I’ve been trying something new to help me process grief and overwhelm.
Quite literally.
Engaging in an activity I’ve never done before – trying a new exercise class, hiking a new trail, visiting a new location, or even smelling a new combination of essential oils – instantly boosts my mood.
Learning something new requires you to focus on the moment, which gives your overwhelmed mind a gentle, engaging focus outside of the familiar thought patterns of sadness or grief.
You see, your brain has to work harder when processing unfamiliar activities. When you live in routine, you don’t have to think so much. Doing something new helps build flexible thinking and “wakes up” your brain.
I recently tried a yoga class with weights, and even though I am familiar with both yoga and weight lifting, the new combination required me to intensely focus on the instructions, movements, and sensory details.
Trying New Things
Stepping outside your comfort zone is also thought to trigger the release of dopamine, a chemical linked to motivation and reward. This boost encourages persistence, even when tasks feel challenging.
Doing or seeing something new can stimulate the “novelty center” of the brain, which responds to new stimuli and triggers your “pleasure-and-reward” dopamine pathways. This helps you feel good and rewarded and can improve mood and motivation. This part of the brain is linked to the hippocampus and the amygdala, both of which play large roles in learning and memory.
Engaging in unfamiliar tasks distracts the mind from rumination and repetitive negative thought loops, acting as a natural reset for your mood.
Trying new things also helps you feel braver, which increases confidence and feelings of self-worth. Simply contemplating ideas and points of view that you’ve never considered before can help your brain develop more flexible ways of thinking and form stronger connections through neuroplasticity. Each new experience rewires neural pathways, increasing adaptability and preparing your brain to handle future challenges.
Smelling the Familiar
My attempts to try new things have included new hobbies, new workouts, hiking routes and travel destinations. I have also tried to order different things at my favorite restaurants and introduce different essential oil blends.
Changing small habits – like trying new foods or new smells – can be an easy and accessible way to try new things.
Scents offer a subtle, simple mood hack, especially when you might feel sad, depressed or overwhelmed. This is because your olfactory system—the part of your brain responsible for smell—is closely linked to the limbic system, which regulates emotions, memory, and behaviour.
When you inhale certain scents, they can trigger:
- Calming responses
- Uplifting effects
- Enhanced mental focus and alertness
- Feelings of emotional warmth, comfort, or nostalgia
Familiar scents can be helpful in boosting mood as they are associated with positive memories. Research on “Recall of autobiographical memories following odor vs verbal cues among adults with major depressive disorder” has shown that scent can “hack” directly into your limbic, or emotional brain, going straight to the amygdala. This is more efficient than the other 4 senses.
“Memories triggered by odors typically differ from memories triggered by words in several recall characteristics. Odor cues are consistently found to evoke memories that are more emotionally arousing and associated with stronger feelings of reliving than memories evoked by words. This characteristic is referred to as the Proust phenomenon, which ascribes odors the ability to cue highly vivid memories.”
Scents trigger more specific and vivid memories than word cues, potentially aiding in breaking negative thought cycles. This may help you break free from negative thought patterns by reinforcing positive scent-based memories.
Parasympathetic®
Trying new or unknown things can trigger your sympathetic “fight-or-flight” nervous system, as your brain may perceive the unknown as a potential threat to survival and safety.
To overcome this, you must intentionally activate your parasympathetic nervous system—the “rest-and-digest” or “social engagement” network—to feel safe enough to explore. Parasympathetic® blend naturally helps activate your parasympathetic nervous system.
Applying Parasympathetic® behind your earlobe on your mastoid bone helps stimulate your vagus nerve, which triggers your “rest and digest” parasympathetic state, alerting your body and your amygdala that the danger has passed so it can stop overreacting.
Research titled “Fear and anxiety take a double hit from vagal nerve stimulation” documents how activating your parasympathetic nervous system via vagus nerve stimulation helps to quell an overactive limbic system.
Your vagus nerve helps your autonomic nervous system communicate fear and danger information to your amygdala. In simple terms, the vagus nerve detects the release of the stress hormone epinephrine, which acts as a “something important just happened” signal that is communicated to other fear centers in the brain. Activation or inhibition of this signal “can enhance or decrease the rate of fear extinction. By enhancing fear extinction while quelling anxiety, vagal stimulation delivers a double hit against maladaptive fear. This may make vagal stimulation particularly useful in cases where severe anxiety prevents effective exposure therapy.”
What’s more, when stimulated, your vagus nerve releases the neurotransmitter Acetylcholine which calms anxiety by relaxing the smooth muscles in your artery walls, dilating the arteries, and slowing your heartbeat. It also may enhance memory consolidation and enhancement, which may help with the processing of fear memories, which helps inhibit exaggerated fear expression, like anxiety. (Read more about Acetylcholine).
Applying Parasympathetic® behind your earlobe on your mastoid bone helps you drop into the “rest and digest” parasympathetic state, alerting your body and your amygdala that the danger has passed so it can stop overreacting.
Fascia Release™
Fascia Release™ helps you try new things by calming your nervous system and eliminating the physical bracing patterns that keep your brain locked in a protective survival mode
Your fascia is highly innervated and communicates directly with the nervous system. That means that when your nervous system perceives unfamiliar situations or stress, it may increase tissue tone as protection.
When you work on fascia, everything resets naturally – it helps to release tension and reduce guarding in the connective tissue web that surrounds every muscle, organ, nerve, and bone. When you are less guarded to new experiences, it is easier to not only try new things, but let go of old ideas and feelings that may be keeping you stuck in unhealthy patterns.
Fascia lies just below the skin, so topically applying essential oils onto the skin allows for easy and immediate access to the fascia. The skin is your largest organ and is relatively permeable to fat-soluble substances like essential oils. Fascia Release™ blend is uniquely formulated to unravel deeply held tensions, constrictions, and energetic blockages. Topically apply Fascia Release™ liberally around the jaw/neck/face, the shoulders/heart, the diaphragm/lungs, the stomach/gut, low back /hips, the ankles, or anywhere that tension presents 2- 3 times daily.
Unstuck™
Being stuck in a freeze or task paralysis state stops you from trying new things because your brain treats novelty and uncertainty as biological threats rather than exciting opportunities.
As you may know, your brain registers unfamiliar situations as potential danger and builds a protective wall to keep you in a safe, known space. Similarly, when you feel mentally stuck or overloaded, your working memory lacks the extra bandwidth required to process new situations or challenges. Finally, trying something new requires baseline motivation chemicals, but a stuck or under-stimulated brain struggles to generate the initial spark needed to help you try something new.
Unstuck™ blend can help you process and release stuck energy to give you the capacity and space to try something new.
If you do not release but continue to hold unprocessed emotional responses they can become habitual patterns of tension that may keep you stuck. Even after the emotion has passed, your body may remain locked in these braced postures, restricting the flow of energy that supports health and healing.
Unstuck™ encourages gentle unraveling of karmic and generational patterns, including patterns that may have helped you survive loss, stress, trauma, grief, rejection, fear, or uncertainty. Over time, what once protected you can begin to limit you, keeping you locked in emotional loops, nervous system responses, self-sabotaging behaviors, and physical tension long after the original threat has passed.
Unstuck™ was formulated to support the gentle release of trauma, karma, subconscious imprints, and old emotional patterns that may be keeping you stuck. This expertly crafted blend of Blue Tansy, Roman Chamomile, Ylang Ylang Extra, Pressed Lime, Mandarin, Lavender, and Rose works through the olfactory pathway to help activate the limbic system, the part of the brain involved in emotion, memory, and subconscious patterning.
As you release holding patterns, you may find that you become increasingly more open to new opportunities and increased health.
Designed for inhalation or topical application. Topically apply 1–2 drops to the top of the head, base of the neck, over throat, over heart, navel, bottom of the feet or behind the ears. Use 2 to 3 times daily, especially during emotional processing, meditation, journaling, or somatic practice.
Limbic Reset®
Your limbic system prioritizes immediate survival over potential growth, treating the unknown as an inherent threat. For this reason, it may prevent you from trying new things.
When your limbic system perceives a threat, it can bypass your prefrontal cortex—the rational part of your brain responsible for logic and decision-making. This “limbic hijack” causes you to reject new opportunities based on raw emotion before you can logically evaluate their benefits.
As you may know, your amygdala scans your environment for danger. Because it cannot distinguish between physical peril and social discomfort, it flags unfamiliar situations as dangerous. When facing a new experience, your amygdala triggers a stress response which floods your body with stress hormones – like cortisol and adrenaline – that make you feel anxious and want to retreat.
Similarly, your hippocampus stores and indexes your memories. When you consider a new activity, the hippocampus recalls past failures. It convinces you that the current risk outweighs the potential reward.
Here is where smell plays a powerful role due to the unique neuroanatomy of olfactory processing in the brain.
Your olfactory bulb is responsible for processing odor information critical for your assessment of your environment. The olfactory bulb directly projects to several structures in the brain implicated in memory and emotion, including your amygdala and hippocampus, allowing olfactory information to enter the limbic system directly (instead of relayed through the thalamus like other sensory information). It has been suggested that the efficacy of odor cues for retrieving rich memories is due in part to the link between arousal and affective reactions mediated by the amygdala.
Limbic Reset can be topically applied over Emotional Points located on the forehead (above the eyes and on the temples), an emotional release point located at the base of the skull at the back of the neck, on the bottom of the feet, and especially on the amygdala reflex point on the big toe. You can also apply over Filter points located on both sides of the back of the skull which are used to filter energies that could pull you back into the old pattern.
My most exciting discovery is different acupressure points that assist in releasing emotional patterns.
- Emotional Points located above the eyes on the forehead. You can also lay your hand over your forehead. I write more about the forehead points for healing emotional trauma HERE.
- Release point is located at the spinal cord at the base of the skull
- Filter points are located on both sides of the back of the skull. They are used to filter energies that could pull you back into the old pattern.
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