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I struggle with chronic anxiety.

And conventional anxiety management strategies – like pharmaceutical drugs – not only do not seem to help, but seem to make me feel worse or cause other issues.

So for years, I have crash test dummied myself trying different natural tools – including several Vibrant Blue Oils blends – that help me function on a daily basis.  They work incredibly well for normal stresses and anxiety triggers.

This week is not normal.  Sunday marks the 5 year anniversary of my 12 year old son Max’s death in a car accident.  Anniversaries are always tricky for me. My body not only keeps score, as Bessel van der Kolk explained in his amazing book, it seems track specific dates even when my brain forgets.  The 27^th of the month is always a tough day – Max passed away on August 27, 2018.  Then 6 months later to the day, my father passed away on March 27, 2019.  There are days when my daughter or I just don’t feel right and our brains are not even registering why.  Then we look at the calendar and notice it is the 27^th of the month and it all makes sense.

Over the years, I have created a super charge anxiety support strategy for those heavy emotional bleeding days where the intensity of my anxiety feels exceptionally paralyzing.   On those days, I have learned to focus not only on calming my (1) vagus nerve to activate my calming parasympathetic nervous system, (2) my adrenal glands to calm anxiety provoking hormones like cortisol, but also to travel upstream to my (3) limbic system to help my limbic system and particularly my amygdala, which I believe is ground zero for triggering maladaptive anxiety responses.

 

What is Your Amygdala?

Your amygdala is a tiny collection of cells at the base of the brain – frequently referred to as the emotional center of the brain – that identifies and assesses potential threats.

It monitors incoming signals from your 5 senses and initiates the brain processes that create both fear and anxiety. It has long been known that animals without amygdala lack appropriate fear responses. For example, rats who had their amygdala removed cuddled up with and showed no fear in the presence of cats — one of their natural predators.

Research on Amygdala Activity, Fear, and Anxiety: Modulation by Stress details how the amygdala can either modulate or when maladaptive, over-activate your fear, and resulting anxiety, response.

Here’s how the amygdala creates anxiety. When your amygdala senses potential danger or detects a threat in the environment, it connects to your prefrontal cortex to help interpret and assess and respond to the potential threat.

If your amygdala is aggressively firing danger detection signals and your prefrontal cortex is under-functioning and not properly inhibiting those fears, it can present as anxiety or panic attacks, both of which  keeps you on alert to potential or imminent danger.   In essence, when your survival “fight or flight” responses are not inhibited, you don’t feel safe and you feel chronically anxious.  This is known as an “amygdala hijack”, a state of chronic anxiety and overwhelm where every potential threat illicits an emotional response.

For example, if you are hiking in the woods and think you see a snake on the ground, your prefrontal cortex assesses the situation before your amygdala reacts.  If your prefrontal cortex determines that the snake is actually a stick, your amygdala calms down and you don’t over react.  If your amygdala  is hijacked, you will assume that every stick is a snake and constantly over-react to even minor threats.

This exaggerated amygdala reactivity can present as anxiety, impulsive aggression, personality disorders and contribute to chronic health conditions like chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia or multi-chemical sensitivity which are often associated with an amygdala hijack, a maladaptive response to stress. To be more specific, your flight or fight response is healthy and adaptive as it can help you prepare to meet and respond in the face of danger. Sadly, when the flight or fight response persists in the absence of danger it becomes maladaptive, contributing to chronic anxiety.  In other words, anxiety is a persistent feeling of being at risk when there is no imminent danger. Amygdala hijack contributes to persistent anxiety.

 

How Does the Amygdala Contribute to Anxiety?

When your amygdala senses potential danger, it sends a signal to another part of the brain called your hypothalamus.  The hypothalamus, in turn, sends a signal through the pituitary gland to the adrenal glands which then secrete stress hormones — like adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol — to trigger a stress response.  The bodily changes that are generated by adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol include increased heart rate and rapid breathing along with a tunnel vision hyper focus on the danger at hand, which you may experience as anxiety related worry or fear.  It also shuts down access to the inhibitory part of your brain – your prefrontal cortex.

To break it down even further, when you are overwhelmed with actual or perceived stressors:

1. Your amygdala– a primitive part of your brain that processes emotional reactions and memories related to threats – signals danger.
2. Your hypothalamus signals your endocrine system (pituitary and adrenal glands) and your autonomic nervous system to mount a physical response to danger.
3. Your “fight-or-flight” sympathetic nervous system is activated, preparing your body to respond to a threat.
4. Hormones are released, including cortisol, norepinephrine, endogenous opioids, and oxytocin.
5. Norepinephrine floods your prefrontal cortex, turning off your ability to access logical reasoning, rational decision-making and higher-level regulation of thoughts and emotions.
6. As the brain prioritizes “fight or flight” survival and routes blood flow toward the arms and limbs to support survival, blood drains from the prefrontal cortex, diminishing your ability to think clearly, focus on tasks, or problem solve as the reptilian brain focuses on survival and escape.
7. As your prefrontal cortex holds circuitry that can inhibit amygdala-driven anxiety, helping you maintain emotional balance.  Unfortunately, when your amygdala kicks into high gear (known as amygdala hijack), your prefrontal cortex goes offline, interfering with your ability to calm chronic anxiety and fear.

The key to unraveling this anxiety cascade is to calm your amygdala and activate your prefrontal cortex so you can more clearly assess the potential threat, determine whether or not it is truly a danger and respond logically and reasonably.

Strong emotions like fear, anger or overwhelm causes your amygdala to override (or hijack) your logical brain and trigger the full fight-or-fight response. As a result, we overreact or under-react and spiral into anxiety and overwhelm.

 

Your sense of smell has direct access to the amygdala in the limbic lobe of the brain which is physically located near the olfactory bulb.

In fact, on a physical level, only two synapses separate your amygdala from your olfactory nerve.  No other sensory system has this kind of direct and intense contact with the neural substrates of your brain’s emotional control center, also known as your limbic system.  Your other four senses, including sound, sight, taste and touch must travel to other regions of the brain first, before reaching your limbic system.

Smell travels through your olfactory system to your hypothalamus a region of your brain that acts as your hormonal control center, by way of your amygdala in your limbic system.  When you smell an essential oil for the hypothalamus, it stimulates your hypothalamus to release hormones that trigger a rapid emotional response, directly impacting how you feel and how you function.

Your brain’s rapid response to smell based stimuli like essential oils is best explained by research which estimates your sense of smell to be 10,000 times more acute than your other senses. Once registered, scent stimuli travel more quickly to the brain than do either sight or sound.

Shifting your focus by engaging your senses, such as your sense of smell, also helps distract you out of an internal state of distress, thereby lessening its intensity and the intensity of your responses to others.  This allows you to feel safe and access more possibilities and options.

Your sense of smell is also tied to you breathing.  Deep inhalations and exhalations both help you focus on your breathing, taking time to slowly inhale and exhale – while inhaling essential oils – can help you connect to your mind and body to remind you that you are safe, and not needing to respond to danger.

Research on “Mindful attention to breath regulates emotions via increased amygdala-prefrontal cortex connectivity” found that mindful breathing techniques help modulate the impact of your amygdala on your prefrontal cortex so that your ability to respond in a calm and thoughtful way is better integrated during emotional stressful situations.

The research found that mindful breathing “down-regulates activation in the amygdala and increases its integration with prefrontal regions”, rendering it effective in “regulating aversive emotions.”

Essential oils can be powerful tools to help focus attention on inhalation and mindful breathing.

 

3 Essential Oils for the Amygdala

Calming your amygdala’s hair-trigger reaction helps to calm and reduce emotional outbursts.  This begins by helping you feel safe.

1. Parasympathetic™

Your sympathetic “fight or flight” state turns on when survival and safety are threatened.

After a danger or perceived risk passes, you should ideally shift out of sympathetic “fight or flight” and restore your sense of safety which allows your body to recover and heal after a demanding physiological and psychological event.

When we are stuck in a cycle of sympathetic dominance – and not activating your parasympathetic nervous system –  your body’s alert mechanism for survival remains on high and you can become trapped in a perception that you are not safe, which lays the groundwork for anxiety.

When you are able to shift out of the high alert state into a mental and emotional space of safety, your mind can relax, allowing you to calm your emotional state, expand your focus and clam anxiety.

You might think of the parasympathetic response as the brakes on the sympathetic response, which in turn puts the brakes on anxiety. The sympathetic system is employed in states of fear. The parasympathetic system is triggered by a sense of safety.

The parasympathetic system restores a sense of safety and balance which calms the brain and the body by activating your parasympathetic nervous system helps to inhibit anxiety, according to research which found that – when stimulated, your vagus nerve releases anti-anxiety chemicals that contribute to faster recovery time from illness, injury, stress, and emotional trauma.

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 anxiety and fear.

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).

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.”

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 over reacting.

 

2. Hypothalamus™

While the amygdala is the emotion center of the brain, the hypothalamus is charge of your ability to change your emotional response and emotional reactivity.  Supporting your hypothalamus can often help fix downstream hormonal and endocrine issues that impact your emotional reactivity, especially related to anxiety.  The direct pathway from the olfactory system to the hypothalamus can also be used to help return your hypothalamus to balance.

Essential oils may help balance the various feedback loops to regulate the production of cortisol, including the hypothalamus and the adrenal glands – part of the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis – to ensure that they are not chronically activated or dysfunctioning which can lead to chronically elevated cortisol levels.

In response to stress, your hypothalamus triggers your adrenal glands to release the stress hormone cortisol until your hormones reach the levels that your body needs, and then a series of chemical reactions known as the negative feedback loop begins to switch them off.  In other words, when the hypothalamus receives the signal that cortisol levels in the body are sufficient, it signals the adrenals to stop releasing cortisol.  So long as the hypothalamus is able to correctly send and receive signals, cortisol levels in the body should return to balance.

Hypothalamus™ blend contains a proprietary blend of organic essential oils, including  Patchouli and Frankincense, which are high in sesquiterpenes.  Research shows that sesquiterpenes are able to cross the blood-brain barrier and have been found to increase oxygen around receptor sites near the hypothalamus because they are so small they are capable of penetrating deeply into your brain and carrying oxygen molecules into your brain tissue to help your brain heal. Sesquiterpenes also specifically have an effect on our emotional center in the hypothalamus, helping us remain calm and balanced.

To help return the hypothalamus and the amygdala to the balance, apply 1 drop of Hypothalamus™ to the forehead right above the third eye (right above the nose between eyebrows and hair line) up to 6 times daily.

 

3. Adrenal™

Anxiety triggers the release of stress hormones to fight or flee and with it, your need for energy in the form of blood sugar or glucose.  This emergency fuel is released from your adrenal glands in the form of stress hormones such as cortisol.

Your adrenals are small, triangular-shaped glands secrete cortisol to regulate energy production and storage, control blood sugar, immune function, heart rate, muscle tone, and other processes that enable you to rapidly respond to stress.  The health and resilience of the adrenals (along with the hypothalamus and hippocampus) help to determine our tolerance to stress.

Balancing the adrenal glands with Adrenal™ can help calm these hormones and with them the anxiety symptoms   More specifically, essential oils can help lower cortisol levels. Research consistently finds that inhalation of essential oils, like the study which looks at Lavender and Rosemary, that essential oils decrease cortisol levels. A similar study found that participants who inhaled essential oils demonstrated considerably reduced salivary cortisol concentrations than those who did not.  More specifically, in the 4-week study, researchers found that anxious and stressed hypertensive patients who inhaled essential oil blends experienced “considerably reduced serum cortisol and anxiety levels compared to the control and placebo groups.”

Adaptogen herbs help naturally lower high cortisol levels in several key ways. Similarly to adaptogen herbs, essential oils are also helpful for fighting stress and balancing hormones. Essential oils, including lavender, myrrh, frankincense and bergamot, contain potent, active ingredients that have been shown to naturally lower cortisol, reduce inflammation, improve immunity, and help with sleep and digestive functions.

Inhaling essential oils is thought to help improve your body’s stress response by toning down the activity of your sympathetic nervous system and increasing the activity of your parasympathetic nervous system.  It is believed that the linalool and linalyl acetate naturally present in lavender may act as a mild sedative  and stimulate the participants’ parasympathetic nervous system.

To help keep your adrenals balanced and not over releasing cortisol, apply 1- 2 drops of the Adrenal™ on the adrenal glands (lower mid-back, one fist above the 12th rib on each side) upon waking, before bed and throughout the day as needed.  You can find more information on Adrenal™ blend here.

Smelling Adrenal™ though the left nostril or applying to the adrenal glands (on the lower mid-back, one fist above the 12th rib on each side). Dilute to start or if any redness occurs.

 

Featured Blends:

Ready to get started? Click the links below to order today:

 

References:

 

I never really learned to take a compliment.  In fact, it makes me super uncomfortable.

And I have become the queen of deflection – often downplaying or diminishing my positive qualities and achievements and never really taking them in and allowing myself to feel and receive love, appreciation or gratitude from others.

It’s not an ideal way to go through life – this self-limiting approach to love and support – especially as I receive so many gracious, kind and heartfelt emails every day.

It was one of these very thoughtful, gracious emails that prompted me to look at this issue.  Karen took the time to share “I would like to personally send you a big thank you for being YOU when you share your information. It is so heart warmingly received by me. No matter how bad my day seems to be I know I can open one of your emails and truly know there is hope and better things to come I just have to stay present. Thank you for keeping it real.”

I shared the message with my boyfriend who echoed the kind sentiment and I immediately started deflecting and downplaying which he pointed out to me in a very kind and thoughtful way.  He thoughtfully shared his observation on how I deflect love and praise, noting that when someone compliments me or acknowledges an achievement, I downplay or diminish it, even when it is true and merited.

Deflection Strategies

Deflection is a common psychological defense mechanism used to evade difficult conversations or uncomfortable situations.  It is often used to redirect negative focus, blame, or criticism away from yourself to help you avoid uncomfortable feelings, which in my case seem to include praise, gratitude and love.

Deflection strategies can include anything that redirects the conversation away from the uncomfortable topic – like compliments – to something less emotionally charged. It can also be used to redirect other uncomfortable topics or issues that might involve feelings of shame or guilt.  Some common deflection strategies include:

• Changing the subject
• Asking a question (that takes the conversation in a different direction)
• Making a joke
• Diminishing the compliment (as I often do by claiming “oh it was nothing”
• Passing off the credit by claiming I couldn’t have done it without other people (which is true – my team is AMAZING!)
• Playing compliment ping-pong and praising the praiser
• Downplaying, criticizing or diminishing myself (that voice in my head that I am always mindfully resetting)

Why You Deflect Praise?

I always try to understand why I am defaulting to a behavior to help unpack and change the behavior.

In trying to understand why I deflect compliments and praise, the obvious starting point was negative self-image and low self-esteem.  I definitely have a strong inner critic and struggle with perfectionist tendencies like not feeling “good enough” or worthy of kind words and actions.

I have also noticed that unexpected compliments and “positive surprises” seem to trigger my fight, flight, freeze response in the same way as unexpected danger or “negative surprises”.  In other words, both positive and negative surprises can be intense emotional experiences that can feel uncomfortable and destabilizing, triggering your fight, flight or freeze response.  In other words, an unexpected compliment may make you feel unsafe and you may want to shut it down so you can restore your sense of predictability and safety.

Deflecting praise may be an unconscious act of self-protection that allows you to regain control in what feels like an emotionally vulnerable situation.

 

Essential oils can be used to help calm the surprise and resulting fight, flight freeze response from unexpected positive surprises, like kind words and actions.  Essential oils can also be used to support the tissues around the heart and the emotional heart to receive the love and the praise.

In other words, essential oils can help you thaw your unconscious self-protection mechanisms that are interfering with your ability to receive love, support, praise and positive connection.

Essential oils are living energy with electrical properties, which are both subject to our thoughts and feelings and able to positively impact your thoughts and feelings so that you may take in the kind words and gratitude of others.

Their vibrations resonate with your organ tissues, like the heart,  and regions of the brain in helpful ways, according to your wishes and mental directions. They also work in the limbic systems to help clear negative feelings and blocked emotions, thus eliminating the root causes of many self-limiting beliefs.

In his book “The Power of Prayer on Plants”, Researcher Franklin Loehr discovered that thoughts change the physical properties of the water by altering the bonding angles between oxygen and hydrogen atoms.  Like water and plants, research shows that essential oils also respond to words, thoughts, and prayer and even amplify intent to move molecules of oils to where they can best serve to heal the body.  Just as your thoughts can amplify the effectiveness of the oils, essential oils can be used to amplify your intent on many levels, including the intent to receive more love or allow yourself to experience the positive feelings associated with praise and gratitude, both for yourself and others.

 

Parasympathetic™  to thaw the Freeze Response

Parasympathetic™ is critical in recovering from a Freeze Response.  It calms the nervous system and helps us be present to the moment, to both your own body and to others.

As you may know, the freeze response can trigger a disassociation so that you don’t feel pain, which includes a disconnection to your sense of smell.  Smelling essential oils, like Parasympathetic™, can help thaw the freeze response and restore your ability to sense your environment and feel safe in it.  This sense of embodiment and safety may help allow you to better receive praise and love.   Apply Parasympathetic™ over the vagus nerve (behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone) to activate the vagus nerve.  This helps  discharge energy and shift out of the freeze state into the healing parasympathetic.

Fascia Release™ to support the tissues around the heart

The issues are in the tissues, and before you can begin to unpack your blocked or stuck heart energy, you need to open up the space around your physical heart with the Fascia Release™ blend.

When you experience surprise or engage your freeze response, part of you is resistance, which triggers you to physically contract, constrict, or pull away from a physical danger, a negative thought or an emotional aversion.  In the process, you constrict and physically guard your heart in preparation for attack.  When you do this, you internalize the fear without release or recovery.  In short, energy doesn’t flow and your body constricts – which locks the stress in your body.

Topically applying Fascia Release™ over the physical heart – with focused application and both above on the clavicle bones in sweeping outward motions and in a gentle vertical caress from your throat and the sides of your neck down over and below the heart – opens the space to allow energy and emotions to flow down and out of your system.  You can also apply over the back of your heart.

Heart™ to receive the love and the praise

Heart™ balances the heart to enhance compassion and support, integrate and reset all the systems of the body, including supporting feelings of receptivity to love and praise.

Your heart integrates and balances your physical, emotional, and mental bodies, providing blood to every cell and every organ.  It also serves as a complex information processing center, influencing brain function, the nervous system, hormonal system and most of the body’s major organs.  When any part of your body isn’t functioning at an optimal level, your heart has to work harder.  For example, when your body is in a state of stress, it needs more oxygen which increases your heart rate.  Your heart is our body’s reset button, but a state of constant stress can fatigue the heart and compromise our ability to reset, leading to inflammation, infections, toxicity and heart disease.

By returning your heart to balance, you support the cardiovascular and circulatory system; regenerate the structure of your heart and help reset the homeostatic mechanism for your entire body. Heart™ is formulated with powerful calming oils, including Jasmine, an oil found to be as calming as the anti-anxiety drug valium, according to a 2010 study.  Jasmine also has a mildly sedative and calming effect allowing it to alleviate anxious thoughts, relieve stress and ease depression.  Jasmine oil actually stimulates the brain, helping to uplift the mood, and promoting feelings of self-confidence and optimism.

Apply Heart™ over your heart (left side of chest) to balance the heart and support, integrate and reset all the systems of the body, including mental clarity, physical health and emotional balance. Heart™ blend also supports feelings of open-heartedness, expansiveness, receptivity while mitigating loneliness, sadness and grief.

As you take a deep breath and breathe in Heart™, try to breathe in the deep sense of worthiness and allow yourself to receive love and praise.  As you slowly exhale, allow your breath to carry out any patterns of low self-worth or self-limiting beliefs.

 

Featured Blends:

Ready to get started? Click the links below to order today:

 

Resources:

 

It’s been a rough week.

Between the devastating fires in Maui which has impacted so many friends and loved ones, the fact my daughter flies back to college today and that next week marks the five-year anniversary of Max’s death which feels oddly more intense.

Max was 12 years old when he was killed. Today he would have been 17 and starting his senior year of high school. While I have done the best I can to process my grief over the loss of my adorable 12 year old, I still feel occasionally blind sighted by the grief over the missed milestones – the dances he will never attend, the college applications he will never write, the prom and graduation he will never attend. I find myself already bracing for the impact of his friends social media posts for these milestone events.

And in my effort to continually crash test dummy myself, I decided to lean into my sadness and heartbreak to see what oils might help lighten the intensity.  

Essential Oils for Heartbreak

Sadness and heartbreak are natural responses to the loss of something or someone to which you have formed a bond or an attachment – like the loss of my son, my daughter leaving and the devastation of an entire town in Maui.

Essential oils can help you process and shift feelings of heartbreak, along with the feelings of sadness, loss, grief, overwhelm and disempowerment often associated with grief.

This has to do, in part, with your sense of smell.

You have a direct link between your sense of smell and the areas of the brain responsible for moderating your emotions and behaviors.  When you inhale essential oils, airborne substances stimulate receptor cells in the roof of the nasal cavities. The olfactory receptors carry signals to the olfactory bulb in the brain. The information is then sent to the areas of your brain responsible for memory, behavior, and emotion.

Your limbic system is the emotional center of your brain that controls your hormones and influences your emotions and your mood. The limbic system plays a role in controlling several unconscious physiological functions that influence your emotions, like breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure.

On a physical level, only two synapses separate your amygdala from your olfactory nerve. No other sensory system has this kind of direct and intense contact with the neural substrates of your brain’s emotional control center. Your other four senses, including sound, sight, taste, and touch must travel to other regions of the brain first, before reaching your limbic system.

This makes essential oils an incredibly powerful tool for calming the intensity of some of the emotions that correlate with heartbreak such as sadness, fear and anger.

By triggering specific memories or emotions, the aroma from an essential oil may help release heartache, improve your mood and promote relaxation.  In fact, research suggests that essential oils may help in the treatment of depression, which is one of several emotions that people tend to experience when dealing with heartbreak.

Oils allow you to gently release these intense emotions, much like you would slowly and carefully unscrew the top of a carbonated beverage to gently release excess carbonation and avoid an explosion.

 

 My Favorite Essential Oils for Heartbreak

Particular parts of a plant and how they can help in the grieving or transitioning period.

Some of my favorite blends below can be used to help gently release and support heartbreak and sadness.

Heart™

Heart™ blend was formulated to balance the heart to support, integrate and reset all the systems of the body, including mental clarity, physical health and emotional balance. The heart is our body’s reset button.  By applying Vibrant Blue Oils Heart blend over the heart, it helps return the heart to balance, and strengthen our ability to process difficult emotions like heartbreak, sadness and grief.

More specifically, essential oils can be used to remove emotional toxins, along with physical toxins, to help support your emotional release.  The high frequency of the essential oils may help to open the subconscious doors and unlock the barriers that stop us from releasing our traumas. The oils oxygenate the cells and bring its blockages to the surface, ready to be released.

Since smell travels directly to the emotional control center in the limbic system, inhaling essential oils releases trapped emotional patterns, including patterns of heartache. Essential oils – with their unique molecular structure – can directly stimulate the limbic lobe and the amygdala where emotional trauma is stored, processed and released.

Each essential oil possesses multiple properties that can support emotional processing and release. The oils in the Heart™ blend in particular may help to balance your heart energy to promote feelings of safety that allow your subconscious mind to release negative stored memories and emotions and replace them with positive beliefs.

Heart™ balances the heart to enhance compassion and support, integrate and reset all the systems of the body, including supporting feelings of open-heartedness, expansiveness, receptivity while mitigating loneliness, sadness and grief.

The heart integrates and balances the physical, emotional, and mental body, providing blood to every cell and every organ.  It also serves as a complex information processing center, influencing brain function, the nervous system, hormonal system and most of the body’s major organs.

The heart is our body’s reset button, but a state of constant stress can fatigue the heart and compromise our ability to reset, leading to inflammation, infections, toxicity and heart disease.  By returning the heart to balance, we support the cardiovascular and circulatory system, regenerate the structure of the heart and helping to reset the homeostatic mechanism for the entire body.

Heart™ blend contains a proprietary blend of organic and/or wild crafted essential oils that helps you show love to others and yourself. Research has shown that sweet smells, like those found in the Heart™ blend,  have been shown to reduce pain by activating the opioid receptors in the brain.

To release the trapped emotions or correct energetic imbalance, you can use the Emotion Code to identify trapped emotions, then Heart™ blend over the heart to clear the trapped emotions from your body.

READ THIS NEXT: Heart Centering with Essential Oils

 

Parasympathetic™

Heartbreak may be triggered by traumatic or stressful events, like the death of a loved one, an accident or near miss accident, exposure to a traumatic event  (like a natural disaster) , a frightening medical diagnosis or an unexpected financial or romantic loss.

These stressful events trigger a stress response in your body, throwing you into the fight-or-flight state of the nervous system.  Your body responds to any threat to survival, including unexpected or alarming news, by dropping into the “emergency” sympathetic state of the nervous system to cope with the change in circumstances and physiologically prepare you to fight or flee.  Your heart rate, blood pressure and respiratory rate increase and your blood flow is routed away from your organs of digestion toward muscles in the arms and legs in preparation for flight.

Whenever you feel unsafe, either physically or emotionally, your nervous system kicks into this high gear or sympathetic State, activating the survival brain either sending you into “fight or flight” or “freeze” shut down avoidance strategies.  To help your body safely process heartbreak, you can shift your nervous system into the safety Parasympathetic branch of the nervous system where your heart and respiratory rate can return to normal.

Parasympathetic™ blend, which contains a combination of clove and lime, can help stimulate your vagus nerve to activate your parasympathetic nervous system and gently release heartbreak.

Citrus Oils, like Lime, are useful when you need to inject an uplifting and refreshing approach to life and help heal a dark and heavy feeling.  Lime is known to help you ‘let go’ and release anxious feelings and heartbreak.

The clove oil in the blend also supports your ability to change your circumstances and let go of victim mentality and patterns of self-betrayal by restoring a sense of self and instilling boundaries and the strength to stand up for your needs.  For intensely stressful situations, we recommend applying it at the base of the skull and over the heart.

Dabbing a drop of Parasympathetic™ blend behind my earlobe ALWAYS lifts me up.  I think of it as my personal reset button.

When you are able to calm down and drop into the parasympathetic state, you can better process and release heartbreak. 

The more you activate your parasympathetic nervous system, the more your body can process through the shock.   A drop of Parasympathetic™ oil placed on the vagus nerve (behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone) can help you calm your nervous system and drop into a more grounded, parasympathetic place. 

 

Lung Support™ 

 

Lung Support™ was designed to help overcome grief and let go of negative experiences, including heartbreak.

Feelings of grief, bereavement, regret, loss and remorse are often associated with the lungs.  The lungs are sponge-like organs located near the backbone on either side of the heart. They function as a fundamental source of life energy –transporting oxygen from the atmosphere into the capillaries so they can oxygenate blood – as well as an important channel of elimination – releasing carbon dioxide from the bloodstream into the atmosphere.

Grief can obstruct ability of the lungs to accept and relinquish, impeding their function of “taking in” and “letting go”.  Grief that remains unresolved can become chronic and create disharmony in the lungs, weakening the lung’s function of circulating oxygen around the body.  When lung function is impaired, it leads to shortness of breath, fatigue and feelings of melancholy, like that experienced with grief.  Sadly, many chronic respiratory diseases and conditions develop after a major loss or bereavement.

Lung contains flower oils, like Rose, which can be powerful when you need to get out of a dark place.  Rose oil is also known to bring a feeling of love, create a sense of well-being and release past hurts, like grief.  Its benefits were documented in studies that found breathing and blood pressure relaxed after Rose oil was applied to the skin. 

Lung Support™ blend works best when topically applied over the heart, lungs or around the ears.  It can also be deeply inhaled and allowing yourself to gently release intense emotions with your exhale as a powerful strategy to allow you to micro-dose emotional release.

READ THIS NEXT: Essential Oils for Grief

 

Featured Oils:

Ready to get started? Click the links below to order today:

 

References:

 

About The Author

Jodi Sternoff Cohen is the founder of Vibrant Blue Oils. An author, speaker, nutritional therapist, and a leading international authority on essential oils, Jodi has helped over 50,000 individuals support their health with essential oils.