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Jodi Cohen: Hello and welcome to Essential Alchemy. Alchemy is defined as the power or process that changes or transforms something in a mysterious or impressive way. My hope is that the information in this podcast can help you transform your mood, energy, physical health, or even some dots to help you shift your mental or emotional state. I’m your host, Jodi Cohen, a bestselling author, award-winning journalist, functional practitioner, lifelong learner, and founder of Vibrant Blue Oils, a company that sells proprietary blends of high-quality, organic, or wildcrafted essential oil remedies designed to help you return to your ideal mental, physical, and emotional state. You can find out more about me and my company at vibrantblueoils.com. And with that, let’s get started with today’s episode.

Hi, I’m Jodi Cohen and I am your host, and I’m super excited to bring you, my dear friend, Tanya Dalton, who is going to blow your mind with her knowledge about time management, calming, overwhelm, really actionable, no rocket science tips, no rocket Science is her podcast. And Tanya is a bestselling author, motivational speaker, nationally recognized productivity expert who you might’ve seen on the Today Show. She empowers executives and entrepreneurs to embrace intentional leadership. Welcome.

Tanya Dalton: Season 4, Episode 13: Productivity Hacks with Tanya Dalton Jodi Cohen: And I forgot to mention your book. You want to hold it up from the background?

Tanya Dalton: Sure. I’ve got two books, Joy of Missing Out Back here. I’ll grab it real quick. The joy of Missing Out is my first book, and yes, that picture I think says it. All right. That’s how we all feel; we’re trying to do everything. Yes, it really is about finding more joy in our daily life. I think there’s a lot of happiness, a lot of joy in the cracks and crevices of everyday life, but we’re so busy that we’re missing it, right? So it’s actively choosing to miss out on the things you don’t really want to do. My second book is on Purpose. So on Purpose, the Busy Woman’s Guide to an Extraordinary Life of Meaning and Success. And so the joy of missing Out is really about how you find more Joy. What does that look like? How do you create days that feel meaningful? And then on purpose, how do you create that vision of where you want to go? And then what goals do you set? How do you figure out what you want to do? So they kind of go together, but they also can be read separately.

Jodi Cohen: Well, and it really speaks to me. I feel like I wasted so many years when my kids were little like the hamster on the wheel. It was like task, task, task, sleep, rinse, repeat. And in hindsight like, oh my God, wow, did that go quickly? And I wish I had really leaned in and enjoyed it more. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Tanya Dalton: Yeah, I think there’s that whole saying that the days are long, but the years are short. And I think people say that to you when you’re pregnant and when your kids are little and you’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I just want to shower. I just want to be able to go to the bathroom by myself without anyone else in the room. And then one day you find yourself being able to go to the bathroom alone and you’re like, wait, where is everybody? Where your house is clean, like meticulously clean. You’re like kind of miss the mess.

It’s funny, the things that we wish for we eventually get, and then we kind of want to go back and revisit what we missed. And I think that’s the thing is we get so caught up in all the things that we think we’re supposed to do or should do that we’re not really taking the time to soak in the meaning to soak in the moment and be present fully. And for me, that’s really one of the things I like to talk to people about. I call my substack not rocket science because a lot of what I teach is not rocket science. It’s not difficult. It’s really easy to implement, and simple to manage, but monumental in the impact it makes on your daily life. And it is small things. One of the things I talk about in the joy of missing out is this concept of million-dollar minutes.

I call them million-dollar minutes because they’re these little slips of time in our day that if they were gone tomorrow, I know I would pay a million dollars to get them back. So it’s the little tiny things. Like for me, one of my million-dollar minutes is a lot of times I like to get up early, I like to write. And so I get up early in the morning and I write, and I’m doing a couple of things for myself. I make sure the kids are up and moving, and then I go and slip back into bed, which seems kind of funny, but I slide back into bed next to my husband because he’s just waking up and we spend 10 minutes lying side by side in bed talking about what we dreamed about the night before or what we have going on in the day.

And to me, those 10 minutes are worth a million dollars or more, quite frankly. So it’s really 10 minutes of intention with my marriage. And so it’s when you start to recognize that these million dollar minutes are scattered throughout your day, it’s when Kay comes home from school, she’s 17, she’s my youngest right now, she’s 17. So she comes home and if she says, Hey mom, lemme give you a little tea. Lemme tell you what’s going on at school. I’m like, stop the presses. I don’t care what I’m doing. I need to give you my full attention because I know that this is really valuable, even if it’s people I don’t even know what she’s talking about or what’s going on. It’s me being attentive to her and receiving and giving her love. So it’s these tiny moments, and that’s what I think really stretches the time.

Tanya Dalton: I think so often we feel like we don’t have the time, and the truth is we all have the same 24 hours. You, me, Beyonce, we all have 24 of all the inequities in our world. Time is the one thing that is completely doled out evenly to every single one of us. It’s all about how you choose to spend your time. So understanding and acknowledging the choices that we’re making that I’m choosing to stop what I’m doing, to listen to my daughter, or I’m choosing to spend 10 minutes to focus with intention on my marriage, that time is not just going to happen. It’s not going to like, oh, fall in my lap. I have to create that time. I have to carve it out and really prioritize it. And if I don’t, it’ll slip by. So that’s one of the things. It’s like those little things, right?

Jodi Cohen: It really is. Those are the two. I do the exact same thing with the guy I’m dating and with my daughter. Every time she calls, I just drop it. But I’m curious. I went through a process of really prioritizing what I value. How do I, and I actually run everything through that filter of if I’m

making a decision, how does it line up with my values? I’m curious how you kind of coach people through this.

Tanya Dalton: Yeah, so I do the same thing. I use what I call the North Star, which is our mission, our vision, and our core values. So my mission or your mission is not what you do, it’s why you do it. I think if we get caught up in what we do, it feels very mechanical and it doesn’t have any purpose behind it. So for example, with you, Jodi, with your oils, it’s not about you don’t sell oils, you help people find health. You help people find sleep. You help them feel better so that they can show up and be the best version of themselves, right? Exactly. That’s your mission. It’s not about selling the oils, it’s why you do what you do. So that’s the first part of the star. Second part is the vision. So if the mission is the why, what vision is, where are we going?

Where is it I want to go? So often we just kind of wing it and we just, I don’t know. I don’t know where I’m going, what’s going on. It’s like getting in the car and expecting to drive to Disneyland or something, and not having a map or not having not mapped out ahead of time, you’re going to get lost. So where do you want to go? And then your core values, and that answers, who do I want to get there? How do I want to live? How do I want to present myself? How do I want to behave? And so through using that filter of your mission, your vision, and your core values, it becomes really clear what is your yes, right? I think so often we hear that we need to say no more often, and I would agree with that, but we also need to say yes more often.

I think we need to hear more yeses. And the thing is, a lot of times we’re saying yes, out of obligation or out of expectation, someone asks us, Hey, can you bake 75 dozen brownies for the bake fair? Sure, I can do that. Even though you don’t have time. We say yes out of that obligation, but every time we’re saying yes, we’re saying no to something else.

Tanya Dalton: And a lot of times the things we’re saying no to are our family, our personal passion projects, our own goals, the things that we really want to do with our time. We’re saying no to those. So recognizing every time you say yes, you’re saying no to something else. Let’s choose our yeses. Let’s decide what we want to say yes to. And in the joy of missing out, I actually have a little blueprint called the finding your Yes blueprint. And I’ll tell you this in the Finding Your Yes Blueprint, the first question is not, do you have the time? The second question is not, do you have the time? The third question is not, do you have the time? The first question are, how do I feel about this? Do I want to do this? Does this line up with my mission, my vision, my core values, my North Star…

Jodi Cohen: Right.

Tanya Dalton: We have to go through these other filters because so often we will say to ourselves, with the 72 dozen brownies for the bake fair, we’ll say, oh, I’ve got the time. Even though you don’t have the time, we’ll say, yes, I have the time. And really the question is, do I like to bake brownies? Do I support this cause, right? Is this something that’s meaningful to me? And let’s say it is a cause that you really like. Let’s say it’s to support your child’s school. Is brownie baking what you like to do? Or is there something else you could do instead? Could you pass out flyers for the bake sale? Could you say no to this and say yes to something else that the school does? So really being mindful of where we’re putting our yeses and choosing yeses that feel right to us, I think is a really big thing.

Jodi Cohen: What a proactive approach to mental health, because so many of us, say yes to things we don’t want to do, and then we dread it or we have anxiety about it, or we procrastinate and don’t show up in the way that was our best self. This is brilliant because you’re alleviating problems before you agree to them,

Tanya Dalton: Right. Because that’s the thing is if you’re feeling resentful or irritated, are you really giving them the best you possible? Probably not. And you’re certainly not giving your kids your best, you or your spouse, your significant other, or your friends, because you’re irritated and grumpy that you have to bake these stupid brownies.

Jodi Cohen: To boundaries a little bit. Absolutely. People get really confused. What do boundaries mean? Just saying no to people. No, it’s prioritizing what your yeses are.

Tanya Dalton: It is, it’s prioritizing what is truly important to you. I like to say productivity is not about doing more. It’s doing what’s most important. So choose what is most important to you. But I think a lot of times we feel uncomfortable with saying no. That’s one of the things is we’re like, oh, but I don’t want to say no. And we mix up the request with the relationship, right? We’re like, oh, they’re really nice. So I want to say yes. Meanwhile, we’re resentful and we’re irritated, all those things. So I like to tell people, first of all, to have a go-to phrase that you can say when someone asks you to do something. Because a lot of times you get asked in the hallway at work, you get asked on the sidelines of the soccer field, you get asked, you don’t know what to say, so you just say yes.

And then five seconds afterward, you’re like, why did I say yes to that? So I like to say, when someone gives me a request for my time, I’ll say, oh, that’s such a great opportunity. I need to go check my calendar. Or Let me think about it. I have several things going on right now. I want to make sure I can prioritize it. So when I’m saying no to them, or I’m giving them myself some space to step back and assess it and see if I want to do it, I’m already making them feel good about it by saying, I want to make, I can prioritize this because I know this is important. And then when I’m saying no to someone, because it’s not my priority but theirs, I will use what I call the sandwich strategy, which is like a sandwich, two slices of bread, two slices of kindness.

The meat in the middle is the no. So I’ll say something like, I’ll start with the kindness. Thank you so much for thinking of me for this opportunity. I really love what you guys are doing there with whatever the organization is. Unfortunately, right now, I just am not able to have the bandwidth to be able to commit to this, and I would love to because it’s such a priority. I know I really want

to be able to support you guys in the future. Let me know what I can do for you some other time. So it’s two pieces of kindness with that solid knowing there’s no maybe or I’m not sure. It’s like I can’t commit to that, and I make it really clear, but I also elevate their cause, their thing that they want to do. I can’t prioritize that. And it deserves to be a priority.

Jodi Cohen: I love that. I occasionally have social anxiety, and it’s really correlated to disappointing people. People are always asking me to do things that are not on my yes list, and I don’t know how to politely say no. So I love having the script in advance. That’s wonderful.

Tanya Dalton: It helps because truly we will say yes when we don’t know what else to say. And then we’re like, oh, why did I say yes to that thing? I have no interest in it. And then we feel stuck. And so what I would also tell you is we’re never stuck. Even if you said yes to something, go back to them and say, listen, I’m not going to be able to do this to the best of my abilities. You deserve to have this done really well. I’m going to need to back out and maybe help them find somebody else to take the place. Or I can do something else.

 

Tanya Dalton: For example, with the bake sale, as I said, maybe it’s, you know what? I can probably do the flyers. I can help with that. Or I can help process the checks afterward, find some other way that you can help, that fits what you want to say yes to.

Jodi Cohen: Well, and I think so many of us as pleasers do confuse the request with the relationship. And we’re afraid that the person won’t like us if we say no.

Tanya Dalton: Yes, we do so much out of people pleasing, don’t we? Because we don’t want people to be disappointed in us. And I think that’s the thing that really holds us back a lot of times. But would we rather show up as our best selves or our grumpiest most irritable selves because we’re not happy about what we’re doing? So when we show up and say yes to the right things, we show up as our best mom, best person, best spouse, best friend, best community member, and best neighbor, when we are feeling really good about what we’re doing. So when we think about it, it really is helpful to everybody else. There’s this effect that’s been scientifically proven called the halo effect, that how we behave affects everybody around us. It’s our blast radius. So when we’re irritated, we’re grumpy, we’re feeling overwhelmed. That bleeds into how our family feels, and how the other people we interact with feel our coworkers feel. And if instead, we choose to take care of ourselves and we start doing things that make us feel good and healthy and well rested and all those things, that halo effect is also there. The people around us start paying attention, and they start mimicking and doing the things that we are doing, and we can really be a change, a force for good.

Jodi Cohen: I’ve noticed that even in my company when I start to think more self-care because then I think there’s no resentment. So you’re just always more respectful with people.

Tanya Dalton: It’s so much easier to give, I think. I like to say, we can’t shine our light on others if our battery needs recharging, and if we’re not taking care of ourselves, our battery is just flickering and going out, and then we’re irritated about trying to even shine the light. We’re just so tired. So taking care of yourself really is a gift for everyone else. It really shouldn’t be called self, self-care, because it is community care. When we all take care of ourselves, we can all take care of each other. And I think that the rising tide lifts all the boats. That’s true for us as well.

Jodi Cohen: Well, and I love the way you’re kind of rethinking productivity and overwhelm. It’s almost the antithesis of what most people say. Get up earlier. No pain, no gain, do more. Can you…

Tanya Dalton: Hustle? Hustle.

Jodi Cohen: Yeah. Of some of your favorite tips?

Tanya Dalton: Oh yeah. I mean, this is the thing I’m very anti-hustles culture, which I think is kind of the drive today where it’s like, just dig in and do more. And if you’re not, no pain, no gain. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. And so I think to me, it’s like, gosh, that doesn’t sound like how I want to live at all.

Jodi Cohen: But…

Tanya Dalton: People are disciplined. You have to be disciplined. And that’s a big one for me, is people always will say to me, oh, I’m just not disciplined. I’m like, discipline is boring. Discipline is way overrated. I mean, I don’t want to be disciplined. I like to have the freedom to be able to do things. And that’s what good productivity allows you to do. It’s not stifling, it’s not rigid. It’s a little bit of structure. It’s a little bit of scaffolding to help hold you up. I like to say it’s our bridges and buildings we build that have that flexibility built in for the high winds of life and that are going to withstand tornadoes and things like that. We need that with our productivity. So building in that grace. And one of the best ways to do that, quite frankly, is mapping out your day, but not doing that at one time.

At the beginning of the week, I teach a process that I call the five Ps. The first P is to purge it out of your brain, get it out on a sheet of paper, and just brain dump it. Don’t worry about the order of it, don’t worry about what it looks like. Just write it on the sheet of paper. And then we want to process. We want to process each day as it comes. So what we do a lot of times is we sit down on Sunday and we’re like, here’s what I’m doing Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and we map out the whole week. And then we wonder why we feel like we’re behind half the week. Well, okay, let’s say Monday was fantastic and we got a lot of things done, and it feels amazing. Tuesday, maybe you have a sick kid who crawls into your bed at three o’clock in the morning and you don’t get any sleep.

Or maybe you wake up with allergies or you know what? Maybe it’s just a rough day and you don’t get as much done. Well, if you’ve already mapped out what you’re doing Tuesday and you don’t get that done, and you mapped out Wednesday, you wake up Wednesday morning already feeling behind, and then Thursday, there’s just that whole snowball effect. So I like to say, get up in the morning, think about how you feel right now, and then set an intention for the day. How do I want to feel at the end of the day? What’s that feeling I want to have? And then you map out and you write down three to five things that you want to accomplish that day to actually get that feeling at the end of the day. So don’t map out your whole week process each day as it comes.

Tanya Dalton: Some days you’re going to wake up and you’re going to say, today’s rough. I just, I’m tired. I don’t feel good. Let’s put less on your plate. Maybe you wake up and you’re like, oh my gosh, I got up. I had my walk. I did some yoga. I read my book. I did my journal. I did some amazing things. I’m ready to get going. And it’s like, all right, let’s put a few more things on your plate for that day. Let’s pay attention to how we feel instead of just doing the things we think we’re supposed to do. And really, that idea, that concept of focusing on that feeling at the end of the day is huge for me. Because some days I want to feel present at the end of the day. Let’s say that my daughter has a sports activity that night. Maybe she has a volleyball game or a soccer game or something.

I want to be fully present. So that means what do I need to get done so I can be fully present? I can shut the door of work behind me and focus. Maybe it’s that I want to feel prepared because I have a big client meeting the next day. All right? If I want to feel prepared at the end of the day, let me think about what things I need to get done so I feel prepared, right? Think about what the emotion is that you want to feel. Now the trick here is you don’t always use the same word. You can’t just say successful, right? That’s pretty loose and easy, and it’s kind of a give-up. So really be intentional with how you want to feel for that day. Think about what you want that night to feel like, and then, all right, these are the activities. They’re going to help me do that. And so process each day as it comes that way, really think that through.

Jodi Cohen: No, I love that. That’s actually what I do. I have a little Post-it pad, and I just pick three things, and then if I do all of them, then I pick three more.

Tanya Dalton: That’s a great way to do it instead of making a giant. Well, this is the thing people want to make a giant.

Jodi Cohen: I did have a giant list, but on the post-it, I only have those three things.

Tanya Dalton: So that’s like your purge list. That’s your P. Yeah because that third P, so I said the first P was purge. The second one is process. The third one is to prioritize what are the priorities? Instead of having a to-do list, what are the things I really want to do? And I teach people in the book how you can do the priority list. It’s very simple. I call it A to-do list with intention, your post-it notes are a perfect example. What do I want to prioritize? What are the three things? And when you accomplish those, then you go to the next three. That’s perfect. Yeah.

Jodi Cohen: Yes. And I do like to put little check boxes next to things because I really,

Tanya Dalton: Oh, we love to check things off. That’s our little dopamine hit in our brain. That feels so good.

Jodi Cohen: Yes. These are amazing tips. Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about you want to share?

Tanya Dalton: Oh my gosh. Well, I mean, I have two books worth and 300 podcast episodes worth of things I could talk about. But really it comes down to that phrase that is really the mantra of everything I teach is productivity is not about doing more. It’s doing what’s most important. So figure out, and get super clear on what is most important to you. That could be as simple as just making a brain dump of what are the things I really love. What are the things that I really want to accomplish? I actually just posted on my substack, not rocket science. I posted a little activity that you can do about your essential needs. What are the things that you need each day? And that helps give you some clarity of what are the things that are important for you that you’re making sure you prioritize.

Jodi Cohen: I love that exercise. Social Connection.

Tanya Dalton: Well, I’m big on little activities. I like to make sure everything I teach is actionable because it doesn’t do us any good to have a bunch of theories I love to look at scientific studies and understand how your brain works, and that’s great, but how do we apply it? How do we make that work for us?

Jodi Cohen: No, I love that. Give some examples of the things you need every day.

Tanya Dalton: Oh, the different things that you need. Well, some people need outside time. I’m a person who needs to go outside every day. Ideally, I like to go barefoot if I can. It’s hard to do when it’s in the middle of winter. But during the spring, summer, and fall, I am outside every day. And that might mean eating my lunch outside. It might mean just going and taking a 10-minute break to walk around for a few minutes. It might mean even if I can’t go outside raining, just go and sit and look outside and maybe even read a book while I’m doing it. Some people have a need for being with other people. And I think that’s an interesting one because some people just need to be in a space with other people versus interacting. So that’s a really interesting essential need that people a lot of times don’t recognize.

They think, well, I’m not very good at studying at the library. I never could do that in college. Or I’m not very good at working alone. But they go and work at a coffee shop, they build off the energy that’s already there in that space with all the other people.

Tanya Dalton: So those are a couple of needs. There are 21 all told. There can be the need for learning and exploring, trying to really grow yourself, whether we’re talking mentally or with your career or spiritual opportunities for growth. There are all kinds of needs. So it’s really getting clear on what is unique for you that you need, and then making sure that you’re filling that up. I think a lot of times people do think self-care is like mud masks and bubble baths and pedicures, and those are all fantastic, and I do enjoy them. However, we have these deeper needs that when those are met, physical touch is another one. Maybe you’re in a space where you like to have physical touch or a lot of our love languages, the words of affirmation, recognition, what is important to you that you need that fills up your love tank and makes you feel really good. And then we can show up as our best selves for everybody else.

Jodi Cohen: I absolutely love that. And you’re right, everyone does think of self-care as like a bubble bath.

Tanya Dalton: We do. We do. And again, listen, I have no qualms against bubble baths, but I mean, I’m a big fan, but we have these other things. And I think having this very narrow definition of what it is, are you and I talked about last time I saw you in person, that idea, and you just told me that you were doing that writing down with the dry erase marker of how you want to feel each day. That’s a form of self-care.

Jodi Cohen: I do mirror in the bathroom.

Tanya Dalton: I love it. That’s one of the things that’s been a habit for me, is I write down a word of the day about how I want to feel. What’s my intention for the day? You write it with a dry erase marker in the bathroom because you put it on the mirror, you write it as you’re brushing your teeth and you think about it. And then that helps me as I’m going through my day, I’m thinking about that word. How am I embodying it? And then when I go to bed at night and I’m gearing up to go to bed and I’m brushing my teeth and washing my face, I’m going to look at the mirror and guess what’s on the mirror? My word. And I look at that word and I think, okay, did I live to that word today? Did I do the things I needed to do to feel that way? And then what’s a beautiful thing is you take your rag and you just wipe it off. Tomorrow’s a clean day. Tomorrow is a fresh start. So even if today felt like it didn’t go the way you wanted it to, even if today felt hard and difficult, good night’s sleep, especially if you’re using your oils right, Jodi, good night’s sleep. And then tomorrow is a brand new day with a brand new intention. And it’s okay if yesterday didn’t go.

Jodi Cohen: Okay, today’s now the easiest way to kind of Marie Kondo your life, as opposed to, is this bringing me joy? Does this align with my word? Am I on track?

Tanya Dalton: Well, the question is, does my life spark joy? I actually just asked that in my podcast this last episode. I took a radical sabbatical where I took a lot of time off to really rest up, take a look at how I’m living. Do I like what I’m doing? Do I like where I’m going? And just kind assess. And so I came back and we talked about does your life sparks joy. Because so often we’re thinking about the items in our house sparking joy, but my gosh, the one thing should spark joy in your world. It’s your life that doesn’t make me happy. And if the answer is no, or if the answer is no, very often we need to stop and take a good look at it, right? Let’s do a quick little assessment and see what’s keeping me from feeling happy. What is stifling some of this joy?

Every single one of us deserves to be happy. Every single one of us deserves joy in our lives. And yes, we have hard seasons. Every single one of us goes through these trenches of life. But if you take the time to map out your own life map, you’ll see there’s going to be trenches. But there are also mountains, right? And we can’t have the mountains if we don’t have the trenches. And so it really does remind us that there is a lot of joy out there. We have to choose to see it. Some days it’s really, really damn hard to find. On other days it’s easier, but taking the time to really intentionally choose, makes a huge difference. And allowing your life to feel joyful.

Jodi Cohen: What I heard you saying, it’s kind of in the trenches. We don’t make changes when we’re happy or when everything’s kind of okay enough. It’s only when it gets bad enough that you’re like, this is intolerable. I have to do something different. And so what I love about your strategies is we all feel like we have to go to our job. We have all these time commitments, and we don’t see where we have flexibility within that, but we do. And I love that.

Tanya Dalton: We do. We do. It’s all in how you look at it too. My son right now is working at a job. He’s in a gap year, and he’s working right now because he’s getting ready to go to Europe for a couple of months. He’s going to backpack through Europe, and he’s mapping it all out. He’s paying for it. And he said to me the other day, he said, I’m just really frustrated. My job doesn’t have any meaning. And I’m like, okay, tell me more about that. Tell me more about how your job doesn’t have meaning. And he’s like, well, I serve food for people and it’s no big deal and it has no meaning. It has no purpose. And I said, okay, that’s a really interesting thing to think about. I said, what is your job doing for you? What are you making money for?

He said, well, I’m making money so I can go on this trip. And I said, oh, okay. So the meaning behind the job can be that it’s affording you to go on a two-month trip through Europe, where you’re going to grow, you’re going to explore. You’re going to do all these amazing things that are going to help you grow. Couldn’t the meaning or the purpose behind your job be as simple as that? Sometimes your job can be the place where you find a lot of meaning, and it’s through the work that you’re doing.

Tanya Dalton: I know, Jodi, you and I both feel that way about the work that we do. Sometimes your job is the vehicle for the meaning. It allows us to go and explore. It allows us to go out and do amazing things in our world, and it’s not the job itself, but what the job allows us to do.

So I told him, I want you to make a little list of this is how much the train tickets cost. This is how much it is to stay at a hostel for a week. I said I want you to make little check boxes. He makes like, I don’t know, $15 an hour. I go make little check boxes that are $15 and then check them off every time I do an hour of work. And I want you to see how that’s getting you closer to your trip to Europe. And he was like, oh. And I think this is the thing, especially with our younger kids. I say younger, he’s 20, almost 21 with our kids today, is they’re hearing that your job has to have meaning. There has to be a purpose. I’m a big advocate of that. But sometimes your job, that’s the vehicle. If you own a business, your business is the vehicle for the life you want.

Your business is not the end all be all. It’s what your business allows you to do. It’s what your job allows you to do. That’s part of that purpose and meaning. So it is a little bit of reframing and looking at things a little bit differently. I think often we’re just kind of stuck in this mindset of there’s one way, this is how we do things. This is what life looks like. This is the routine. This is what I’m supposed to do when I’ve done this. Then one day I’ll be happy. And instead, let’s step outside of ourselves. Let’s observe like we do in meditation, and let’s choose how we want to view our world because that influences everything. So for my son now, he’s like, oh, okay. So I don’t mind so much going for work because I just got two train tickets to Austria, or I just got, so it is, it’s shifting how you’re looking at things.

Jodi Cohen: And even, I mean, you’re in a long-term marriage. I’m in a long-term relationship. Sometimes if you had a choice of how you’d spend your day, you’d do it differently than your partner. But it brings them so much joy that it’s a win. It’s like, great. He does a lot for me. Absolutely. I can totally do this for him.

Tanya Dalton: I’d only say give and take, because I think take has such a negative connotation. It’s the give-and-receive of relationships, right? Yeah. I’ve been married almost 24 years now, and there’s a lot of give and receive, and you have to be willing to receive, which is one of the things women a lot of times have a hard time receiving, just actively, openly receiving, and we feel like we’re giving a lot. So there is a lot of that give and receive that I think is really important.

Jodi Cohen: This was amazing. I could talk to you for hours, and I’m sure everyone who’s listening is going to want to learn more. Can you share again where they can find you and how they can learn more or work with you?

Tanya Dalton: Absolutely. So basically, anywhere that you’re listening to this podcast, you can find my podcast, the Intentional Advantage. You can search by the Intentional Advantage or my name Tanya Dalton. I also have a substack that we mentioned earlier, not rocket science, and you can find that by going to tanyadalton.com/connect. And that’ll lead you there. And I just started it a couple of weeks ago, and I’m very excited about the direction it’s going. It’s creating a lot of conversations and a lot of ways to find a lot more meaning in what we talk about in the podcast or just in things you’re already doing in your regular everyday life. It is, it’s kind of shifting the mindset. So tanyadalton.com/connect.

Jodi Cohen: I love that. And overwhelm and time management are so tricky. So thank you for helping us reframe this and really helping everyone kind of get those million-dollar minutes.

Tanya Dalton: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Jodi. This was a lot of fun. Jodi Cohen: This was great. Thank you.

Tanya Dalton: Thank you.

Jodi Cohen: Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. I hope this podcast empowered you with some useful information and takeaways. If you liked this episode, please consider sharing a positive review or subscribing. I would also love to offer you my free parasympathetic toolkit as a gift just for listening. It will teach you how to activate the most important nerve in your body to turn on your ability to heal. This free toolkit includes a checklist, a video, and a detailed guide. If this podcast prompted any questions, you can always find answers at my blog at vibrantblueoils.com or my book Essential Oils to Boost the Brain and Heal the Body. Until next time, wishing you vibrant Health.

Su sentido del olfato transmite señales de peligro y seguridad a su cerebro.

En otras palabras, el sentido del olfato es fundamental para la supervivencia.

El olfato te alerta sobre peligros (como depredadores y fuego), ayuda a localizar comida y agua e incluso ayuda a encontrar ciertas plantas con fines medicinales. Las investigaciones muestran que su sentido del olfato es diez mil veces más agudo que sus otros sentidos.

El olfato llega al cerebro más rápido que los otros cuatro sentidos (sonido, vista, gusto y tacto) y tiene acceso directo al centro de control emocional del cerebro conocido como amígdala en el sistema límbico. Otros sentidos primero viajan a otras áreas del cerebro antes de llegar al sistema límbico.

Esto hace que el olfato sea una de las vías de señalización más poderosas tanto para señales de peligro como de seguridad:

• Olores que indican peligro te mantiene seguro estimulando una respuesta instintiva de miedo que te permite movilizar rápidamente energía y recursos para sobrevivir a la amenaza del peligro. La investigación afirma que «el olfato intacto es fundamental para evaluar la seguridad de las sustancias ingeridas, evaluar el peligro inminente y reconocer las relaciones sociales».

• Aromas de señales de seguridad Se ha descubierto que revierte esta respuesta de miedo, según una investigación prometedora. La investigadora Linda Buck, ganadora del Premio Nobel, estudia cómo los diferentes olores desencadenan diferentes respuestas en el cerebro. Por ejemplo, Buck descubrió que el aceite esencial de rosa puede contrarrestar la respuesta de miedo del cerebro al olor de un depredador. Su investigación encontró que oler aceite esencial de rosas en presencia de olores de depredadores (u otros estímulos de miedo) puede suprimir las respuestas al estrés y las señales hormonales del cerebro.. Específicamente, el estudio encontró que «el aceite de rosa puede bloquear las respuestas de las hormonas del estrés al olor de los depredadores, y también es posible que algunos transmitan señales que supriman, en lugar de activar, las respuestas hormonales relacionadas con el miedo».

Esta investigación proporciona una idea de cómo se pueden usar los aceites esenciales para enviar señales de seguridad al cuerpo para influir en sus respuestas químicas al trauma y a los estímulos basados ​​en el miedo al suprimir o activar las respuestas hormonales del cerebro a olores específicos.

Cómo llega el sentido del olfato al cerebro

El sentido del olfato, que forma parte del sistema olfativo, es uno de los canales más poderosos del cerebro. De hecho, su sistema olfativo es único entre los sistemas sensoriales porque tiene acceso anatómico y funcional directo al lóbulo límbico del cerebro, que está físicamente ubicado cerca del bulbo olfativo.

Esto permite que los aceites esenciales inhalados accedan fácilmente a áreas del cerebro que ayudan a cambiar su salud física y su estado de ánimo.

¡Y es rápido!

Las investigaciones muestran que todo el proceso, desde la inhalación inicial de un aceite esencial hasta la respuesta correspondiente en el cuerpo, puede ocurrir en cuestión de segundos. Se cree que tu sentido del olfato es 10.000 veces más agudo que tus otros sentidos. Una vez registrados, los estímulos olfativos viajan más rápido al cerebro que la vista o el sonido.

Es interesante observar que el sentido del olfato es el primero de todos los sentidos en desarrollarse. Incluso antes de nacer, su sentido del olfato está completamente formado y funcionando para ayudar a mantener su seguridad y supervivencia.

Las investigaciones muestran que el sentido del olfato es el más sensible de los sentidos. Las personas pueden recordar olores con un 65% de precisión después de un año, mientras que el recuerdo visual es aproximadamente del 50% después de tres meses. Es interesante observar que el sentido del olfato de una mujer es mucho más fuerte que el de un hombre y se mejora aún más durante la primera mitad del ciclo menstrual y el embarazo.

Cómo el olfato activa señales de seguridad

Los aromas tienen un efecto modulador de la actividad psicofisiológica y de la excitación. Esto se debe a que su sentido del olfato se conecta directamente con la parte de su cerebro que regula la liberación de varias hormonas esenciales que lo ayudan a sentirse seguro.

Las neuronas sensoriales olfativas transmiten información a áreas específicas del cerebro. Las investigaciones muestran que «el olfato tiene la capacidad de transferir y regular estados emocionales». En concreto, un estudio sobre El poder de la persuasión del olor «informó de una reducción de los síntomas de ansiedad en sujetos expuestos a olores agradables combinados con una técnica de relajación». El estudio reveló que «los aromas agradables inducen un estado percibido de relajación y una reducción percibida de los síntomas depresivos». La exposición a aromas naturales agradables también se ha asociado con reducciones en la frecuencia cardíaca, la presión arterial y el afecto negativo.

Como se señaló anteriormente, su sentido del olfato tiene acceso anatómico y funcional directo a la amígdala en el lóbulo límbico del cerebro, que se encuentra físicamente cerca del bulbo olfatorio.

De hecho, a nivel físico, sólo dos sinapsis separan la amígdala del nervio olfatorio. Ningún otro sistema sensorial tiene un contacto tan directo e intenso con los sustratos neuronales del centro de control emocional de su cerebro.

El olor viaja a través de su sistema olfativo hasta su hipotálamo, una región de su cerebro que actúa como su centro de control hormonal, a través de su amígdala hasta su sistema límbico. Cuando hueles un aceite esencial de hipotálamo, lo estimulas a liberar hormonas que desencadenan una respuesta emocional rápida. (Más AQUÍ).

Al destacar los «numerosos estudios que vinculan los recuerdos desencadenados por olores con un mejor estado de ánimo y una reducción del estrés», la revista Harvard Medicine Magazine detalla cómo las señales de seguridad o peligro «se detienen rápidamente en el bulbo olfatorio antes de viajar a áreas clave del cerebro involucradas en el aprendizaje, las emociones y memoria: la corteza olfativa o piriforme, que identifica los olores; la amígdala, que interviene en la generación de emociones; y el hipocampo, que almacena y organiza los recuerdos. Si el hipocampo considera importante el olor (si está asociado con un momento particularmente emocional, por ejemplo) puede registrar la información y almacenarla indefinidamente. Incluso décadas después, la misma fragancia puede traernos recuerdos y el significado emocional del momento que nos invade.

Las imágenes, los sonidos y otra información sensorial deben pasar primero a través del tálamo del cerebro antes de llegar a la amígdala y el hipocampo. Por el contrario, el sistema olfativo se encuentra justo al lado de ellos y parece haber evolucionado esencialmente para transmitir información a estos centros de memoria y emoción. Esto puede explicar por qué los estudios han encontrado que, en comparación con los recuerdos evocados por otros sentidos, los recuerdos evocados por los olores tienden a ser más emocionales y es más probable que vuelvan a la vida de una persona.

La respuesta de su cerebro al olor estimula la liberación de hormonas y neuroquímicos que cambian su fisiología y respuesta emocional. El hipotálamo produce hormonas excitadoras, que estimulan la actividad cerebral, y hormonas inhibidoras, que tienen un efecto más calmante.

Estas hormonas cerebrales, en cooperación con la glándula pituitaria, controlan todos los mensajes hormonales para los sistemas endocrino, de estrés y digestivo, que a su vez influyen y protegen todos los aspectos de su salud, incluido su estado emocional. De hecho, su sentido del olfato es tan sensible que prácticamente cualquier olor desencadenará una respuesta cerebral que registra alguna respuesta física o conductual clínicamente demostrable.

Es este canal directo entre el sentido del olfato y el hipotálamo a través del cual los aceites esenciales ayudan a combatir el estrés y el trauma emocional, además de estimular la producción de hormonas para ayudarlo a sentirse seguro y tranquilo. Este es el mecanismo que funciona cuando tienes una respuesta emocional a un recuerdo desencadenado por un olor.

Según una investigación, la capacidad de los olores para evocar recuerdos vívidos y emocionalmente intensos es bien conocida. El olfato es único entre las modalidades sensoriales en su relación con la memoria. Fisiológicamente, el olfato está más cerca tanto de la amígdala como del hipocampo (Herz y Engen 1996), lo que puede explicar la capacidad de los olores para evocar recuerdos emocionales intensos (Chu y Downes 2000; Herz 1997). El propósito de esta investigación es examinar las asociaciones existentes que tenemos con los olores y su capacidad para influir en el comportamiento.

Los olores pueden actuar como señales ambientales para la memoria, donde los olores se presentan junto con estímulos que se recordarán, en lugar del grado en que las asociaciones existentes entre el olor y los estímulos relacionados con el olor pueden influir en la memoria.

Para obtener más señales de seguridad, un tratamiento conocido como «acondicionamiento olfativo hipnoterapéutico» combina la hipnosis con la inhalación de aromas agradables para indicar una «sensación de seguridad y control personal» que ha mostrado resultados positivos para los clientes que superan un trauma y un trastorno de estrés postraumático (TEPT). ). Esta técnica se basa en investigaciones que han descubierto que la percepción de olores puede inducir una «inundación» de recuerdos autobiográficos distantes de manera más vívida que otras modalidades sensoriales.

Aceites esenciales y señales de seguridad.

La inhalación de aceites esenciales es la forma más rápida y eficaz de crear un equilibrio fisiológico o psicológico en el sistema límbico. El olfato puede estimular directamente la entrada positiva a la amígdala, evitando el relevo talámico y permitiéndole enviar poderosas señales de seguridad al centro emocional del cerebro.

Es interesante observar que el sistema límbico originalmente se llamaba rinencéfalo (que significa «cerebro olfativo») porque se pensaba que involucraba principalmente al sentido del olfato.

Dadas las características del olfato emocionales y relacionadas con la memoria, su uso puede ayudar tanto a reducir la sensación de amenaza como a mejorar la sensación de seguridad.

La estimulación olfativa con aceites esenciales se puede utilizar para restablecer el poder de percibir una amenaza y ayudar a calmar la sobreexcitación de su sistema límbico.

Restablecimiento límbico™ contiene una mezcla patentada de aceites esenciales diseñada para calmar la excitación ante amenazas y enviar señales de seguridad para ayudar a restablecer su sistema límbico y respaldar una regulación emocional saludable. Restablecimiento límbico™ está especialmente formulado con aceites de helicriso y sándalo de melisa, que se promocionan para la función cerebral y se sabe que cruzan la barrera hematoencefálica y ayudan a transportar oxígeno al sistema límbico para ayudar a reconectar los circuitos neuronales del sistema límbico y calmar la respuesta hiperactiva al estrés.

Cambiar su enfoque involucrando sus sentidos, como su sentido del olfato, también lo ayuda a distraerse de un estado interno de angustia, reduciendo así su intensidad y la intensidad de sus reacciones hacia los demás. Esto le permite sentirse seguro y tener acceso a más posibilidades y opciones.

Aceite recomendado:

referencias:

Jodi Cohen: Hello and welcome to Essential Alchemy. Alchemy is defined as the power or process that changes or transforms something in a mysterious or impressive way. My hope is that the information in this podcast can help you transform your mood, energy, physical health, or even some dots to help you shift your mental or emotional state. I’m your host, Jodi Cohen, a bestselling author, award-winning journalist, functional practitioner, lifelong learner, and founder of Vibrant Blue Oils, a company that sells proprietary blends of high-quality, organic, or wildcrafted essential oil remedies designed to help you return to your ideal mental, physical, and emotional state. You can find out more about me and my company at vibrantblueoils.com. And with that, let’s get started with today’s episode.

Hi, I’m Jodi Cohen and I’m super excited to share the brilliance of my dear friend Katie Kimball, who has four kids aged seven to 14, and she is the national Voice of Healthy Kids cooking as a blogger, two time TEDx speaker, former teacher who founded Kids Cook Real Foods, which is recommended by the Wall Street Journal as the best online cooking class for kids. Her blog, Kitchen Stewardship helps families stay healthy without going crazy, and she’s on a mission to connect families around healthy food, raise critical thinking skills, use the Lab of Curiosity in this kitchen, and grow kids’ meal revolution where every child learns to cook. Welcome, Katie.

Katie Kimball: Well, thank you so much, Jodi. I wish my oldest was 14. He is actually 17. Jodi Cohen: Oh, 17, sorry.

Katie Kimball: Seven to 17. Yes, we have one in every school building, which means my email is out of control.

Jodi Cohen: Oh my God. Well, and I love it. Before we started recording, we were kind of talking about how picky eating is not just for littles. It really goes all the way up into adolescence and adulthood. So I’d love it if you could kind of just share what got you into this.

Katie Kimball: I think I had a pretty standard eighties childhood. We ate sort of packaged convenience food, although my mom did cook a lot from scratch. God bless her. And so that was what I took into my own young adulthood. So it was bag salad, bottle dressing, hamburger helper, the normal stuff. And my own real food conversion definitely started when I got pregnant with Paul 17 years ago, 18 years ago, because it was just getting hit with a ton of bricks. Like every bite matters so much I have growing this new life.

Katie Kimball: That was the very first thing that I searched in that kind of, oh my gosh, there’s a new life inside me. What do I eat? I typed and found the Bradley birth method, and they do such a nice job of being comprehensive with movement and food and preparing the body for the actual labor.

So we made little tiny changes at first, like, okay, we’re going to ditch margarine and use butter. We’re going to change our brand of tortilla chips so that they have slightly fewer additives. They were just so tiny at first, and then once I started feeding the actual baby food, it just snowballed from there. And so I became very much a real food, whole foods proponent and advocate, and I made all the mistakes. I burned all the things. I cut everything wrong. I did not know what I was

doing, but I’m a teacher by trade and just my teacher brain as I was standing at the cutting board and burning things on the stove was thinking, how can I make this easier for other mamas out there who were on this journey trying to save money and not spend all their time in the kitchen? It just felt like it was a constant stretch.

And that’s kind of where the idea of kitchen stewardship came about stewardship, is caring for all of the gifts we’ve been given our time and our budget and our family’s nutrition, and heck, the environment too. So in 2009, that’s I started teaching online just teaching people how to do these techniques in a baby-step fashion, giving yourself grace, and just really choosing the techniques that don’t stretch the tension that can save time and money at the same time. So I built this amazing community. I just loved being online and connecting with other women all around the world, but then I kept hearing the same story, and it was Katie, I do want to get healthy, but this is so hard because I was never taught to cook. That’s kind of our whole generation. Yeah, absolutely. Me too. And I thought, okay, generationally, if we’re not taught to cook, we are not comfortable teaching our kids, and in 20 years people are going to be saying the same thing.

Our grownup kids will be saying, oh man, I wish I could be healthier, but I was never taught to cook. So I thought, okay, I’m a teacher. I’m a mom of four. Maybe I’m the person to step into this gap and stop the cycle and really help parents make it easier to teach their kids to cook. So that’s kind of where kids cook real food was born. And I very quickly realized that no mom, very few moms are walking around going, oh, I just have such a problem. I wish I could teach my kids to cook. But many of them are walking around going, Ugh, if my kids would just freaking eat what I make, life would be better if I could get a vegetable past their lips. So I’m like, okay, parents need their kids to eat better. What they don’t know is that getting them in the kitchen is really going to help. So that’s where I started sort of building this picky eating knowledge and have done some training. And so now I can be a picky eating expert who can really help. I’m really helping a lot of parents help kids build a great relationship with food.

Jodie Cohen: Well, no, and it’s amazing, and I was sharing that my 17-year-old told me that she’s the only person she knows that doesn’t have some kind of eating issue, be it body dysmorphia, one of the more severe problems, or even just, I only eat beige food.

Katie Kimball: I do think picky eating is a huge epidemic, and if kids aren’t encountering foods in the elementary years, or better yet in the preschool and toddler years, they really don’t know how to interact with food. And there are so many kids, and I do believe that extrapolates onto our teens who are actually afraid of food or afraid of trying new foods, Jodi, you would not believe, many families in my picky eating membership will tell about their kids. And if the kid walks up to the table and sees a vegetable on the table, they literally scream and run away. It’s not just like complaining like, oh, I don’t like what you made, Mom. They are so afraid of that vegetable. They’re out of there. So it is a very serious problem, and I’m so sad to hear that in the teens. It is developing into this eating disorder and the body image stuff. Man, that’s just hard to watch.

Jodi Cohen: Yeah, a lot of her friends, basically, if it’s not a carbohydrate, forget it.

Katie Kimball: Sugar’s not playing with a full deck. They’ve got the ACEs up their sleeve. I just feel like any time the sugar and the processed foods come into play, it’s unfair because they’re so addictive and they’re pulling our kids in.

Jodi Cohen: Yeah. So I’m really curious, tell me how you work with people. You get a new client whose child is afraid of vegetables. How do you kind of stairstep them through adding new foods and introducing their kids?

Katie Kimball: Yeah. Well, I’m not a therapist, so I don’t take on individual clients. We just have a membership where we build this community, and I do walk my pep club, my picky eating playbook, and parents through a five-step process with the goal of building a good relationship with food. I mean, step zero is to dismantle a lot of our existing beliefs about picky eating because first of all, most parents think that the picky eating problem is a food problem. And for most kids, picky eating is not about the food. It either. Sometimes it has to do with a relationship or a power struggle with the parents, but almost always at its root cause picky eating starts with something physiological. Either there’s a sensory processing issue that the child is really interacting with food so much differently than us as an adult that we can’t understand why they can’t encounter a new food and be okay with that.

Katie Kimball: There are a lot of kids who have swallowing and chewing issues now. Those baby food pouches did nothing to help kids learn to encounter food, which is really interesting. So typically picky eating has at its root something physiological, and then the parents get fearful because what’s our job? Our job is to keep the kid alive, and if they’re not eating much or anything or doing the right thing, we get scared. And then that interplay can start to exacerbate what could have been a smaller physiological issue. And then we get some of the power struggles, and then we get some of the pressure situations going on. And sometimes the pressure goes from child to parent, which is when the parent says, Man if chicken nuggets are the only thing my kid will eat, I got to feed ’em chicken nuggets. I got to keep ’em alive. So we have to dismantle those existing beliefs.

And then we work through a process of figuring out an eating routine of figuring out when and how to serve those vegetables, structuring the mealtime environment in a really helpful way, and then moving through how we allow our kids to have preferences and not assume that they are then labeled as a picky eater. So the steps are, to prepare the space, lead with your ace, set the pace, keep a poker face, and give them grace. So we just kind of move through all those, and that poker face is really important because if we’re pressuring our kids to eat, we end up really breaking a lot of their hunger and satiety cues and forming a negative relationship with food. And so again, a lot of dismantling of what’s going on.

Jodi Cohen: I really love it. It’s interesting because my second child had a lot of sensory things, and I remember finally taking him somewhere and realizing certain aspects of what I thought were, his personality had nothing to do with his personality at all. They were sensory-driven, and it was mind blown. So that’s great that you’re sharing that with people. Say someone comes to you with a kid who won’t eat or is afraid of the vegetables, and so you’ve helped them reframe things, but then where do you start? How do you kind of step and babystep someone into introducing formerly frightening foods?

Katie Kimball: Absolutely. Step one is definitely to make sure that the appetite is actually there. We overfeed our kids here in North America where too many snacks. Snacks are too big, snacks are too highly palatable. They’re the munchy crunchies, they’re the things that the kids want to eat. And when the child knows that they’ll have snacks anytime they want, dinner is optional. So step one is to make sure that we’re creating a lot of space between snack time and dinner time. And to change a little bit about how the snack looks, it’s not unlimited. It’s a little more balanced. So then the kids are coming to the table with an appetite, so at least they’ve got that going for them. Leading with your ace is my second step because I do encourage parents to put that ace those vegetables out first, and then they’re keeping their poker face.

Katie Kimball: So if the child wants to run away, if the child wants to run away, that’s okay. You say that’s okay. You can come back for dinner when you’re ready. And for many families, that is a huge paradigm shift because they may have been saying, if you eat three bites of broccoli, you can have some ice cream, or you have to eat three bites of broccoli before you leave the table, or you have to finish this food. And all of that pressure interplay can really be damaging to kids’ affinity for food or their relationship with food. The most powerful thing for the kids who are actually afraid is to remove the whole experience from the table to completely remove any idea that they have to put food in their mouth, which means either getting them involved in the kitchen prep or literally doing some crafts with food where there’s clearly no obligation that anyone’s going to eat. So a kid might be using a stick of asparagus to paint with ketchup or hummus. Oh, that’s cool. Oh yeah, on paper with No, it’s not at the table. There’s nothing to do with eating. And that can actually help to inoculate their senses a little bit and get them that exposure where they can Exposure

Jodi Cohen: Therapy, I love it.

Katie Kimball: Make friends with food. I prefer the kitchen so much more practical. But for kids who are really dealing with a lot of that fear, they kind of need a both-and approach.

Jodi Cohen: And I love it. So some of these recipes, I can see parents thinking like, oh, my child had knives. That could be dangerous. What aspects of food preparation do you like to get the kids involved in?

Katie Kimball: I love getting knives in the hands of children since now, don’t take that the wrong way. No, I mean, here’s the thing. What’s going to motivate the child? So if they’re two or three, learning how to measure a teaspoon of salt is good.

Jodi Cohen: Yeah. Scramble an egg.

Katie Kimball: Yeah, use a whisk. Anything really, when they’re 2, 3, 4, and five, they’re good. They’re excited about being in the kitchen. For kids who are a little older, I am a huge advocate that once a child can read and write, they can do just about anything in the kitchen that an adult can, maybe minus the chef’s knife. But we put sharp hands, sharp knives in the hands of six and seven-year-olds, again with proper training. So we teach really fun phrases like up and over soldier and tug of whirlpool so that the family has this vocabulary to talk about where your fingers go, where the knife goes, how you move the knife, how you hold the food so that everything is super safe and there’s a trust built as the kids build these skills. So yeah, I’m actually a huge advocate of getting kids to wash and cut produce as early as everyone in the family feels ready for that.

Jodi Cohen: Do you have video trainings where people can watch you? Okay, that’s great.

Katie Kimball: That’s great. Yeah, we do. That was my flagship course kids cook Real Food. And so I’m an educator. I was a third-grade teacher for a couple of years. I just took about 30 basic skills that I think any human being needs to follow most recipes and figured out, okay, what comes first? How do we build this scaffolding on another? What can kids who are age two to five developmentally handle? Now what can kids who are age six to 10 developmentally handle? And so we built a course with Yes, professionally filmed videos, kids’ hands doing the skills. And one thing I’m really proud of because so many kids and families have food sensitivities and food allergies, is that I’m really skills focused. So you are learning to roll dough, or you are learning to follow a recipe, or you are learning to use the stove safely and the food is secondary, such that anyone with an allergy sensitivity or picky preference can just easily swap out the recipe and still practice the same skill and do the same kind of techniques and motions when they’re finished with our kids. Cook Real Food eCourse. Kids know how to tackle just about any normal recipe, no creme brulee and flaming torches or anything, but things that regular families would cook using Whole Foods.

Jodi Cohen: So I’m wondering if my daughter who’s going to college in the fall is too old for your kids’ cook course.

Katie Kimball: Some teens still love it. Some teens say, oh, the kids in the videos are too little. So I always recommend to the teenager parents is to find a cousin or a neighbor or someone who is 10 and under and have the teenager be the teacher’s assistant, and then they just learn by assimilation.

Jodi Cohen: Oh that’s a wonderful idea. Okay. So then the next question is helping, do you provide recipes? Do you help them pick recipes? Do you have strategies when you have multiple kids with multiple preferences, how to decide what meal you’re eating when…

Katie Kimball: And Yeah. Well, in the Kids Cook Real Food course, we obviously have to make some food. So there are recipes, and then we provide lots of swaps for alternate diets. When we talk picky eating, deconstructing the meal is one of my set-the-paste strategies for that environment of mealtime. And I think a lot of parents do this naturally, but they don’t always think about doing it with every meal. So a really natural deconstructed meal is like a burrito bowl. You have maybe your rice or your quinoa, you might have some salad chopped up, have some cooked protein, some beans, maybe corn or green onions, and you have all these toppings and everyone goes through and picks what they want.

Katie Kimball: So you’re eating the same meal. You have that family unity and that dinner cohesion, the cook who is often the adult, but hopefully the kids are starting to help, has only had to make one thing because there are many, many, many families, I wish there was a study to have percentages.

Jodi Cohen: Oh, how many order chefs?

Katie Kimball: Yeah, how many short-order cooks there are? Yes. Making two, even three meals a night, which is just painful for me to hear. And I’m like, okay, mama’s team, one meal, we need to be on team one meal. So that burrito bar, again, people kind of do that naturally, but they don’t always think about that with something like stir fry or pasta or, oh, I make a lot of casseroles. And so we do have to sort of brainstorm together as a community, how can we deconstruct this so that everyone eats the same meal, but even our pickiest of eaters, our most preference, most selective eaters can see at least one or two things that are their safe foods, but yet get exposure to other things. And mom and daughter is only making one meal.

Jodi Cohen: That’s amazing. So you could have the protein on the side if you have a vegan or dairy on the side or love that.

Katie Kimball: Exactly. And even casserole can sometimes be deconstructed. I have a dairy-free daughter, and so we have a casserole we make with sliced potatoes and ground beef and a couple of other vegetables, and that is like a homemade cream of chicken sauce. Well, obviously dairy-free, she can’t do that, but all we have to do is prep everything and put hers in a tiny casserole dish. It all goes in the oven at the same time, and she just has some olive oil instead of the sauce. It makes it pretty easy. And so there’s always a way. So I don’t think families with picky eaters need new recipes. That’s the thing. Everyone wants that as their turnkey solution. Give me the best recipe for a picky eater. That’s just not how it works. It’s about the strategy and the environment that we set up.

Jodi Cohen: Oh my gosh, I absolutely love that. That’s brilliant. And I know you have strategies for restaurant eating too. I’m curious how you tackle that because that’s another one. If you have a picky eater, it makes it hard to go out and sometimes mom wants a night off.

Katie Kimball: Yeah. Well, goodness, unfortunately, with the picky eaters, it’s easy to go out because the kids’ meal is chicken nuggets, pizza, Mac, and cheeseburgers generally that’s what our picky eaters like. But if you have healthy eating intentions with kids, it is hard to go out because as soon as they have that kid’s menu, it’s all the beige. It’s like the bar food and the county fair food. Why are we putting up with that being the kid’s menu? It’s absolutely ridiculous.

Katie Kimball: We tend to have our kids split an adult meal when they’re younger, and generally they’re tastier. To be honest, our kids, they want an adult meal. And so our only problem now is that they’re very expensive to take out because now they eat a lot, even though they’re in the kids’ meal age range, they want those adult meals. But that’s kind of what we do. And just seeking, in most restaurants, you can seek out your vegetables, you can skip the bun if carbs aren’t your friend. You know what I mean? There are always little strategies.

Jodi Cohen: And I’m curious because I, as a mom who made breakfast for her children for far too long, if you have ideas for teaching kids how to make their own breakfast beyond pouring cereal and milk in a bowl, make their own lunches, is that something you get into?

Katie Kimball: Well, it’s something that my kids do. Definitely. Definitely. Absolutely. And that’s the beauty of skills over recipes really, Jodi, right? Is that once a child knows how to safely use the stove now it’s pretty easy for them to make pancakes for them to fry an egg or scramble an egg. My kids, like I said, I have four kids in four different schools. We’ve got three different start times in the morning. It is an absolute circus around here. So my two older kids, Paul and Leah actually get up before I do most days, and they just ask the night before, what are you thinking for breakfast tomorrow? And so they easily know how to scramble some eggs, add some cheese for those who can eat the cheese and just fry up some well-sourced sausage. And in fact, my daughter, she’s so industrious, she made a list not too long ago.

Well, we went through a kitchen remodel, and so we knew that in the first few weeks when the kitchen was all torn up, we had to cook in the basement. And so she and I worked together and we made muffins and waffles and grain-free pancakes and just froze all this stuff. And once we were through the kitchen remodel, Leah said, I really liked having that stuff in the freezer that made breakfast so much easier one or two days a week. So she took it upon herself one weekend to restock the freezer with the blended cashew waffles and the grain-free pumpkin pancakes and muffins and all this stuff. And so that’s been really, really nice. My other secret is that the Instant Pot can make your oatmeal for you while you’re sleeping, and then it’s hot when the first person gets out of bed. So we do Instant Pot oatmeal at least twice a week as well.

Jodi Cohen: Oh, I love that. That’s great. Congratulations. Is there anything else that you think would be helpful for someone who’s like, oh, wow, what a concept. I can teach my kids to cook. I can stop being a short-order chef. Anything else that people have really been excited about?

Katie Kimball: I just think the motivation for parents is what’s needed the most because we have so many roadblocks. One of the questions we ask families who do buy our course is like, what’s the hardest part? Now? You’ve already bought a course, you’re committed to this, but what’s the hardest part even now about getting into the kitchen? And it’s like, oh, it’s hard to find the time. It’s hard to motivate the kids. This is my haven. I don’t want to slow down. I don’t want the kids to be messy. So we have a ton of psychological roadblocks, and I think to dismantle those in order to motivate ourselves to really believe I need to teach my kids to cook, I want to future cast parents and say, this is not a burden for your kids. This is not something horrible that we’re doing to them, this is a huge gift that when they are young adults, you and I both have a child heading off to college within the next year and a half or so, and I’m so just pleased beyond belief that when my kids are young adults, they can be pursuing their career.

They can be figuring out who they love in life, instead of wandering about some young adults today going, oh gosh, what do I feed myself? Ramen noodles again, frozen pizza, eating out. That’s stressful if not for the mind, but for the body. I want them to know how to actually nourish themselves. And so I want them to make the mistakes in my house, and not only in the future but there are so many benefits now when kids know how to do authentic tasks that adults do. That is true. They don’t need participation ribbons. They don’t need platitudes of Good job, honey. No, because they’re actually feeding and nourishing other human beings. There is no better way to build truth. And I can’t think of anything that kids need more right now than a strong sense of self.

Jodi Cohen: Yes. And empowerment. I love that. How can people find your programs work more with you, and learn more?

Katie Kimball: Absolutely. Well, all the fun real-life stuff is on Instagram at Kids Cook Real Food, and then kidscookrealfood.com is the house for everything. We run a picky eating challenge a couple of times a year, and those are really popular. Kind of feel the momentum of a community working together and trying some new things and seeing kids maybe take tastes or allow food on a plate. There are a lot of measures of success that don’t all have to do with food going past the child’s lips. But yeah, we’re always doing something to help families connect around healthy food and really build that good relationship.

Jodi Cohen: Wonderful. Well, I’m going to sign up for the Picky Eater Challenge. I know enough people in my life that could use it. Thank you so much for your time, and it’s always great to see you.

Katie Kimball: It’s a delight. Jodi, thanks for having me.

Jodi Cohen: Thank you so much for listening. I hope this podcast empowered you with some useful information and takeaways. If you liked this episode, please consider sharing a positive review or subscribing. I would also love to offer you my free parasympathetic toolkit as a gift just for listening. It will teach you how to activate the most important nerve in your body to turn on your ability to heal. This free toolkit includes a checklist, a video, and a detailed guide. If this podcast prompted any questions, you can always find answers at my blog at vibrantblueoils.com or my book Essential Oils to Boost the Brain and Heal the Body. Until next time, wishing you Vibrant Health.

Jodi Cohen: Hello and welcome to Essential Alchemy. Alchemy is defined as the power or process that changes or transforms something in a mysterious or impressive way. My hope is that the information in this podcast can help you transform your mood, energy, physical health, or even some dots to help you shift your mental or emotional state. I’m your host, Jodi Cohen, a bestselling author, award-winning journalist, functional practitioner, lifelong learner, and founder of Vibrant Blue Oils, a company that sells proprietary blends of high-quality, organic, or wildcrafted essential oil remedies designed to help you return to your ideal mental, physical, and emotional state. You can find out more about me and my company at vibrantblueoils.com. And with that, let’s get started with today’s episode.

Hi, I’m Jodi Cohen, your host, and I’m so excited for today’s podcast. I’m joined by my dear friend Deanna Hansen, who is a pioneer in the field of fashion decompression for physical and emotional transformation with more than 20 years of hands-on clinical experience. Deanna created block therapy, a unique fascia release protocol using these fabulous blocks that we’re going to talk about to relieve chronic pain and disease, encourage healthy detoxification and reverse cellular aging. She’s also the author of this amazing book, which really unpacks kind of what we’re going to talk about a little bit further. So thank you and welcome.

Deanna Hansen: Thank you, Jodi. I’m so incredibly honored to be here sharing with your community.

Jodi Cohen: No, this is going to be really fun. I’m really excited to kind of jump in. For people who don’t really know what you do facia and breathing, can you explain that a little bit?

Deanna Hansen: Absolutely. So let’s just have a bit of a discussion on what fascia really is and the functions and purpose of this beautiful system that really is still not very well understood. So we have trillions of cells in our body, and the goal of the fascia in part is to keep cells incorrect alignment, because if they’re in their rightful position, there’s optimal space in and around the cells. Space allows for ease of flow of nutrients in as well as the removal of toxins and waste away from the cell. So that’s one of the functions. It’s also the communication system between every single cell on the body. Fascia is primarily made up of collagen and elastin. It is the balance of these proteins that gives us both our structure as well as that opportunity to move through life with grace and ease. The challenge is though we have to be also conscious of supporting our fascist system.

Deanna Hansen: And one of the issues is we’re under this constant force of gravity. Gravity is always pulling us down toward the earth, and it doesn’t just compress the body linearly because we’re dominant on one side. We literally spiral down in one direction or another. So what happens to the balance of the collagen and elastin is as I start tipping off balance, the collagen component starts to migrate and it creates these false walls and false floors in the body. So if I’m not using my body properly with conscious awareness of posture and proper breathing, the collagen migrates. It creates all of these beaver downs to blood flow, and then cells become compromised as a result of that as well as they become dirty. So they’re essentially starving and dirty. So cells that are hungry and dirty, they’re not doing their best job to keep our bodies healthy so that we can thrive.

Jodi Cohen: Yeah, and I love you really get into detail in the book about how pain, pain, let’s say in the right hip might be the cause of a fascial imbalance elsewhere that we’re always compensating, and so that kind of throws us off and then results in pain almost in a distal region.

Deanna Hansen: It really does, and we’re always teaching people about the cause sites versus the pain sites. So if I can talk just a little bit about the diaphragm because this is such a key component of fascia decompression in this work. So dia, I’m just going to bring my camera down a little bit so we can see here. So the diaphragm is a plate of muscle that supports everything above the rib cage when it’s working properly. With the inhale, it moves down. When we exhale, it lifts, and if we’re breathing consciously, we’re getting this continual mechanical action in through here, creating an internal massage. It also helps through the strengthening of this muscle maintain this proper alignment up the chain. Now the challenge is pain, fear, and stress causes to reactively hold our breath. So if we don’t consciously understand that and stay focused on that breath, this becomes weak.

The rib cage collapses into the core. It creates displacement of the organs inside the core space. And because we don’t have the mechanical action of that muscle working properly, it starts to become colder. So our systems, when they’re colder, they don’t have the ability to function. We need heat, we need energy to ensure that all of these cellular actions happening inside the cell all the time are able to do their job. But as soon as the body starts to become cold as a result of not breathing properly, now we don’t have the energy to send all of that life force to the cells as well as detoxify the body efficiently. And it’s fascinating because when we breathe consciously, we can feed the body up to six times the oxygen that’s 600% more oxygen. I mean, just even consider that it’s amazing and it’s not like we’re pulling six times the air into the lungs.

Deanna Hansen: We are directing the air in the lungs to where the majority of the oxygen receptor sites reside, which is at the base. So the absorption rate increases dramatically as well. They have shown that 85% of weight loss comes through proper exhalation. So if we’re not breathing properly, we’re storing all of this waste in the body. So we basically compress and balloon and become toxic as a result of falling out of balance and the fascia having to allow that collagen to migrate to create these building blocks so that we don’t tip over and land on our face. So that’s why we really need to understand the heating of the body, and that’s why we need to look at the extremities as the major cause sites, because the calves in the feet, they’re the furthest from the engine. So whenever I’m looking at a body and doing an assessment, there’s always going to be one foot that’s going to be acting like a flat tire or the driver of pulling the body away from balance, and then the other side of the body is going to become the anchor.

So the further that driving foot pulls us away, the more tight and rigid the opposite side of the body becomes, and it anchors. So if my right foot is the one pulling me away, now my left shoulder, for example, is getting drawn into that system. So the muscles back through here are under this constant contraction to try to stop me from tipping over, and that’s why we’ll have shoulder issues. It’s also pulling the shoulder out of its joints so we can end up having issues with arthritis. And this is every single cell in the body. I’m just using the shoulder as an example, but that’s why it’s so important to understand the limbs. The limbs are truly the puppet masters of the core. I work with a lot of people with scoliosis and simply addressing the core and the spine is never going to give us lasting results because as soon as we start walking, we’re going to get pulled back into this negative fascia alignment pattern, and we’re going to continue to cycle through those issues lifelong as well. Gravity attracts or is attracted to dense tissue, so the denser the body becomes as a result of it becoming cold and out of alignment the faster we go through the aging process.

Jodi Cohen: You said a couple of things and you detailed this really nicely in your book. You talked about energy and you talked about weight, and that was part of what got you into this. You most of us were like, oh, the more exercise, the skinnier I’ll be, the healthier I’ll be. And it didn’t work out for you. And I mean, look at how gorgeous you are. Can you talk a little bit about your story and your personal experience with changing your breathing, opening your fascia, and the weight loss and the energy boost?

Deanna Hansen: Absolutely. So it was back in my twenties when I was training to be an athletic therapist. So athletic therapy in Canada would be like a physiotherapist, but really trained to work with elite athletes. So I’m doing the work, I’m working out like a fiend. I’m doing 400 situps a day, running ty bow aerobics, weights, I mean, you name it, I’m working it.

Deanna Hansen: I was also dieting in the way that back then I understood dieting, which is basically just limiting calorie intake. I had no concept of what that truly meant from a healthy perspective. So the harder I was working, the bigger I was getting. I was 50 pounds overweight and the majority of my size was stored in my core. So I was really ashamed of it. I felt anything but attractive or sensual. I just felt like this big block of tissue, and I never touched that area, with the exception of if I’d be coming home from a five-mile run dripping wet with sweat, I would observe that my belly would still feel cold.

So this one moment, I made some changes at the age of 30, I’m 54 now. This one moment was the seed of everything to come because I was going through some real struggles and I was having serious anxiety attacks. But this one anxiety attack in particular, I actually thought I was going to die because my breath was just frozen and locked. So for some reason, I intuitively dove my hand into my belly. Now up until that, as an athletic therapist, I always focused on deep tissue work and I had good practice because I had strong hands and I could locate scar tissue and bodies and people and work through it basically in the back and the legs as we were trained to do. But I had never paid any attention to my own belly, and here I was intuitively moving around this tissue and it was marbled with what felt like scar tissue, even though I hadn’t had any injuries or surgeries at that time.

So suddenly I’m having these aha moments. Also, just prior to this moment, I had started the practice of yoga, and I had a wonderful teacher who about every 30 seconds would remind us to breathe. And every time she would remind us, I’m like, wow, I’m not breathing. So I was just in this moment of working in this tissue, I was having these realizations like, no wonder I’m not making any progress with my dieting and my working out because there’s no lifeblood, anything getting into this tissue. So for the first evening, I spent maybe 30, 45 minutes just intuitively exploring, and the next day I woke up and I was a little tender, but I was also calm and that’s not my norm. So I was excited to finish with my patients that day, get back home, and do that work again the next night. And after the second night of doing the same thing, I stood up and I felt taller, I looked at myself in the mirror and I literally began to cry because my belly was flatter than it had looked in years, years of working so hard and failing. And yet in two days literally at my fingertips, I was making positive changes. So this became my new process. Every night I would come home from working on clients, I would start diving into my own body, and within two weeks my chronic low back pain was going away, my neck pain was improving, but most importantly, I was actually hopeful for life for the first time in a very long time. So that was, yeah, 25 years ago almost now. And I’ve never looked back.

Jodi Cohen: We’re the same age. And it’s funny when I started doing yoga, I grew an inch. I was five-six, and suddenly I was five-seven.

Deanna Hansen: Amazing.

Jodi Cohen: No, it really is amazing. And I want to talk a little bit about two things that you brought up, kind of how we kind of protect the heart and what that means both physically and emotionally, and then why we’re all such shallow breathers.

Deanna Hansen: The diaphragm is fascinating because it’s the only muscle that’s under our conscious and unconscious control. Now we’re built to survive. So whether we’re conscious breathers or not, we are going to survive as long as we do and we end up breathing through the muscles of the upper chest because pain, fear, and stress cause us to reactively hold the breath. And then on top of that, when I was a teenager, I was a highland dancer, and I was always told, to hold your belly in. Hold your belly in. Well, if you’re holding your belly in again, you’re going to breathe somehow. And so these muscles of my upper chest, they took over and they became the main breathers because I wanted to have that flat belly. But the challenge with that is now I’m basically making this foundation, the diaphragm weak, causing the entire weight of my rib cage and everything above to crash down into my abdominal space, causing everything to move outward because it’s got to go somewhere, all of that tissue.

And if I take away that space for where it’s supposed to be, now I’m ballooning, I’m getting bigger. That was such a beautiful moment for me to truly understand that because prior to that it was like, why are the rules of weight loss not applying to me? But here I’m making these changes and it was so impactful. But also when we have trauma, heartache, heartbreak, whatever it is, again, that same response of the diaphragm is there. If you see a deer survive an attack, they shake after they release that energy. Where we as humans, tend to move into that freeze mode where we’re going into protection mode and there’s a purpose for it because if we are being attacked by something, it gives us that shot of adrenaline. However, if we continue from that frozen moment and age, from that perspective, now we are truly changing everything in the body from an energetic perspective as well as how we properly feed and clean cells.

Jodi Cohen: I love that. And I mean it’s interesting. I want to kind of get into how you formulated the blocks and how they work. But one of your early exercises, it’s so simple and so powerful. You just have people place this over the belly, which is kind of near the rib cage, and it doesn’t physically hurt, but it must trigger the release of emotions. I just lay on it and wa, and I’m not in physical pain, it’s just like the shaking or all that energy is just coming out of me and it’s really powerful. So can you talk a little bit about what you teach, what the block is, how this works so amazingly well, and how you help people do this at home, which is such a gift?

Deanna Hansen: So there are three pillars to this work. So the science is called fascia decompression Block therapy is the process that we use. People can also use their hands. So either way, the goal here is to decompress the fascia at the belly button. That’s where all of the 72,000 currents of life force come together. That’s where we are attached as we are growing in the womb. So this area is, and I love how Kelly Kennedy comments on this. She said, it’s basically our first scar, and that’s exactly what it is. It’s the scar. So if we keep this abdominal space nice and open and free, we have a very different situation in our body from every aspect to how we look, how we feel, how we function, and how we perceive life. When we start compressing and we start tangling all of the tissue inside this beautiful space, it blocks that life force.

And we also end up storing those negative emotions that have been trapped inside for so long. So at the beginning of every single class, we literally lie on the tool on the belly button. And if it’s too painful to lie on the tool, you can lie on your back, place the tool on your belly button, add a little bit of pressure with your hands, and then we teach you how to train proper diaphragmatic breathing because when we inhale, the belly should become big. I always tell people, to think

pregnant belly with the inhale. And then we want to squeeze the belly small with the exhale. Most people are breathing in the opposite direction when they’re breathing through the muscles of the upper chest. There’s no activity happening in the abdominal space. And then again, the breath isn’t being pulled deeply enough into the lungs to really have optimal absorption or detoxification. So the act of lying on this for a minimum of three minutes, which we always instruct, pressure over time creates heat, it creates blood flow. And then we also instruct on really connecting to the full exhalation. When we do that, now we are training this muscle in the proper way. And also when we slow down the breath and we bring it into a relaxed state, not only does it change our brain frequency to a relaxed state, it turns on the parasympathetic nervous system and all of those wonderful things.

Jodi Cohen: I mean basically that’s amazing what you’re sharing intuitively. I’ve had some interesting traumas and the most interesting, when my son was killed in a car accident, was his dad. That was the driver. His dad was in prison for four and a half years, got released. My daughter’s like, oh, yay, call him. And I’m like, wait a minute, I never processed all this anger. I have all this stuff that I just kind of backburnered because he was out of the picture, said, I need to deal with it. And all of a sudden I’m like, dorsal, vagal freezing because it’s too much for my system and I’m in shutdown and I’m stuck. And I’m like, okay, I’m just going to lie on this. And it’s that one act it just opened. It’s almost like I’m in a room where there is no water. It gave me enough space to just take that one next breath. And I think you were kind of talking about why that placement in that specific area is so, so powerful. So much of what you do is incredibly powerful. That feels like a life raft.

Deanna Hansen: Well, and it’s because of that vagus nerve connection because now we can communicate with the brain in a much more beautiful way. What’s fascinating when we first start this process, we’re basically coming to this work as a cold shell. You know how they say we only use 10% of our brain. I believe we’re actually breathing 10% of our capacity. So when we can actually open up the diaphragm and start feeding ourselves more fully and completely, what’s really exciting is every part of the body starts awakening more. So if we only have 10% of our cells really in use because we are riddled with scar tissue and adhesions, which we all are to some degree, basically we don’t have all of our cells communicating with our brain. So then we get locked into memories of the past and fear of the future. We get pulled into this loop of trauma because we have gaps in the system.

So if 80 to 90% of our cells aren’t communicating with the brain, we’ve got a lot of dead space that we end up reliving memory over and over and over again. So as soon as we start diving in through this process and we melt adhesions, then we start connecting to those cells that are deeper than what we’re consciously aware of. And that’s where we have stored and hidden the negative emotion, the memory around a trauma. And so it has a life inside the body that keeps living as though it’s still here in the moment, even though it could have been decades ago. So when we go through the process, we melt those adhesions, we exhale out the energy, and then suddenly we move past it. And it’s beautiful because there’s no judgment around it. You simply move past it. Now we can have healing crises, we can have memories come to the surface or dreams.

It can also come out through the skin. Your body can suddenly feel like it has a fever or mucus production because the body’s really ingenious at doing what it needs to do. When we start putting positive energy in, the negative energy will come out. Sometimes people just as you mentioned, you’re crying. You have a day where you feel sad because suddenly you’ve opened up this portal of that frequency and now it’s coming out so it can leave and we want to support it leaving you. If you want to be crying all day, that’s a beautiful thing. If you’re feeling angry and there’s no immediate reason for it, it’s because you’ve opened something and you’re letting it out of the body. So these are really healthy things, but we need to understand them because if people don’t understand those healing crises, they can be a little scary. But through the process of connecting to that full exhale, we very efficiently and effectively move that negative energy out to keep the space inside renewed and clean. And I love Greg Braden’s book, the God Code, and he goes into detail, I’m not very good with detail, but he shares that on the surface layer of every single cell. And I believe that the surface layer of every single cell is the fascia connecting every other single cell lies the message God lies within. It’s fascinating.

Jodi Cohen: I totally believe that. And the other thing that’s fascinating that I really appreciate about your block and your teaching, sometimes I feel like we need to titrate the intensity of the release. There’s so much there. And with your therapy, with oils, with so many things, it’s like if you open the soda can, it might explode. So you let out the pressure a little bit easily. I feel like you do a wonderful job kind of helping people to titrate the intensity and really give people a tool to kind of, we have EMDR, we have kind of mental tools to work on the trauma, but I really love what you said that if we don’t really address it in the body, it’s still there.

Deanna Hansen: It is. And the reality is those adhesions in the fascia will grip in adhere to bone with a force of up to 2000 pounds per square inch. I mean, that’s another thing that’s like how is that even possible? How can our body be so strongly held out of alignment? But you can feel it. You can if people have cold feet and you can feel the density in people’s body where we’re dense, we have a lack of flow, and then we also have a whole bunch of adhesions blocking those cells from communicating with our brain, with our whole system. So to be able to understand how to release the extremities while connecting with the breath is such a beautiful simple process. So for all of the listeners here, one of the things that we share for everybody to do every single day, and it’s mind-blowing the changes, is to work between the toes because again, the feet are the furthest from the engine.

So if we take a finger or say a pencil, if you don’t have the strength in your fingers and you press down between each toe for three minutes to the point where you feel that pain as you’re connecting to your exhalation, we start to re-pattern the feet because this is where we’re most strongly gripped and held. So let’s say we had a trauma when we were a child and we ended up in that freeze mode with the breath again, we’re still going to be breathing but differently now. And now that your diaphragm isn’t working, we have all these cells as we’re developing and growing, not being supported through proper breath and detoxification. So then we end up burying all this. As we keep going through time, we get shorter, wider, and denser. So when we start putting some energy, some heat, some love into these spaces, then we connect the breath to the extremities where we’re most strongly held and we start moving the energy in a nicer way. Because yes, there are lots of things that can happen if people just dive into a process and disrupt that trauma too much too fast. You can get overwhelmed, but working the feet and then the extremity, a simple way to do it, three minutes pushing into between each finger just like this, and it’s painful. It’s surprisingly painful.

Jodi Cohen: One at a time, or can you take your own, my yoga instructor always tells us to do all the toes at once with the hands, is that too much?

Deanna Hansen: I do all the toes now, but in the beginning, until you really get an understanding of what it should feel like between each toe, I feel that if people try to do it all at once, they might feel it in only two and they might not be getting the right pressure in all of them. So you’ll still get benefits for sure. But I always tell people, if you’re watching a TV show spend, spend the time just doing it for half an hour, and then when you’re done, stand up, grip the toes into the floor because not only do we want to release the old patterning, we now want to turn these beautiful mechanisms, 26 bones in the feet. We want to turn them into the springy, wonderful foundations of our body that they’re supposed to be instead of becoming a flat tire. So through that gripping the toes, we pump up the tires essentially, and then we can drive our body forward in life without falling into those collapses. And that is also just such a beautiful way to release the energy more effectively and simply throughout the whole body instead of it getting all jarred up and it has nowhere to go.

Jodi Cohen: One of the things before we kind of get into your block and how people can work with you, you mentioned Kelly Kennedy. I’m so intrigued by the intersection of the vagus nerve, the fascia, and the lymph, and I love your take on that, and how they interact with each other.

Deanna Hansen: Well, I mean they’re all married together because again, if we’ve got the adhesions now we have a blockage in our lymphatic system. So adhesions are the roadblocks to whether it’s energy flow or fluids, so lymph being a fluid, if we’re collapsed and twisted over, then we have a blockage for the lymphatic flow as well. And that’s why I love the work that Kelly does as well because it’s such a beautiful compliment. In fact, this is a compliment to everything including your work, because you do the same thing with your beautiful essential oils. You teach people how to move that fluid, and there are so many different ways we can do it, but the adhesions do become that roadblock no matter what. So to understand how to melt those adhesions and get that breath strong, to keep the body warm brings all of these different opportunities that we have for healing into a, not one plus one equals two, but an exponential benefit for our health going forward.

Jodi Cohen: It’s interesting. That’s actually why I created the fascia release formula because I call it like the vagus nerve has co-factors. It’s not just stimulating the vagus nerve. That’s not enough. There are other aspects of the physiology and the emotional state that impact it. And so we have to look at all of them.

Deanna Hansen: And I learned more about the parasympathetic nervous system from your book than I’ve ever read anywhere.

Jodi Cohen: Thank you.

Deanna Hansen: Yeah, it’s fascinating. I mean, everybody needs to read that book.

Jodi Cohen: Oh, you’re so kind. Thank you. But I feel mean, it’s so funny because I’ve been doing this for 12 years and it’s like I’ve wondered if the universe throws obstacles in my way so I can figure out how to get past them. So I want to kind of talk about what you offer people, how they can work with you, how they can use this block to kind of reduce the fascial adhesion. So speak a little bit to what you offer people if they’re like, oh, I need that. All the things I didn’t know I needed.

Deanna Hansen: Now we have what’s called our starter program, and so the block comes with the starter program and we have classes working throughout the body. We always begin working first in the core of the rib cage because most importantly, it’s all about the breath. So again, there are three pillars. The first pillar is creating space that we do through lying on the tool, then inflating the space through the teaching of proper diaphragmatic breathing, and then maintaining that space through teaching people proper postural foundations. So in our program, we have classes that teach you all of these things. We work through the entire body, we work head to toe. And then from there we also have a membership with tons and tons of programs and additional classes. We also teach people how to bring some hand work in. We even have a video on conscious walking because how we use our body is as important as going through the process of releasing the patterning that we have and learning how to breathe properly.

So we make it really simple in our programs to do that. So you simply just order the tool. Block therapy.com is our website, and you start, we also have a sampler program and would love to give to your people listening for free. It’s amazing. It’s nine classes using a rolled-up towel so you can begin right away and the towel, when you roll it up nice and dense, it works pretty darn good because it’s about the teaching. So the difference between this process and some of the other fascia modalities is if we are rolling on a fascia roller or a tennis ball or something like that, the rolling keeps us on the surface. Just like you’re taking a boat on the surface of the ocean, we need to deep-sea dive. So the tool is made of either bamboo or wood because bone and wood, bamboo and wood, similar in density to bone.

Deanna Hansen: And because the fascia will grip and adhere to the bone with that 2000-pound per square inch seal, it’s a magnetic seal. We need something similar in density to be able to reach that depth. So when you’re lying in a position for a minimum of three minutes after you connect with the breath and you understand the process of seeking pain on purpose, which I’d love to talk in a moment about, we teach you how to slowly shear through the layers so we can release that magnetic seal. If I have a magnet far enough away from each other, there’s no attraction, pull it close together and it seals with the force. If I try to pull this away, I won’t have any luck doing that, but I can slide it apart. So the shearing allows us to go through the depths of fascia to get to those adhesions with the tools.

Jodi Cohen: Oh my gosh, I’m having a full body knowing, okay, talk about pain on purpose.

Deanna Hansen: So pain is the baby crying, and whether it’s pain, anxiety, or any other, what we would determine as a negative sensation, that’s your cell letting you know that, Hey, mom or dad, you’re asking me to do a job, but you’re not giving me what I need. If we’re compressed, we’re squishing it and then it’s not going to be properly fed, not clean, it’s going to be dehydrated, exhausted. So it gives us information through pain signals. So we basically, again, if we are, and nobody is a perfectly aligned body, every cell is in the correct position, but because again, we don’t start falling away, but pain takes us away. So let’s say I’m a golfer and I wake up and I’ve got a little bit of a tweak in my neck. I slept funny, but I wanted to go and play that golf game, but I don’t have my normal full range of motion I’m going to play and unconsciously I’m going to adapt my swing so that I can still do the action.

But there’s going to be a slight shift in how I do that. If that doesn’t get switched and changed in the moment, which it normally doesn’t, it adds up. And because now I’m twisted in a different way, the fascia, that migration of collagen is going to constantly be adapting to these new forces, these new negative alignments I’m creating in my body. So pain takes us away from alignment. So we’re going to use pain as our roadmap back to that correct alignment. And what’s lovely about it is the pressure fibers are larger in diameter than the pain fibers. So initially you get into the position and you sense that pain butt, you are in control, and we always teach people your breath is your guide. As long as you’re breathing in a relaxed way, you’re feeding and healing, if anything hurts so much, it takes your relaxed breath away. That’s your body saying too intense. So let’s back off a little bit. We can do the work on the floor, we can do it on a bed. Most of the work is done lying down, which is also lovely.

Jodi Cohen: So you talk about in the book your mom hurt her ankle or hurt her leg, and just this idea of healing and how we think of inflammation as the bad guy that we need to stop, but how you have kind of figured out how to work with inflammation to expedite healing. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Deanna Hansen: Yeah, and it always struck me as odd as I was going through my athletic therapy training. Somebody would have a torn muscle or something would happen, and I was always like, ice makes no sense to me. Why would the body be doing this as a natural response? And we as humans think, oh, we know better. It just never made sense. So everything I’ve ever taught, I’ve first done on myself. So here my mom comes in, she’s a second-degree ankle sprain. She comes right off the golf course to see me. And so I’ve only done stuff on myself for it. And I’m like, okay, well, I’m going to test my mother. I mean, if something goes wrong, she’s not going to sue me or something. So I have her on the table and first of all, I just get her to calm down with her breath, and then I just add a little bit of energy into her quads and her calf just so that there’s some good flow.

And then right where the injury is, I start just applying a little bit of pressure, and at first, she’s just pulling away, but again, I’m just like, keep breathing. You let me know. I give her the control and then before I know it, I’m going deeper, deeper, deeper. And then I had her standing up on it and then I had her walking on it and it was amazing. She walked out almost without a limp, and I explained to her, you’re probably going to be in some pain tonight. I’m going to come back over tomorrow morning and I’m going to work on it again. She did let me know in no uncertain terms that evening, that she felt the pain because what went into the body, we allowed to come out. We didn’t freeze it in that negative state, and the next day she was 80% better.

It was amazing. So it took hardly any time for her to fully heal from this injury. And I always explain with inflammation, it’s like here the body is directing all this blood flow with all of the ingredients to rebuild the tissue. So if you’re baking a cake, you’ve got all the raw ingredients, you mix it up, you have batter, but if you put the batter in the freezer, you have frozen batter, put the batter in the oven, you bake a cake. We need heat and energy to allow those raw ingredients to rebuild whatever was damaged. And we don’t even have to know because the body will take care of itself as long as we support the natural processes of the body. So we can repair so much faster than, well, not only faster, but in a completely different manner than if we allow that scar tissue or that injury to be healed with scar tissue.

Deanna Hansen: Because what that does is now I’ve got a gap. All of the collagen and the surrounding tissue, if it’s not being rebuilt through that inflammation is going to get dumped in. And now we have a scar, and that scar has no last ability. It acts like a beaver down to cells on the other side, and then we get pulled into this chronic inflammation because your brain or your body is still saying, well, wait a second, you’re not really healed over there. Now there’s all these other cells that need more attention. So the body keeps directing blood flow to this area, but if we’ve already frozen it, it becomes backed up and stagnant and creates more damage and then more inflammation, and then the body gets thrown into this crazy response. It’s dysregulated now. So no matter where you’re starting in your body, we can turn on all of those healing proteins by heating the body up and by understanding how to melt the adhesions that were created through this process so that we can actually go backward through time in our tissue, get back to those injuries and truly heal them properly.

And it’s just so lovely and fascinating to see because again, it’s a simple process, not without those shifts because those shifts are real, but we’re in pain anyway. And rather than having gravity direct where our future holds us to give people and empower them to be able to walk through life and awaken their greater potentials and understand how that full exhalation is really the counterforce to gravity. So when we can get back to the basics and the body’s designed to do this, it’s not like we’re forcing the body to do something different than what it’s supposed to do. We’re just treating it so that it can be remembered.

Jodi Cohen: I really love that. I forgot to ask, I love this little one too. I’m slightly obsessed with the neck as kind of the big bottleneck because it lets the good things into the brain, it helps with drainage. Can you just talk about it, I know you have a bigger program for those people who are interested in the fascia release on the neck, what do you cover in that program, like for the vagus nerve, the neck, everything?

Deanna Hansen: Yeah, so I have a ton of those classes actually in the membership where I’m using because we’ve got actually two different size blocks. I’ve got a series called The Baby. You’ve got the Paddle, this is the Baby.

Jodi Cohen: I have all three.

Deanna Hansen: Oh, you’ve got all perfect. I’ve got a series called Double Blocking the Neck and Throat, and it’s three 30 minutes literally focusing through here. And I love that series because it really creates that space. It opens up this area, all of those adhesions. I’ve also got a class in there called the Wrinkle Wrecker because we really want to understand the tongue. The tongue is partly designed to support the weight of the head, but if it’s not understood, it becomes a hindrance to this area and impacts your thyroid, your major lymphatic drainage sites, and the carotid arteries. So in the membership alone, we have that, but I also have a program called the Face Lifter Program using that paddle now, we launched it a little bit ago and our community loved it, and then we’ve had some growth things going on, so it’s not quite available yet. The paddle will be probably by the fall with our whole program around that Rev revamped. So I’m very excited about that. But people are getting tremendous results just from people.

Jodi Cohen: You look amazing. You are the cover model for your own product.

Deanna Hansen: Thank you.

Jodi Cohen: Anything that I haven’t asked you that you’d like to share?

Deanna Hansen: Wow. I mean, there are so many things and what I just get so excited about is it doesn’t matter if you’re a kid. We’ve got people starting in their nineties. It’s wild. If you’re an elite athlete, if you’re struggling to get out of bed every day, you can access this work and you take it to the level just like yoga, if you have a goal of doing the splits, you start where you are and you work toward the goal. So with this process, it doesn’t matter where you are.

Jodi Cohen: Hips, for anyone that like me, likes to cheat in pigeon pose or side-to-side lenses because you can’t bend is great for the hips.

Deanna Hansen: Yes. And simply working between the toes will change the game. I had a client who was at one of my retreats at Sparkling Hill last year. She’s in her seventies, and she was sitting there and when she’s sitting cross-legged, her knees were up about this high and she said, okay, Deanna, I’m determined. What do I need to do in three months to get this to change? And I said, every day work between your toes because the foot is what’s messing up your hip. Just like if I took your arm and I pulled it this way, now this is my range. If I release this now, this is my range. So by releasing the toes she shared in our community group last month, her knees are all the way to the floor.

Jodi Cohen: Wow. Okay. I am on board. I definitely have my knees too. This has been so amazing. We will definitely have to talk more, but please tell people where they can find you and learn more about working with you.

Deanna Hansen: So block therapy.com is my website and there’s so much information on there. My favorite thing is if you happen to be on Facebook, we have a private Facebook group called Block Therapy Community, which anybody can join. This is lovely because there are 15,000 members in there now, and whatever question you ask, you’re going to have the members answering you as well. So if you have fibromyalgia or MS or you want to know, does this work for cellulite or whatever it is, you can ask those questions and you’re going to get real answers from the people doing the work that have seen the changes. And that’s the most exciting part for me because I mean, I can talk all I want about it, but to actually have people experience those changes and to be sharing with you, community is so important and is just such a lovely place to be. I have two of my therapists moderating the group and they’re fantastic.

Jodi Cohen: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time, for your brilliance, and for everything you shared. I’m sure everybody got a lot of dots connected and for your very generous software, we’ll put that in the show notes for the nine-class program, nine-day program.

Deanna Hansen: Yeah, it’s called the Sampler Program. So everybody just gets that link, try it, and if you love it, then you can go to the next step.

Jodi Cohen: Amazing. Thank you so much.

Deanna Hansen: Thank you, Jodi.

Jodi Cohen: Thank you so much for listening. I hope this podcast empowered you with some useful information and takeaways. If you liked this episode, please consider sharing a positive review or subscribing. I would also love to offer you my free parasympathetic toolkit as a gift just for listening. It will teach you how to activate the most important nerve in your body to turn on your ability to heal. This free toolkit includes a checklist, a video, and a detailed guide. If this podcast prompted any questions, you can always find answers at my blog at vibrantblueoils.com or my book Essential Oils to Boost the Brain and Heal the Body. Until next time, wishing you Vibrant Health.

I have been stimulating my vagus nerve with a Parasympathetic blend for decades and it always makes me feel better!

It is an immediate band-aid for any stress, anxiety, or overwhelm. 

That said, it has not completely eliminated the underlying stress, anxiety, or overwhelm. It has definitely made those emotions more manageable and has reduced the intensity of the emotions, but they were still surfacing on a regular basis.

So I started to wonder what I was missing.  

I knew that vagus nerve stimulation successfully calms the nervous system and helps regulate brain-to-body stress signals.  

I was also aware that the limbic system – particularly the amygdala – was always scanning the environment for external threats which then signals the sympathetic branch of the nervous system to help hormones and neurotransmitters to help you prepare to fight or flee, which many of us experience as anxiety. I formulated Limbic Reset to help regulate the amygdala and address this brain-to-body root cause.

But it was not until I began aggressively focusing on body-to-brain signals – by releasing my fascia with Fascia Release and opening my Heart – that I was able to address the root cause of my stress and finally get off the stress treadmill.

What are Internal Safety Signals?

Your limbic system is constantly assessing threats from both your external AND INTERNAL environment.  

This means that in addition to scanning sensory inputs (visual, auditory, smell) from the external environment, your limbic system is reading signals from the body – primarily from the heart and the fascia – to assess safety cues.

In other words, if your body is storing trauma in the fascia, that impacts the signals that are sent to the brain and keeps your limbic and nervous systems stuck in a hyper-vigilant or maladapted stress response, which is why even though I would stimulate my vagus nerve with Parasympathetic blend and it would calm the stress at that moment, the stress would return the following day. Brain-to-body safety signals cannot work in isolation if the body continues to send incoherent signals to the brain. You have to address BOTH to resolve the underlying root cause that is driving the chronic stress response.

Restoring coherence to the fascia and the heart helps restore internal safety cues to your limbic system and address the underlying root cause of your stress response.

Bidirectional Communication Between the Brain and the Body

Your body and your brain are constantly communicating via bi-directional signals that pass both ways between your body – primarily your heart and your fascia – and your brain. 

Your heart and your brain are in constant communication with the fascia serving as the bridge between the heart and the brain. Research finds that “emotion processing is prompted by an initial modulation from ascending vagal inputs to the brain, followed by sustained bidirectional brain-heart interactions.”  

Information from the heart – including emotions – is sent via afferent nerve pathways in the vagus nerve and may directly affect activity in the amygdala. Afferent neurons – also called sensory neurons – are the nerve fibers responsible for bringing sensory information from the outside world – including vision, hearing, smell, or taste, as well as the sense of touch, pain, and temperature – into the brain. Dr. Rollin McCraty, the Research Director for the Heart Math Institute, shares that perceptions and emotions are not dictated entirely by the brain’s responses to stimuli arising from our external environment, but also include the internal sensations or feedback transmitted to the brain from the body, including signals from the heart and the fascia.

More specifically, your heart generates a powerful electromagnetic field that can inhibit or facilitate the brain’s electrical activity, influencing your brain’s rhythms and cognitive functions. Changes in your internal emotional state are accompanied by predictable changes in the heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, and digestion. 

Fascia, often described as the body’s connective tissue matrix, serves as the bridge between the heart and brain. This complex network of collagen fibers not only supports our physical structure but also acts as an information highway. Imagine it as a fiber optic network within you, transmitting signals between the heart and brain. When fascia is healthy, this communication flows smoothly, facilitating a state of coherence.

Heart Coherence

Your emotions are reflected in your heart rhythm patterns. When you feel stressed, anxious afraid, or angry, your heartbeat reflects that negative energy through a chaotic, erratic, or disordered heart rhythm known as an “incoherent heart rhythm pattern”.

Your heart then sends signals to your brain that influence your mental and emotional experience. 

The neural signals traveling from your heart to your brain follow this incoherent pattern as well. This discordant heart pattern can then throw your mind into chaos, inhibiting higher cognitive functions, and impairing your ability to think clearly, remember, learn, reason, or make effective decisions. 

More specifically, the type of chemicals released into your body depends upon the quality of the emotional signal sent from the heart to the brain. The incoherence of the rhythmic activity of your heart inhibits higher cognitive functions such as attention, perception, memory, and problem-solving.

Conversely, when you’re experiencing positive emotions like love, joy, gratitude, and compassion, your heart reflects a balanced, or harmonious ”coherent” rhythm that looks smooth, ordered, and stable. 

Coherent heart rhythms initiate afferent messaging to the brain, alongside related feedback from your nervous system. The brain recognizes this positive pattern and works to lower the baseline of arousal, allowing your amygdala to shift from negative to positive emotions. This allows your body’s systems to synchronize and work better, enhancing your ability to think clearly, learn, remember, reason, and make healthy, thoughtful decisions.

By opening the Heart and allowing energy to flow freely through it, you support open communication between the body and the brain. Heart opening also allows the fascia and muscles surrounding the heart to help release its grip.

Fascia Coherence

Fascia is a three-dimensional web of connective tissue that supports very deep layers of tissue surrounding the physical heart. Your fascia also acts as a high-speed conductor or communication network, allowing electrical and biochemical signals to travel efficiently between the body and the brain.  

In this capacity, your fascia helps send signals from your body to your mind, allowing you to function as a coherent whole. The alignment of collagen fibers within connective tissues of your fascia closely resembles traditional acupuncture meridians allowing these channels to provide pathways for speedy electromagnetic signal propagation. 

When fascia becomes compromised through injury, physical or emotional stress, or poor posture, adhesions or blockages develop compromising the communication network.  

When you experience stress, part of you is resistant, which triggers you to physically contract,  constrict, or pull away from physical danger, a negative thought, or an emotional aversion. This triggers your fight-or-flight response.

In the process, you constrict and restrict your breath and your energy in preparation for the attack. When you feel you can’t flee or fight your way out of a bad situation, you hold your breath or breathe minimally and freeze, hoping the threat will pass you unscathed. Instead, 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. After stress passes, the emotions should be discharged and released, but if it often does not – keeping the stressful experience stuck in your tissues and the constant feedback loop of stress circulating to your brain.

This is especially true around critical communication centers like your heart. To help unpack your blocked or stuck heart energy, you need to open up the space around your physical heart with a fascia blend.

In other words, brings the heart and body into coherence to shift the messages sent to the brain and limbic system to complete and release the trauma loop. When the emotions are not released from the body, the trauma does not release and you stay stuck in a trauma loop.

Your fascia generates the state of coherence in the water molecules of our cells, constantly transmitting essential information to the body and the brain. This fascia coherence helps to support a higher degree of order and alignment with your body.

How Coherence Communicates Safety Signals

Your amygdala coordinates your mental and behavioral response to environmental threats. 

You might think of it as your threat assessment center. It monitors incoming signals from your five senses to scan input from the external environment and messages from the body to scan the internal environment for emotional content and signals and compares them with stored emotional memories (your internal baseline) to determine the level of perceived threat.

Past experience builds within us a set of familiar patterns that are established and maintained in the neural networks. Inputs to the brain from both the external and internal environments contribute to the maintenance of these patterns or baselines.  

Your amygdala is looking for a match or mismatch with these pre-existing baselines. If external or internal input is sufficiently different from the familiar reference pattern, this “mismatch” or departure from the familiar underlies an amygdala “hijack” of your neural pathways activating your autonomic nervous system and triggering an emotional response (that can present as overwhelm, anxiety or panic attacks, to keep you on alert to potential or imminent danger) before the higher brain centers – like your prefrontal cortex which helps to regulate your emotional response – can receive the sensory information.

In other words, familiarity feels safe.  When an input is unfamiliar – even if it is ultimately a positive new opportunity – it can automatically trigger great vigilance in your amygdala If the rhythm patterns generated by the heart are disordered and incoherent, especially in early life, the amygdala learns to expect disharmony as the familiar baseline and thus we feel “at home” with incoherence.

Rollin McCraty of HeartMath explains that if you regularly and consistently spike your arousal, through extreme mental states of fear, stress, or anxiety, then hormonal responses ensure that may over-sensitize your system, prompting you to react even more quickly to emotional or environmental stimuli. This further impedes the rational cognitive functions of your prefrontal cortex, making thoughts of how to reduce stress or anxiety more difficult, and leaving you open to more stress or anxiety-inducing stimuli. This perpetuates the vicious circle of stress

This is one reason that you cannot think your way out of trauma into a new baseline. Your ‘thinking’ higher cortex has limited access to the emotion-processing centers of the limbic brain, making it difficult to counter a stress response with thoughts alone. The sensory input from the body travels more quickly than the thoughts coming from your prefrontal cortex pushing your body into a stress response before your brain can override it. The key is to send safety signals from the body.

In other words, the only way to change a maladapted stress response pattern is to change the input from the body to the brain via the heart and the fascia coherence. Your heart and your fascia are uniquely positioned as a powerful entry point into the communication network that connects the body, mind, and emotions.

Changing the input from your heart and your body sends coherent signals to the amygdala which may help support feelings of safety and comfort that alleviate the stress response.

Essential Oils Support Coherence

Nature is coherent which is why inhaling or topical applying essential oils that are derived from the concentrated essences of plants helps shift you into coherence both physically and emotionally. 

Coherence is defined as a state of harmony within the mind, emotions, and body which is naturally found in nature. A coherent heart rhythm follows a stable, balanced pattern similar to the patterns found in nature. Topically applying essential oils derived from coherent plants can shift your body into a state of coherence just as harmonious language or gratitude practices promote emotional well-being. I believe this is one reason that flowers or plants are gifted as an expression of love or kindness. They lift your mood, boost your sense of safety and joy, and enhance your natural coherent state.

What’s more, your sense of smell is correlated with your sense of safety. Your olfactory nerve has direct access to the amygdala. 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.

Smell is the only sense that does not travel to the thalamus (the relay center for all sensory signals) before accessing the forebrain. Your other four senses – including sound, sight, taste, and touch – send signals through the thalamus first, which then sends the signals to your amygdala before forwarding them to your prefrontal cortex.

This may explain why your brain responds to smell-based stimuli – like essential oils – within seconds. In fact, research 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.

The following essential oils have been profoundly helpful in changing the input from the body to the brain. Your heart and your fascia are uniquely positioned as a powerful entry point into the communication network that connects the body, mind, and emotions. Essential oils that support the heart and the fascia are therefore ideal to send safety signals to the brain and break the trauma loop.

Heart™ 

Your 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, the hormonal system, and most of the body’s major organs. While all organs in the body send signals to your brain, your heart has significantly more afferent inputs than other organs and is the primary source of consistent dynamic rhythms to the brain.

For example, heart coherence signals brain coherence, which activates your prefrontal cortex helps override emotional circuitry, and supports healthy emotional regulation. When your heart beats in a coherent rhythm, it communicates with the other organs and systems in your body and may help to shift them into the same coherent rhythm.

Essential oils topically applied over the heart may help bring the heart into coherence. Heart™ blend balances the heart to enhance compassion and support, integrate and reset all the systems of the body, including supporting feelings of open-heartedness, expansiveness, and receptivity while mitigating loneliness, sadness, and grief.

When any part of the body isn’t functioning at an optimal level, the heart has to work harder. For example, when the body is in a state of stress, it needs more oxygen which increases the heart rate. 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 help reset the homeostatic mechanism for the entire body.

Heart™ blend contains a proprietary blend of organic and/or wild-crafted essential oils that help 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.

Fascia Release™

Neural inputs that signal the brain may originate from tissues and organs that are affiliated with your fascia.

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.

Topical supplements play an important role in supporting fascia health and recovery from inflammation. For example, essential oils easily penetrate layers of restricted fascia, creating warmth to break up congestion, increasing circulation, lymphatic drainage, and mobilizing adhered tissue.

Essential oils soften the myofascial tissue, allowing the deep and constrained tissue to stretch and move as it is designed to function. They also have an analgesic effect, relaxing the muscles and reducing pain.

Essential oils can be used to revitalize and de-stress the fascia and muscles, working quickly to break down inflamed, fibrous tissue, and removing toxins from the painful area.

The essential oils in the Fascia Release™ blend are uniquely formulated to unravel deeply held tensions, constrictions, and energetic blockages in your tissues to reduce pain, improve blood and lymphatic circulation, and release fear, repressed emotions, and tension held in the body (organs, muscles, tendons, bones, and joints) or the mind. Topically applying Fascia Release™ over the physical heart or any area of physical tightness or pain opens the space to allow energy and emotions to flow down and out of your system. Releasing fascia constriction in the back of the body – specifically between the shoulder blades at the back of the heart – helps to physically release fascial constrictions and adhesions around the heart that may help open the heart for the healthy flow of emotional energy.

Featured Oils:

References:

¿Un niño quisquilloso con la comida le está quitando el placer de comer a su familia? En este podcast, Jodi se une a su amiga Katie Kimball para compartir estrategias para cultivar hábitos alimentarios saludables en niños de todas las edades.

Únase hoy para aprender:

• El proceso de cinco pasos de Katie para ayudar a los padres a abordar las causas fundamentales de los caprichos a la hora de comer, que a menudo implican factores fisiológicos y dinámicas de poder, en lugar de centrarse únicamente en la comida en sí.
• La importancia de crear un entorno alimentario estructurado y de baja presión donde los niños puedan explorar e interactuar con los alimentos sin sentirse obligados a comerlos.
• Estrategias prácticas para involucrar a los niños en la preparación de alimentos, según su edad y etapa de desarrollo, para desarrollar habilidades y conocimientos alimentarios.
• Consejos para navegar las comidas en restaurantes y deconstruir las comidas familiares para adaptarse a diferentes preferencias dietéticas mientras se mantiene el enfoque en comidas nutritivas y compartidas.

Este episodio proporciona un enfoque integral y compasivo para superar los caprichos a la hora de comer y cultivar una relación positiva con la comida para toda la vida, tanto para los niños como para los padres.

Para más información sobre Kids Cooking Real Food puedes visitar:

¡Sintonízate para saber más!

Si disfrutó este episodio, considere compartir una reseña positiva o suscribirse. También puede encontrar más información y recursos en el sitio web de Jodi Cohen,

¡Aprenda más sobre Katie aquí! Instagram: Katie Kimball Chef infantil | Facebook: los niños cocinan comida real

Acerca de Katie Kimball

Katie Kimball es conocida como la voz nacional de la cocina saludable para niños. Es ex maestra, dos veces oradora de TEDx, autora y madre de cuatro hijos. Creó el curso electrónico Kids Cook Real Food, recomendado por The Wall Street Journal como la mejor clase de cocina en línea para niños. Su blog Kitchen Stewardship ayuda a las familias a mantenerse saludables sin volverse locas, y su misión es conectar a las familias en torno a alimentos saludables, enseñar a todos los niños a cocinar y ayudar a las familias a cultivar estas habilidades vitales tan importantes.

Si disfrutas del podcast Essential Alchemy, deja una reseña de Jodi en iTunes.

Jodi Cohen: Hello and welcome to Essential Alchemy. Alchemy is defined as the power or process that changes or transforms something in a mysterious or impressive way. My hope is that the information in this podcast can help you transform your mood, energy, physical health, or even some dots to help you shift your mental or emotional state. I’m your host, Jodi Cohen, a bestselling author, award-winning journalist, functional practitioner, lifelong learner, and founder of Vibrant Blue Oils, a company that sells proprietary blends of high-quality, organic, or wildcrafted essential oil remedies designed to help you return to your ideal mental, physical, and emotional state. You can find out more about me and my company at vibrantblueoils.com. And with that, let’s get started with today’s episode.

I’m super excited to be joined by my very dear friend, Mollie Eastman, to talk about our circadian blueprint, which is a really hot topic and one that I’m excited you’re going deeper into. So for those of you that dunno, Molly, she is the creator of Sleep as a Skill and the host of Sleep is a Skill podcast. Sleep is a skill as a company that optimizes people’s sleep through a unique blend of technology, accountability, and behavioral change. So necessary after navigating insomnia while traveling internationally, she created what she couldn’t find a place to go and learn the skill set of sleep. And with a background in behavioral change from the nonverbal group, she became fascinated with the chronobiology and its practical application to sleep and our overall experience of life, knowing the difference between a life with sleep and without. She’s now dedicated her life to sharing the forgotten skillset of sleep, and she’s working on what I’m sure will be a bestselling upcoming book. So welcome, Mollie.

Mollie Eastman: Oh, well, thank you so much for that kind introduction and for your support in this journey of really sharing the importance of sleep and the ways that we can support getting that great sleep and your amazing products that help support that mission.

Jodi Cohen: Yeah, I think it takes a village a little bit, especially when it comes to sleep. So let’s kick off. Tell me about, for those people who don’t realize how important sleep is, let’s talk about sleep.

Mollie Eastman: Yeah, absolutely. So talking about sleep, I mean it might help too to know that as you’re listening to me as a speaker on sleep, it’s like I’ve given my whole life to sleep at this point. It’s my mission on the planet to help support people with their sleep. And yet it wasn’t always a workable area for me. And part of how I think about my life now is in a three-part series, one of how before life looked before I had really the sleep breakdown, what that looked like during and after. And so before I had that real sleep breakdown, what life looked like was I didn’t think too much about my sleep beyond, it’s just like, oh, this is my lot in life. It’s a fixed thing. I have a lot of labels and narratives. I would say I’m a short sleeper, I’m a night owl.

It’s in my jeans. I’ll sleep when I’m in dead. So I’d say all these things and I would then create a reality where I’d operate within that and my habits got more and more pronounced. This was as a kid into my teenage years, college, and beyond. And over time, this kept going and going. And I wouldn’t correlate as a serial entrepreneur in Manhattan burning the candle at both ends. Oh no. That suddenly I’m getting sick more and more frequently. I had the beginnings of an ulcer. I had shingles in my twenties. I had a lot more anxiety mounting, and yet I would be justified and righteous about my habits and say, well, I go to bed late. What’s the big deal? I’ll just wake up later. I’m an entrepreneur so I can make my own hours. What’s the problem? Not until I went through this period of insomnia that totally changed everything for me.

And at some of my lowest points, I finally went to the doctor and I left with sleeping pills, which is just so everyone knows it’s not supposed to be the first-line approach. We are now supposed to actually begin with CBTI, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia before doling out prescription medications for sleep. And of course, you have some amazing things that can support people when they are struggling with their sleep and beyond. And yet that’s what happened to me. So in that moment, it was like this panic of, now I’ve got this prescription, but what’s the plan here? Am I just taking this indefinitely? What am I going to do to get out of this problem? So it started this quest of learning about this thing that we do a third of our lives on average, 26 years. So went down the rabbit hole, spent a lot of time, money, energy, and effort, and in the process what ended up coming out on the other side was finally restoring my sleep.

But that was, I shared before it wasn’t even that great. So now I got to experience, wait, I can optimize my sleep. I can have this great sleep reliably, routinely, not just once in a blue moon. And it changed my experience of life so much so that I couldn’t stop talking about it. And what got developed was kind of these small groups and they started growing and growing and now we have sleep as a skill.

Mollie Eastman: So now we have online courses, podcasts, newsletters, work with high stakes poker players, we’re in hotels and all these things. So I say all this because no matter where you might be at with your sleep, no matter if you’re going through struggles with your sleep or you’ve had times in your life with insomnia or sleep deprivation, or you just think that you could improve it a little bit, no matter where you are in the spectrum, my commitment is that sleep is a skill and that we can learn some of these tools to uplevel no matter where you’re at.

Jodi Cohen: I love that. I mean, a couple of things that you touched on that really resonated was kind of this almost aspirational, like we will sleep when we’re dead. I remember in college pulling all-nighters or when I worked in the tech industry and really feeling proud of myself for how productive I was, I’m not sleeping. And then after I had my kids and they messed up your sleep and then going through trauma and sleep was hard. It’s something you take so much for granted until you don’t have it. And so unpack a little bit some of the cognitive behavioral therapy for sleep. When someone comes to you, how do you help them to start sleeping? Where do you start?

Mollie Eastman: Yes. The CBTI, cognitive behavioral therapy is the kind of gold standard for addressing sleep across the board. Now, I bring in certain elements of that, but I bring in some new science around this thing called chronobiology. So the science of time and how time affects your biology. And part of that begins with the distinction of circadian rhythm, which you touched on in the beginning. So why do we start there? Well, what we’re seeing is that our circadian rhythm is this 24-hour kind of rhythm that we are on as human beings. And within that circadian rhythm, we’re diurnal creatures, meaning that we’re meant to be active by day and at rest at night. So it’s kind of the blueprint. We’re not nocturnal. We are meant to be active by day, and night, and rest at night. And when we don’t do that, we see some real deleterious effects come up.

We see that with shift workers. We know that it’s a possible carcinogen to engage in shift work and we want to support those people because they’re doing important work. But there is a reality to the fact that when we deviate from that rhythm, we see really real-world effects, not only from things like cancer rates going up, diabetes, heart disease, and mental health disorders, but also our course problems with our sleep-wake cycles. So the difference is you might say, well, I’m not a shift worker. Why does this apply to me? But what we’ve seen is that since 2001, the EPA did a study and they found that the average American was spending around 93% of their time indoors. And that included automobiles and that was in 2001 before the pandemic, before smartphones, Netflix, and all the fun things that bring us inside and keep us in there.

Mollie Eastman: And so we can make the estimation that we’re at least indoors around 93% of our days, if not much more, which I would wager we are. So why does that matter? Well, it turns out that the more we’ve gone indoors, that we have been obliterating the automaticity of this circadian rhythm because when we lived outside, a lot of this just got handled because then we were dependent on the sun and the temperature changes and all that would happen when the sun would rise, it would warm up the environment. Now it’s clear, okay, we only got so much time left to do whatever we got to do and then the sun would set and it’s kind of game over. But now we have this 24-hour opportunity for this comfort that we’ve created. But now there’s a great book called Comfort Crisis that I think we’re actually dealing with, which is this comfort crisis as it relates to sleep.

Because now we have this wonderful 72-degree environment that we’re set up on 24 7, and we’ve got lights that can be on 24 7 not realizing the major damning effects that this is having on our biology. So where we begin is in training and strengthening our circadian rhythm. So from a practical application point, if you’re listening and you get nothing else out of what I’m saying, what we always want to begin is begin with consistency, and we start with our wake-up time. So we start with seven days a week getting around the same wake-up time. So say it’s 7:00 AM so we want to have 7:00 AM across the board, including the weekends. You can kind of swing it around plus or minus 30 minutes or so, but you’re anchored at that consistent 7:00 AM example. Now, paired with that wake-up time, we want to marry your wake-up time with bright light exposure and we want to get you outside to do that.

So we don’t want to have sunglasses or hats or anything on that can obstruct your ability to get that sunlight in your eyes on the first part of your day. And we want to do that consistently, especially even when it’s cloudy or it’s in the winter, a lot of people say, why bother? But actually that means we want to be out and we want to be out even longer on those days because the sun has been impeded. So you want to have this kind of equalizing effect by being out there longer, getting sunlight. I’ve got these windows behind me if you see the video. So these are helpful. We still get some light cues, but they’re still obstructing some of that full-spectrum light. So there are studies that show that getting that light from behind a window can make it so that it can take 50 to a hundred times longer to reset your master clock from behind a window.

So as simple as just getting yourself physically outside or opening that window can make the difference in resetting that master clock. You can say like, well, why does that matter? Well, the bright light in the morning communicates to your body that this is the time to start our day. And you can almost imagine this kind of invisible countdown clock that’s going to help support that you’re going to get sleepy in the hours later in the evening so that you are actually with more automaticity, falling asleep at the same time.

Mollie Eastman: Now these factors are huge, so you want to aim for bright days and dark nights, and those are the two pieces that we’d want to begin with beyond light. So light dark is the most powerful, what’s called zeitgeber or time giver to strengthen your circadian rhythm. Below that temperature are meal timing, exercise, timing, thought timing, and drug timing. All of these can also affect your circadian rhythm the strength of which we can touch on as well.

Jodi Cohen: I love that. I mean, for those of us who have dogs, we’re ahead of the game. Yeah. Mollie Eastman: Oh, totally. I say that all the time.

Jodi Cohen: Out the door, what is the optimal time to be outside in sunlight? How long should I take my dog walk?

Mollie Eastman: Yeah, totally. And so this is one of these things where again, it would be so nice if we could just say, well, 10 minutes every day, bye. But it turns out there’s a dose dependent piece to this, and it depends on where you are on the globe. It depends on some of your health markers, it depends on your skin tone for a number of other reasons. So one, you can parse out this light conversation to a couple of different factors, one being about vitamin D production, and you get kind of vitamin D production a bit later in the day. So that’s a time when you need to be out for a stretch of time for many people. So it can be around 20 minutes is often the recommendation for that vitamin D piece, but it way varies based on where you are on the Fitzpatrick scale of your skin tone.

So the Fitzpatrick scale, you find where you are on the skin tone piece. So the darker your skin tone, the longer you need to be outside because it’s almost like this natural sunblock that has been created for you, especially if you’re in a northern latitude location. We really want to know these things because that can put you at a big disadvantage in producing enough of this vitamin D, which is a hormone. We have to get rid of this vitamin name part. We need to call it a hormone, which is what it is. And this can really affect your sleep period because it’s part of the story of getting you sufficient serotonin. And serotonin is a precursor to melatonin. So that’s for the vitamin Dp. So you need to be outside later in the day as well to get that, and you need to get that on your skin. But for the morning light piece, how long do I need to walk my dog component? What I would begin with at least is just looking at what can I do that it can consistently do because something is better than nothing. So even starting at around five to 10 minutes can be a behavioral win, and you’re getting that with naked eyes. So no sunglasses and what have you on there, but we’re starting there.

Jodi Cohen: That wear regular glasses. Does that block the light as well?

Mollie Eastman: So this is a controversial topic. So some kind of circadian experts will say, no, it doesn’t block things. There are other people that are calling themselves quantum biologists, and this is a whole other conversation. So some of those individuals will say, actually, this can be obstructing. And if you think of a lot of our blasts might have blue-blocking tech and our contacts might have that. So there’s an argument with that camp that would say you would be better off even if you just tip your glasses a little lower so that you can get more of that light in your eyes, then there could be an argument to be made for that.

Jodi Cohen: I think I heard Ari Whitten saying like, you’re supposed to stare at the sun without any glasses or anything in the way.

Mollie Eastman: Totally. So a controversial thinker on this topic is Dr. Jack Cruz. So he’s been a long-time proponent on the naked eye, no contacts, no glasses. I actually just had a really kind of controversial podcast with Andrew Huberin and they touched on some of these. It was like eight hour long podcast, like a two-part series with Rick Rubin. Really, really interesting. But those kinds of philosophies came to head because Huberman has said it doesn’t matter. It’s fine. You can keep your contacts and Jack Cruz and other thinkers in his wheelhouse have thought otherwise. So you could if you just got the glasses, just kind of tip those down a little bit so that you can get them next for you how…

Jodi Cohen: They smell or do what they do. This is great though. I really love the blueprint of this, and it’s almost like intermittent fasting where people say you eat in this window, you are giving a very clear blueprint of here’s what you do first thing in the morning, here’s how you set your temperature. Can you share a little bit more of the blueprint?

Mollie Eastman: Yes, totally. Okay, so you got your light-dark piece, and the dark piece would be post sunset that you are, we don’t have any blue light in our environment is our goal to the point that 250 circadian scientists have just released a call to arms where they’re asking for warning labels on light bulbs when used at night because of their effects on both sleep, cancer, diabetes, mental health, et cetera. So the solution to that would be to have things like candlelight red lights, Himalayan salt lamps, fire, et cetera. So doing that in the evening is our goal. You can also wear blue blockers and that sort of thing. So that’d be the nights, but then there’s temperature is one of the next ones that’s really important. So we want to be getting our body temperature up throughout the day because it’s not meant to be static.

Mollie Eastman: So dynamics, so you’re getting your body temperature up throughout the day, but you might have a warmer environment in your space if you’re indoors. Most of us are in our space all the time, so we turn up the temperature, but then in the evening, we’re markedly turning that down. And then if you can have available to yourself like a cooling mattress topper, say, oh, like…

Jodi Cohen: A chili sleep, plaid.

Mollie Eastman: Chili, sleep, exactly, ate sleep, bed jet, these different things that can cool the bed. This is also evolutionary biology for a certain extent because we imagine we would’ve been sleeping on the ground in history through as hunter-gatherers, which would’ve been the coldest spot in the environment. Very different from our foam beds with duvets that trap all that heat in

there. And so we think of all some of these reasons why we wake up throughout the course of the night, and very commonly temperature is a component of that, not to mention hot flashes and all these things that we might go through. So that can be really, really important.

Jodi Cohen: I mean, I’m in kind of a mixed marriage. I’m always cold and my partner’s always, and so he has the air on and it’s very complicated because his perfect temperature for sleep is different than mine.

Mollie Eastman: Totally. Now we actually just had eight sleep on the podcast just yesterday, and they were speaking to some of their findings of some gender differences around temperature inclinations. So they see this after large data sets of users and what have you. And so they find that women tend to need things to be a little bit warmer. And also we’re dealing with, if we’re of menstruating age, we’re dealing with changes throughout our cycle as well to further complicate, but then men seem to want it cooler. So that’s one of the beauties of having those cooling mattress hoppers because you can have your own select side and you can make it warmer if you want to make it warmer. Also, some of the newer ones like Chili just released a feature that can help support reading your body temperature. And the same with eight sleep. So now there can be a bit of an AI component, so it can be reading your temperature and kind of adjusting more in real-time.

So that’s fun. So those are available, but then you want to look at what are some of the other things that you might be doing that could be impacting your body temperature. And a very common one is meal timing. You touched on it with intermittent fasting. Well, there’s something called circadian rhythm, intermittent fasting. And so that is the timing of your food and how markedly that can either move your circadian rhythm in the right directions or kind of wrong directions.

Mollie Eastman: So if you’re eating in the night, especially now, we know the bare minimum around three hours before bed is the absolute minimum for our last bite of food out of research from Dr. Satchin Panda. But also anecdotally, I’ve certainly found out of our many, many individuals that are on the ora ring, so every person we work with has to wear the ora rank to participate in our program.

So we’ve seen tons of data around what moves the needle, and we’ve seen this in other sets as well, but four to five hours and sometimes more before bed having our last bite of food. What we reliably tend to see is a drop in heart rate improvement in HRV and less sleep fragmentation. So include boosts in your deep sleep readouts on some of your wearables. So that would be the meal timing piece. Also, you’re looking to front-load your calories so that you’re largely eating when the sun is out, and not eating as much when the sun sets is kind of our general rule or goal I should say. So with that, that’s the meal timing piece. Now exercise is another one that you can have a circadian component too. Now we want to largely have our exercise happening pretty much by day for the most part when the sun is out.

And if we think about the ancestral blueprint piece, it’s likely that our ancestors weren’t running around doing squats or something post sunset when it’s totally blackout. Why would that be happening? Well, so we want to bring and borrow some of that same rules of P white with the food. They probably weren’t going to some refrigerator or pantry at 9:00 PM 10:00 PM We were not doing those things so we can lend and pull from what we likely we’re doing. This includes exercise. So we do see there’s different studies that point to different things seemingly some movement benefits in the morning as well as some for the afternoon hours for lowering of injury risk, especially for some concerns that elderly population as well, so that we’re not taking ourselves out with that exercise. It’s so important for sleep. Other things include two novel ones. So thought timing, we’re now seeing that there’s a bit of a diurnal lean to our thoughts.

So we’ve different types of thoughts by day than we do by night, which is really interesting. I mean, we’ve even had people on the podcast speaking to something called the Mind after Midnight study, and they found that in those wee hours in the morning when many of us think of the worst case scenarios and all the things that could go wrong, catastrophic thinking, there actually is research to support that. We tend to do this. So suicidality rates sadly go up, anxiety, depression, these flawed thought patterns seem to occur in those early morning hours. So this is helpful for us to know because then we can create a bit of a self contract with ourselves to not really believe some of the thoughts that are coming out of our brain in those early morning hours because we know that that’s a flawed faulty time for us. So that if you…

Jodi Cohen: Wake up at 3:00 AM and you’re okay.

Mollie Eastman: And you’re thinking of everything that could possibly go wrong, just kind of create the self contract for yourself that we’re not going to engage with some of these thoughts and also just have almost this filter on knowing that this is sort of danger hours where not just and for all of us that we’re going to have some of that flawed logic. Now in the lead-up to that in the evening hours, we find that there’s a difference in our brain activity if we set ourselves up powerfully to start downregulating in the evening so that our brain isn’t firing at all crazy and hyperactive in the evening hours, hopefully, we’re feeding it kind of like nice, peaceful, relaxing things and then doing a bit of an audit if we’re engaging in materials, conversations, activities that are hyping us up and getting us all overly excited, even in an exciting way, maybe you’re excited, you have a trip coming up and you’re planning it and you’re Googling about it or whatever that you stress. EU stress can also get us overly excited at the wrong time. So you want to have thought timing mechanisms in place so that you’re engaging in those excitatory thoughts by day. The evening is more reserved for the downregulation of thought patterns. Lastly, we also talk about something called chron pharmacology. Drug timing and drug timing are really interesting. So what are our common drugs? Well, one of the most common drugs is caffeine and the timing of that. And I love caffeine. I’m not saying you can’t have caffeine. I love…

Jodi Cohen: Caffeine too. That’s right. Caffeine in the morning with some people, a glass of wine at night.

Mollie Eastman: Totally. Exactly. And clearly one of the biggest things we see with wearable data is people realizing, oh wow, I had no clue how much my alcohol or the glass of wine is showing up in my sleep results. So that can be really, really helpful to play with. So worse kids, even if you’re moving that glass of wine earlier, we’re kind of advocating for really egregious happy hours or boozy brunch or something if you’re going to engage in those things. But most of the time, ideally abstaining because half the time, no matter where you shuffle these things, typically we see some forms to see it show up in your heart rate elevation or HRV drop, and that can just leave you feeling not so great. Other drugs that we commonly see, THC are a common one that can also be similar to alcohol, and they help with us falling asleep, but then the quality that sleep can come into play. So that’s something to be aware of too. Of course, pharmaceuticals more recently kind of plant medicine, seeing some of that show up on people’s sleep results. So there’s a lot that we want to make sure that even with our supplements, sometimes we can be taking B vitamins or what have you too late, and then that can be wiring us, getting us all excited too at the wrong times. So you’re just trying to audit all of these things that you’re taking in and then helping to support your sleep results.

Jodi Cohen: I love that This is such an amazing roadmap and so clear.

Mollie Eastman: Well, I think it’s so helpful for, I shared in my story that I was this upside down living person, so I was like a vampire going to bed super late, waking up super late, not seeing, I couldn’t even have told you when sunrise or sunset was during those years in my life. And yet one of the great things that happens is when we start to align with some of these rhythms of nature, a lot of this stuff just kind of falls into place. And then we’re not having to work so hard to both fall asleep and stay asleep. So you might use some of your meditation apps or something to fall asleep, but you’re no longer dependent on some of these things where we see so many people like, oh, I just can’t turn off my brain. I just would love to be able to flip a switch. Or maybe I fall asleep, but then I’m up at 3:00 AM and now I’m just up for hours. What do I do? And all of that stuff can often get handled with some of these things that we bring in that we had no idea we’re making such an impact on our sleep results.

Jodi Cohen: Yeah, no, exactly. And smelling oils can help with thoughts, but it’s not like there’s a magic bullet. And I love that you’ve taken it, it’s funny that you teach poker and gambling. Yes. Teaching people how to take the chance out of what seems like a Chancey situation. You’re really doing the same thing with sleep. Totally.

Mollie Eastman: Yes. So well said. Absolutely. That’s one of the interesting things. I think before we maybe hit record, one of the things I was mentioning is that poker players are in casinos designed on purpose to confuse the circadian rhythm. So everything we’re talking about, they have no windows, they have tons of bow lights, lots of stimuli, slot machines. You have no idea if it’s day or night, but sadly, many of us are living like that to some form. Like our phones have become our own slot machines and the dopamine hit of Instagram, Facebook, whatever. Not to mention the Hulu, HBO, Netflix, and all of these fun things and laptops.

Jodi Cohen: I dunno, when I was growing up at midnight, the TV would go off. You get those, the national anthem music, it just…

Mollie Eastman: Totally just done. Yeah, absolutely. That’s great.

Jodi Cohen: On demand, you can watch 24/7.

Mollie Eastman: Yeah, exactly. And now certainly, I had lived in New York City for many, many years through some of Covid. I was in Vegas another bright light area. And with the poker component and having the optionality to truly live a 24-hour lifestyle, it goes back into that comfort concern because just because we can do it doesn’t mean it’s supporting our biology.

Jodi Cohen: Exactly. This was so amazing. Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you would like to touch on?

Mollie Eastman: I guess what I would say is really standing in this concept that sleep is a skill, not just because, but one of the things I find for a lot of people is similar to what I was sharing, is that we might have amassed some of these labels and narratives, even if we haven’t maybe ascertained or realized it quite yet, or you might know. So we might have it that I’m a bad sleeper. Oh, I’m not a good sleeper or, or like, oh, I used to sleep great, but then menopause, but then I had the kid, and then whatever. And so some of these narratives can impact one, our likelihood of getting curious and learning about some of these things. So we might just think, oh, this is not for me, it’s not available to me. And two, what I would say is in the process of considering just trying on that, we drop some of those labels for now to explore how our sleep could be.

I think that what can be on the other side is this whole experience of, oh my God, it is a skillset just like anything else. So we want to start at sleep 1 0 1, so beginning there and that you too can be a part of this. And then the other thing I would say too that would be a or missed if I didn’t mention is that there are over a hundred sleep-wake disorders that are lurking, that often go undiagnosed. So knowing that one at the very least, one very common one being sleep apnea, upper area resistance syndrome. And so we know at least one in four individuals appear to have this, and we have kind of theories that there could be more. And what’s the problem with all this is that because there’s, in the United States, there’s only around 7,000 sleep professionals for millions of people, and our primary care doctors on average are getting about two hours of training in sleep, even at Harvard Med.

Jodi Cohen: Medical practices based on no sleep. Sleep deprivation.

Mollie Eastman: Totally. Yes. That’s their vantage point. So if you’re getting any sleep, you’re killing it in their world. And so not from a malicious standpoint, but just from a lack of training, they don’t have a lot of tools or resources that they can really give you beyond the prescriptions. And so that for me is a concern because then that’s not allowing, there’s a lot of red flags that can come up as people are sharing that would point, oh, this could be a sleep problem, but it’s getting missed. So you really, unfortunately right now, need to advocate for yourself, need to learn about these things, and just know that it’s getting easier and easier With wearables. I really suggest to everyone track if available to you, or even if not, there are really affordable or free apps that are on your phone that you could even use, or just track it with a pen and paper too, the old school sleep diary.

Mollie Eastman: So getting some numbers about what’s going on. Then I would also say there are home things that you can order now to test for sleep apnea, and they’re usually around like 200 bucks or so, even out of pocket. So things like Lofta, empower, sleep, and other companies that you can get those sent right away so you can test for some at least things like sleep apnea or upper air resistant syndrome. But sadly, people might have restless legs, they might have narcolepsy, they might have certain sleep disorders that they have no clue about. They even have Braum teeth grinding other things.

Jodi Cohen: Yeah, no, this was incredibly helpful. How can people find out more about you?

Mollie Eastman: So at Sleep as a skill.com, they can go on there and they can take a lot of action. So one, we have a free sleep assessment that you can just fill out a couple of quick questions about what’s going on with your sleep, and get tailored advice back. We can also have a free downloadable PDF for the optimized bedroom, 18 high-tech, and low-tech things that can be done to improve your sleep environment. You can get free podcast episodes with sleep experts. We can do it every Monday for over five years we’ve been sending something called the Sleep Obsessions Newsletter. So lots of free information in there on how you can improve your sleep. And then if you’re still really struggling, then we have online cohorts and now something called a sleep audit that’s been really popular. So say if you’re wearing an Ora ring or whoop band, we can audit your current sleep data and then give you feedback on things that you can change right away to impact your sleep results.

Jodi Cohen: I love this. Well, this was always a pleasure. I’ve learned so much. Thank you so much.

Mollie Eastman: Oh, well thank you so much for having me and for all the work that you do. And I love your oils. It’s like the only oil that I have on my bedside, a little nightstand, so I so appreciate you and am excited for more.

Jodi Cohen: Me too. Thank you.

Mollie Eastman: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Jodi Cohen: Thank you so much for listening. I hope this podcast empowered you with some useful information and takeaways. If you liked this episode, please consider sharing a positive review or subscribing. I would also love to offer you my free parasympathetic toolkit as a gift just for listening. It will teach you how to activate the most important nerve in your body to turn on your ability to heal. This free toolkit includes a checklist, a video, and a detailed guide. If this podcast prompted any questions, you can always find answers at my blog at vibrantblueoils.com or my book Essential Oils to Boost the Brain and Heal the Body.

Until next time, wishing you Vibrant Health.

Your limbic system works to regulate your emotions and respond to physical, mental, and emotional threats in combination with your parasympathetic nervous system.

In fact, your limbic system is often referred to as the “emotional nervous system” as it helps you interpret sensory information and determine whether external stimuli are threatening or benign. If a threat is perceived, your limbic system will then prompt your nervous system to activate the “fight or flight” sympathetic nervous system response.

Your limbic system is your “threat-detection & response” mechanism wired to respond to sensory information – especially the sense of smell – to help keep you safe.  

To do so, it learns from past events to help protect you in the future. In this capacity, it can over-react on the side.  For example, if you experienced significant psychological or emotional stress while exposed to certain environmental chemicals, a “conditioning effect” may take place in which the limbic system “wires in” an association between the chemicals and the stress response. Once a conditioning event has taken place, your limbic system can get stuck on high alert, and sensory stimuli get misclassified as threatening when they are actually benign. This leads to chronic elevation of the sympathetic stress response, which may contribute to health concerns.

Restoring proper function to the limbic system can help TURN OFF the alarm in your limbic system – in effect rebalancing inhibition and activation –  and TURN ON your body’s self-healing mechanisms by regulating your “fight or flight” response, and regulating the freeze response

As your sense of smell is critical to your sense of safety and your olfactory bulb is physically located near your limbic system, essential oils can be a powerful tool to help restore the proper function of your limbic system.

What Does Your Limbic System Do?

The limbic system gathers and interprets information from the environment through sensory information and decides how your body should respond to external stimuli. 

The limbic system is also involved in your response to stress, your emotional response to external events, and your involuntary protective mechanisms (like the “fight or flight” response). It is particularly active when you are under stress or feeling unsafe or threatened.

More specifically, sensory information is carried to the hypothalamus, which then acts like the “regulator” of hormone control, communicating to other parts of the body by sending signals to the pituitary/thyroid/adrenal glands and helping the body maintain homeostasis.

Interactions between the hypothalamus and the rest of the limbic system influence the autonomic nervous system — specifically the sympathetic nervous system fight-flight-response and other emotional hyperarousal responses, including anxiety and fear. 

More specifically, your limbic system connects to the autonomic nervous system centers in your brainstem. 

A stressor or memory of a negative event activates connections between your amygdala and your brainstem sympathetic centers that increase heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle responsiveness. 

Your parasympathetic nervous system can help to dampen this physiologic response, functioning like a “vagal brake”.

The limbic system connections to your ANS strengthen or weaken depending upon the environment, stress, and other exposures.  This can cause threat mechanisms to overfire and distort your interpretation of sensory information, which can contribute to dysfunction and neurological disorganization.

Symptoms of Limbic Dysfunction

Your limbic system can get “stuck” in a state of hypervigilance and over-reactivity where it categorizes non-threatening stimuli as threatening, triggering involuntary trauma patterns and contributing to distorted unconscious reactions, sensory perceptions and protective responses, including the following symptoms: 

• Unexplained Brain fog 
• Low energy or fatigue
• Chronic joint and/or muscle pain
• Heightened sensory perceptions, including smell, taste, light, sound, or electromagnetic sensitivities
• Sensitive to food, chemicals (including perfumes, household cleaners, personal hygiene products, or other chemicals)
• Inability to concentrate or focus 
• Anxiety and irritability or panic attacks
• Mood swings
• Depression
• Hormone imbalance
• Sleep-related issues
• Increased sensitivities to foods, medications, or supplements
• Headaches
• Dwell on past negative events or expect negative outcomes
• Short-term memory problems

Over time, this state of hyper arousal can reset your limbic system to a heightened state of arousal and anxiety, which leads to hyper-sensitization, weakens the immune, endocrine, and autonomic nervous systems, and negatively impact our ability to rest, digest, detoxify, and heal, stabilize our mood, and maintain motor and cognitive function.

In other words, Limbic System Impairment can sensitize the brain to a negative stress response and keep us stuck in a Sympathetic Dominant vicious cycle.

Essential Oils for the Limbic System

Inhaling essential oils is the fastest and most efficient way to create physiological or psychological balance in your limbic system. 

This is because smell can access the limbic system of the brain to lower limbic system activation which then enables your body to enter the parasympathetic “rest, digest, and repair” state.

It’s interesting to note that the limbic system was originally called the rhinencephalon (meaning ‘smell brain’) because it was thought to primarily involve the sense of smell.

This is because your sense of smell is key to survival!

Smell is often the first warning of safety or danger.  You smell food and water.  You smell predator odor and fire.

As noted above, your sense of smell has direct anatomical and functional 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.  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 by way of your amygdala.  When you smell an essential oil, 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.

In particular, the chemical constituent Sesquiterpenes, found in high levels in essential oils such as Frankincense and Sandalwood, are thought to help to increase the oxygen in the limbic system which in turn “unlocks” the DNA and allows emotional baggage to be released from cellular memory

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.

Reset Your Limbic System with Essential Oils

Olfactory stimulation with essential oils can be used to reset the volume of threat perception and help calm the over-firing of your limbic system.

I am excited to share our NEW Limbic Reset blend that can be used in combination to help rewire neural circuits in your limbic system and calm an over-active stress response.

Limbic Reset™ contains the following combination of oils designed to calm threat arousal and send safety queues to help reset your limbic system and support healthy emotional regulation.  Limbic Reset™ was specifically formulated with Helichrysum sandalwood and Melissa oils which are touted for brain function and known to cross the blood-brain barrier and assist in carrying oxygen to the limbic system.

Cedarwood

Cedarwood essential oil, extracted from the wood pieces of a cedar tree, has been found to possess anti-inflammatory, antispasmodic, antifungal, tonic, astringent, diuretic, and sedative therapeutic properties

Research carried out on rats confirmed the sedative effects of cedarwood oil. The research actually stunted the olfactory pathway (sense of smell) and still found an increase in relaxation from exposure to cedarwood oil and its chemical constituent cedrol, leading researchers to conclude that cedarwood demonstrated “sedative effects regardless of the animal species or the functional state of the autonomic nerves, suggesting the mechanism of action is via a pathway other than the olfactory system.”

There are several varieties of Cedarwood. This blend contains Himalayan Cedarwood (Cedrus deodara) which has been shown to reduce pain and inflammation in animal research. Other studies found that cedarwood inhibits the inflammatory leukotrienes that are responsible for the inflammation response (5-LOX), especially in relation to pain. Out of all of the Cedarwood species, the Himalayan cedarwood was the strongest 5-LOX inhibitor.

Frankincense

Sourced from the resin extract from Boswellia carterii trees grown in Somalia, Frankincense helps support anxiety, nervous tension, and stress-related conditions. It can help fortify the mind. One recent study on rats indicated that essential oil can help improve memory retention and sharpen the mind.

Frankincense contains compounds known as sesquiterpenes that are known to cross the blood-brain barrier and increase oxygen around receptor sites in the emotional centers of your brain, like your hypothalamus and amygdala, helping to calm anxiety.  Sesquiterpenes are C15 carbon chains that do not contain oxygen molecules but seem to pull oxygen in. This is one reason that when essential oils that are high in sesquiterpenes are topically applied to the brain or inhaled through the nose, oxygen levels seem to increase.

Frankincense also contains terpenes, which are strongly anti-inflammatory and protective over healthy cells. Research suggests that frankincense oil can be used to improve memory and your ability to learn.

Helichrysum Italicum

Helichrysum essential oil possesses anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antimicrobial, antifungal, and antibacterial properties.

Helichrysum™ helps improve focus by enhancing blood flow to the brain.  Research has shown that helichrysum lowers inflammation in blood vessels along with blood pressure and also increases smooth muscle function to improve blood flow and carry more oxygen to the brain which helps improve brain function.

Research has found that Helichrysum lowers inflammation due to several mechanisms: inflammatory enzyme inhibition, free radical scavenging activity, and corticoid-like effects.

Lavender

Lavender essential oils help boost cognitive performance and concentration.  More specifically, lavender oil helps calm anxiety to help enhance focus and concentration.

Research discovered that Lavender™ and linalool, a major constituent of Lavender™, were able to bind to the serotonin transporter which may have an inhibitory effect on serotonin reuptake. Limiting serotonin reuptake helps maintain proper serotonin activity, and proper serotonin activity promotes feelings of happiness and helps support important processes such as learning and memory.

Linalool has also been shown to modulate the transmission of GABA in your brain by activating GABA receptors, which helps to enhance the inhibitory tone of your brain, basically blocking brain signals that activate your stress response and calming your nervous system. A deficit of GABA contributes to anxiety and ADHD.

Research has found that GABA can improve focus and decrease ADHD symptoms.  Additional research correlated lower levels of GABA with greater impulsivity and less inhibition.

Melissa

Also known as lemon balm, Melissa essential oil is known for its ability to induce calmness, reduce anxiety, and improve cognition. Melissa essential oil is also considered a nervine substance, or a tonic for the nervous system to keep it healthy, and functioning properly, and prevent nervous disorders. This property of melissa essential oil can be useful for health concerns like vertigo, nervousness, and convulsions.

Melissa essential oil also demonstrates antidepressant and sedative properties. A 2013 study found melissa essential oil helped improve anxiety, depression, neuroprotectivity, and cognition. This could be attributed to the principal constituent limonene which has been correlated with anti-depressant effects and shown to lower anxiety and stress. Scientists think its calming, mood-lifting effects come from limonene’s ability to elevate serotonin levels in the brain. Serotonin is an important hormone and neurotransmitter that helps induce feelings of joy and relaxation.

Another study demonstrated Melissa’s ability to directly affect the brain and neurotransmitters. “The results indicate that essential oils obtained from Melissa officinalis leaf and Citrus aurantifolia leaf showed high acetylcholinesterase (an enzyme that catalyzes the breakdown of acetylcholine) co-inhibitory activities.”  This means that Melissa inhibits the breakdown of acetylcholine, allowing this important neurotransmitter to perform its valuable cognitive functions for longer in the brain.

Acetylcholine plays a key role in memory, attention, and learning. Damage to the cholinergic (acetylcholine-producing) system in the brain and resulting acetylcholine deficits have been linked with the memory deficits associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Research has found that essential oils are some of the most effective tools to regenerate and heal these acetylcholine-producing systems.

Sandalwood 

Harvested from the roots of the sandalwood tree, Sandalwood is known for its sedative properties and its ability to promote positive thinking, mental clarity, concentration, and focus.

Calming anxiety helps to free up the prefrontal cortex to enhance focus and concentration.

Scientific research found sandalwood to be effective in reducing levels of anxiety and easing anxiety symptoms.

Sandalwood has been shown to promote mental clarity, which is one reason it is often used during meditation and spiritual rituals.  One study found that sandalwood’s main compound, alpha-santalol, elevated alertness, attentiveness, calmness, mood, relaxation, and vigor.

Sandalwood also has anti-inflammatory properties that can help reduce brain inflammation.  Calming brain inflammation helps eliminate brain fatigue and enhance concentration and focus.  Read More about calming brain inflammation HERE and HERE.

A 2014 study found that the active compounds in sandalwood can decrease inflammation markers in the body called cytokines. It is believed that these active compounds (santalols) act in a similar manner as ibuprofen and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs that act by inhibiting these inflammatory markers.  The “observed anti-inflammatory properties of topically applied Sandalwood oils provide a rationale for use in products requiring anti-inflammatory effects.”

Ylang Ylang

Ylang-ylang is a yellow, star-shaped flower that grows on the Cananga tree and is known to calm the mind and soothe the nervous system. It helps relieve mental fatigue, anxiety, and tension headaches and bring emotions into proper balance.

Research supports Ylang Ylang’s ability to increase blood flow, relieve inflammation, and calm anxiety to enhance focus. One study found that Ylang Ylang reduced anxiety and boosted self-esteem when it was either applied to the skin or inhaled.

Similar research explored the benefit of inhaling ylang-ylang essential oil to reduce blood pressure, improve cognitive functioning, and reduce anxiety. The research explored how the major active constituents of Ylang Ylang essential oil, including linalool, altered neurotransmitters related to mood after odor exposure. Research found that inhaling Ylang Ylang decreased dopamine concentration and increased the Serotonin precursor, 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) in the brain.

How to Apply Limbic Reset

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.

Featured Oils:

References:

Los aceites esenciales son poderosos calmantes para la ansiedad y el incienso es uno de mis favoritos. Aplicarlo en mi corazón o inhalar directamente del frasco me ayuda a afrontar momentos de mucha ansiedad.

Las investigaciones respaldan cómo el sentido del olfato afecta nuestro estado de ánimo, los niveles de estrés y el rendimiento mental. Cuando se inhalan, los aceites esenciales estimulan los receptores olfativos de la nariz, que luego envían señales a la parte del cerebro que controla las emociones, el estado de ánimo, el estrés y los procesos de pensamiento, incluida la ansiedad.

La evidencia también respalda la aplicación tópica de aceites esenciales para calmar la ansiedad. Un estudio encontró que la aplicación tópica de una mezcla de aceites esenciales de incienso, bergamota y lavanda cuando se usaba en un aceite para masajes de manos ayudó a inducir la relajación, reducir la presión arterial y reducir la depresión y la ansiedad.

Se ha descubierto que los extractos de incienso afectan ciertas neuronas del cerebro que ayudan a regular las emociones. Este tiene un efecto ansiolítico o ansiolítico que ayuda a aliviar los síntomas de ansiedad y depresión. Las investigaciones han encontrado que la inhalación de extractos de incienso promueve un estado emocional positivo.

¿Cómo reduce el aceite de incienso la ansiedad?

El incienso, una resina hecha de savia de árboles, es un agente particularmente poderoso para calmar las emociones. Tiene un alto contenido de sesquiterpenos, un compuesto que se sabe que cruza fácilmente la barrera hematoencefálica y transporta oxígeno al cerebro. Este aumento de oxígeno ayuda a calmar la inflamación en las partes del cerebro que controlan el estrés, la ansiedad, el miedo y la depresión.

Los sesquiterpenos también pueden ayudar a equilibrar las hormonas y las emociones, ayudando a aliviar los síntomas de ansiedad y depresión. Al aumentar la oxigenación de las glándulas pineal y pituitaria del cerebro, los sesquiterpenos equilibran las hormonas que regulan las emociones, lo que a su vez equilibra el estado de ánimo.

El aceite esencial de incienso también puede ayudar a promover una respuesta calmante en el sistema nervioso, favoreciendo la respiración profunda y la relajación, lo que ayuda a abrir las vías respiratorias y reducir la presión arterial.

Por ejemplo, el incienso contiene acetato de incienso, un compuesto que estimula una proteína receptora que se ha demostrado que alivia la ansiedad y la depresión en estudios con animales. Un estudio en ratones publicado en la revista FASEB encontró que un receptor en el cerebro responde a un componente químico de la resina de incienso llamado acetato de incienso. Tiene un efecto antidepresivo y reduce la ansiedad.

Otro estudio encontró que inhalar incienso ayudó a calmar el dolor y la ansiedad entre las mujeres embarazadas durante el parto.

El incienso tiene poderosas propiedades antidepresivas y sedantes que ayudan a inducir sentimientos de tranquilidad y relajación, lo que ayuda a calmar la ansiedad.

¿Cómo utilizar aceite de incienso reduce la ansiedad?

Inhalación:

Sostenga la botella uno o dos centímetros debajo de la nariz y respire profundamente. También puedes inhalar estratégicamente incienso por la fosa nasal izquierda.

La ansiedad puede ser causada por la hiperactividad y el dominio del lóbulo frontal derecho del cerebro. El cerebro derecho procesa los aspectos emocionales de la experiencia humana, brindándonos empatía y compasión, pero cuando se esfuerza demasiado, el cerebro derecho puede contribuir a aumentar las emociones y la ansiedad.

El neurólogo funcional Dr. Titus Chiu sugiere estratégicamente inhalar aceites esenciales, como el incienso, a través de la fosa nasal izquierda para activar el lóbulo frontal izquierdo y equilibrar la hiperactividad del lóbulo frontal derecho. Esto crea un equilibrio entre los hemisferios izquierdo y derecho del cerebro, lo que luego conduce a una sensación de calma y ayuda a detener los ataques de ansiedad.

Aplicación local:

El incienso se puede masajear:

• Sobre el corazón para calmar la ansiedad
• En la parte posterior del cuello del tronco del encéfalo para mantener la calma y el pensamiento claro.
• En las plantas de los pies: puede aplicarlo estratégicamente en los puntos reflejos de las plantas de los pies o simplemente permitir que los ingredientes químicos del aceite entren en su cuerpo a través de los (más de) 200 poros de las plantas de los pies.

Solicitud incienso en la planta de los pies también puede ser muy arraigador, ayudando a calmar y disipar la energía ansiosa.

Grounding es una técnica que te ayuda a conectarte con la energía curativa de la naturaleza y la Tierra. La conexión a tierra nos lleva a un estado de equilibrio, tanto mental como físicamente. Es en este estado de equilibrio que nuestro cuerpo puede descansar, restaurarse y sanarse a nivel físico, emocional y espiritual.

Los aceites esenciales, especialmente los derivados de la corteza, las raíces, las hierbas, las agujas y la resina de las plantas terrestres que están internamente arraigadas a través de su estructura de raíces en la Tierra, le ayudan a atraer sus centros de energía hacia la Tierra.

incienso es una resina extraída de árboles que crecen en el clima desafiante del noreste de África y la Península Arábiga. Estos climas desafiantes hacen Incienso™ excepcionalmente resistente y de apoyo para ayudar en la conexión a tierra. Incienso™ Se sabe que ayuda a purificar, santificar y conectarse con su camino espiritual, calmando el parloteo mental de su sistema nervioso. También te ayuda a conectarte con la energía curativa de la Tierra.

Añade unas gotas al baño.. Combínalo con un poco de sal de Epsom para una relajación adicional. También puede integrar aceite de incienso en su rutina de cuidado de la piel para obtener beneficios físicos y mentales. Existe evidencia de que el incienso y otros aceites esenciales pueden ayudar a combatir las arrugas y reducir o prevenir las manchas solares. También se ha demostrado que el incienso mejora el tono de la piel al tiempo que ayuda a generar nuevas células cutáneas y reduce otros signos de envejecimiento. Además de servir como un excelente humectante, el incienso contiene compuestos que pueden levantar y tensar la piel laxa debido a la edad, el estrés o las condiciones ambientales.

Aceite recomendado:

Referencias:

Calmar la vejiga hiperactiva con aceites esenciales

Mi cuñado me decía burlonamente «por ahí pasa un río» porque al parecer uso mucho el baño.

Recientemente supe que su sistema nervioso autónomo juega un papel clave en el mantenimiento de la retención de la vejiga y en calmar la respuesta de la vejiga hiperactiva.

Es más, los síntomas de la vejiga hiperactiva se pueden aliviar y calmar con el uso de aceites esenciales aplicados tópicamente.

¿Qué es una vejiga hiperactiva?

La vejiga es un órgano hueco ubicado en la pelvis o en la parte inferior del abdomen. Una de las funciones principales de la vejiga es almacenar orina. La otra es eliminar la orina del cuerpo en respuesta a señales del sistema nervioso y el cerebro.

Una vejiga hiperactiva puede contribuir a orinar con frecuencia, despertarse por la noche para ir al baño o pérdida involuntaria de orina conocida como fuga urinaria o incontinencia.

Como sabrá, los riñones producen orina, que luego viaja a la vejiga. Pero es su cerebro el que le indica a su cuerpo que orine relajando los músculos del piso pélvico y permitiendo que la orina salga del cuerpo.

Cuando las señales del cerebro no fluyen correctamente o se interrumpe la conexión entre el sistema nervioso y la función de la vejiga, los músculos de la vejiga pueden contraerse involuntariamente, creando una sensación de necesidad de orinar con frecuencia, incluso si la vejiga no está llena.

Curiosamente, pero no es sorprendente para aquellos de nosotros que hemos esperado en largas colas para ir a los baños públicos, las mujeres se ven afectadas con más frecuencia por la vejiga hiperactiva que los hombres.

Síntomas de vejiga hiperactiva

La vejiga hiperactiva se define por la frecuencia y urgencia de orinar. Los síntomas pueden incluir:

• Necesidad repentina de orinar
• Un chorro de orina débil o que gotea.
• Micción frecuente (orinar ocho o más veces al día).
• Urgencia (sensación o necesidad de orinar inmediatamente).
• Pérdida de orina o pérdida involuntaria de orina.
• Despertarse más de una vez por noche para ir al baño.
• Fuga de orina

Regulación autónoma de la vejiga.

Su sistema nervioso autónomo relaja los músculos que le ayudan a controlar la micción.

Es parasimpático una rama de su sistema nervioso que promueve el filtrado de orina y también la retención de la vejiga, lo que significa que puede producir orina pero retenerla por más tiempo. Cuando orina, el sistema nervioso parasimpático indica a los músculos de la vejiga que se contraigan y al esfínter (un anillo de músculos que protege o cierra una abertura o tubo, como el ano o la vejiga) que se relaje para que pueda vaciar la vejiga por completo.

El sistema nervioso parasimpático ayuda a preparar la vejiga para orinar estimulando el músculo detrusor para que contraiga y relaje los músculos de la vejiga. El sistema nervioso parasimpático trabaja en oposición al sistema nervioso simpático, que es responsable de almacenar la orina. Cuando la rama simpática del sistema nervioso es dominante, la retención de la vejiga se reduce, lo que provoca una micción más frecuente y con un volumen menor.

Dicho esto, uno de los síntomas de estar en un estado de dominancia simpática es la necesidad de orinar con mayor frecuencia.

La rama simpática de su sistema nervioso prioriza la supervivencia y ralentiza la desintoxicación de los riñones y la vejiga y las funciones excretoras y de secreción específicas, lo que a su vez aumenta la necesidad de orinar (y a veces dificulta orinar por completo).

La mezcla parasimpática estimula el sistema nervioso parasimpático, lo que ayuda a la retención de la vejiga.

Estar en un estado simpático ralentiza la desintoxicación de los riñones y la vejiga y las funciones excretoras y de secreción específicas. La epidemia de infecciones de riñón y vejiga puede estar relacionada con la inhibición simpática del sistema inmunológico. El fortalecimiento de la respuesta del sistema nervioso parasimpático favorece la función saludable de los riñones y la vejiga.

Aceites esenciales para la vejiga hiperactiva.

Una vejiga hiperactiva suele ser el resultado de la activación de nervios que provoca que los músculos se contraigan inesperadamente. Los aceites esenciales que pueden ayudar a calmar estos nervios y músculos pueden ayudar a aliviar algunos síntomas.

Los aceites esenciales tienen propiedades antiinfecciosas y antiinflamatorias que pueden ser útiles para regular y aliviar los síntomas de la vejiga hiperactiva.

Parasimpático®

La mezcla parasimpática estimula el sistema nervioso parasimpático, lo que ayuda a la retención de la vejiga.

Estar en un estado simpático ralentiza la desintoxicación de los riñones y la vejiga y las funciones excretoras y de secreción específicas. La epidemia de infecciones de riñón y vejiga puede estar relacionada con la inhibición simpática del sistema inmunológico. El fortalecimiento de la respuesta del sistema nervioso parasimpático favorece la función saludable de los riñones y la vejiga.

Es más, la vejiga hiperactiva puede deberse a impulsos nerviosos irregulares. Estos impulsos le indican a su vejiga que necesita orinar, incluso cuando no lo hace. Esto puede provocar micción frecuente o ganas de orinar después de haber orinado.

En concreto, un estudio de estimulación nerviosa, que cambia la señal eléctrica de los nervios que llevan impulsos a la vejiga, muestra la frecuencia y urgencia de la vejiga hiperactiva.

Además, las propiedades antibacterianas del aceite de clavo (contenido en Parasimpático® mezcla) puede ayudar a matar las bacterias involucradas en las infecciones urinarias, especialmente cuando las bacterias se han vuelto resistentes a los antibióticos.

Soporte de vejiga™

Diferentes sistemas de órganos son vulnerables a diferentes tipos de perturbaciones emocionales, y se sabe que la vejiga está asociada con un trauma emocional, ya que se cree que los desechos emocionales residuales se almacenan en la vejiga.

En la medicina china, la vejiga se considera un almacén de emociones, gestionando las reservas emocionales y el desbordamiento. Cuando te sientes vacío de reservas internas, todo te parece demasiado difícil de manejar, incierto y aterrador. Del mismo modo, cuando las emociones se desbordan, puedes sentirte abrumado, asfixiado, fuera de control y llevado a la desesperación.

A menudo, estas emociones abrumadoras parecen demasiado difíciles de manejar en el momento, por lo que las almacenas en tu vejiga hasta que puedas procesarlas y superarlas.

La mezcla Bladder Support™ le permite liberar el pasado negativo y liberar el trauma emocional del cuerpo. Ayuda a superar los sentimientos de desesperación y la sensación de estar siendo empujado al límite. También tiene la capacidad de equilibrar el cerebro derecho e izquierdo.

Bladder Support™ Blend contiene una fórmula patentada de aceites esenciales orgánicos y/o silvestres de:

incienso; que puede ayudar a mejorar la salud de la vejiga debido a sus propiedades antiinflamatorias y antioxidantes. Se sabe que el incienso alivia la ansiedad, la tensión nerviosa y las condiciones relacionadas con el estrés. Las investigaciones muestran que el aceite de incienso tiene actividad antitumoral contra las células cancerosas de vejiga. Específicamente, los investigadores encontraron que el aceite esencial de incienso «suprime el crecimiento de las células cancerosas al detener la progresión del ciclo celular e induce la muerte de las células cancerosas de vejiga al activar múltiples vías de muerte celular».

geranio Puede calmar la ansiedad y reducir el estrés. El geranio actúa como un tónico poderoso, ayudando a aumentar la circulación de líquidos, también puede ayudar a mantener el miedo agudo y superar el abuso, las lesiones y las crisis emocionales. También puede ayudar con traumas y duelos extremos.

Helicriso™ Actúa como un antiinflamatorio natural que puede ayudar a desintoxicar los riñones y reducir el riesgo de desarrollar vejiga hiperactiva. Helicriso™ Tiene propiedades diuréticas que pueden ayudar a mover el agua por el cuerpo, facilitando la orina. También se cree que reduce las contracciones de la vejiga, lo que reduce la necesidad de orinar.

Lavanda Los aceites esenciales son extremadamente antiinflamatorios y calmantes. Adaptado de la planta Lavandula angustifolia, conocida por sus propiedades calmantes, que pueden ayudar a calmar los nervios en el área de la vejiga y reducir los síntomas de la vejiga hiperactiva.

Bigarade de petitgrain Ayuda a aliviar el pánico, la ira y la ansiedad y alivia el agotamiento nervioso, la depresión, el estrés y la fatiga mental. También estimula la mente consciente para mantener una percepción y un enfoque claros.

Rosa Ayuda a aliviar el estrés, la ansiedad, la apatía, la depresión y la apatía. Puede mantener la energía, la confianza y un estado de ánimo positivo.

sándalo Ayuda a superar la baja autoestima, el duelo y el miedo, calma las conductas agresivas y egocéntricas, controla el TOC y ayuda con el insomnio.

Abeto Apoya los sistemas nervioso y glandular. Se cree que actúa sobre los nervios que rodean la vejiga, reduciendo la necesidad y la frecuencia de la micción. Abeto También se considera un elemento de conexión a tierra mental, ayuda a equilibrar el plexo solar, estimula el timo y ayuda a controlar la ansiedad y el estrés.

raíz de valeriana Se considera el mejor aceite por sus propiedades sedantes y calmantes. Soporta todo tipo de tensiones, ansiedad, agitación y ataques de pánico. Ayuda a calmar la mente y redirigir los pensamientos de forma positiva.

Aplique 2 o 3 gotas de Bladder Support™ en la vejiga (justo encima y detrás del hueso púbico), directamente sobre las áreas de trauma o abuso, o alrededor de la parte exterior del pabellón auricular.

Aceites destacados:

Referencias: