attention is part of using herbs sensibly.
Once you've got it, it stays with you.
The next time the same sort of headache turns up, you don't need to start searching again.
You can open the handbook, find the section that looks familiar, check the recipe and make it.
That's really what I wanted this to be.
A small, useful handbook that already has a place on your phone when you need it.
Headaches
A Green Guild Formula Handbook
£14.97
Instant access · Digital handbook · Yours to keep