When it comes to stress relief, one of the easiest ways to arm yourself against stress (distress), anxiety and tension is to incorporate essential oils into your daily routine.
Why essential oils for stress relief?
Aromatherapy is the art and science of utilizing essential oils to balance, harmonize and promote health and vitality in the mind, body and spirit.
Essential oils are the naturally extracted aromatic essences of plants. These oils are distracted by one of two key methods- distillation and expression. Depending on the botanical, the essential oil can be stored within the leaves, flowers, rinds, seeds or roots.
So, a bit of a scientific explanation here before I give some oil recommendations.
The fragrance of an essential oil can directly affect your emotional state. When a fragrance is inhaled, odor molecules from the essential oil journey up the nose and into olfactory membranes where they secure themselves to the receptor cells lining a membrane called the olfactory epithelium.
Your olfactory membranes contain roughly 800 million nerve endings that directly receive the vaporized oil particles and carry them along nerve fibers and connect them with secondary neurons in the olfactory bulb.
When stimulated by the odor molecules from essential oils, your nerve cells trigger enzyme activity and electrical impulses via nerve pathways to the limbic system. Your limbic system controls activities such as sleep, hunger, heart rate, blood pressure, hormonal balance, breathing and stress level. Odor molecules also connect with your hypothalamus which controls the endocrine and nervous systems.
So in short, essential oils have a profound physiological and psychological effect on our moods and emotions and the way we perceive and deal with stress.
Now that we’ve made it through all of that, here are some amazing essential oils to trigger stress relief-
essential oils for stress relief:
Lavender Essential Oil
Ylang-ylang Essential Oil
Bergamot Essential Oil
Rose Essential Oil
Chamomile Essential Oil
Vetiver Essential Oil
Frankincense Essential Oil
Fennel Essential Oil
Frankincense Essential Oil
The above listed oils can be diffused, combined with lotions and carrier oils for direct skin application, added to dryer balls to provide fragrance to clothes, dropped into drawers, combined with water in a water bottle and sprayed as linen or room fragrance.
interested in learning more about stress relief?
Join me on November 24, 2019 when I present a virtual workshop called The Art of (dis)Stress Relief!
You can join in from anywhere in the world and will get some grounding and pacifying tools for heading into this holiday season with ease.
Register before 11/15 to receive a 15% discount.
*Registration link is on my homepage :) or you can reply and I’ll get in touch with you!
For more DIY natural skin care ideas, check out my latest book Natural Beauty from the Outside In, where you’ll find 70 Ayurveda inspired hair and skin care recipes.