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3 Essential Oils for Cognitive Dissonance and Intuition

By Jodi Cohen

This was an amazing week!

I celebrated my birthday, exceeded my summit registration goal with over 120,000 people registered and….

I got to interview one of my role models and health rock stars, Dr. Christiane Northrup, the New York Times bestselling author of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom and visionary pioneer in women’s health.

We talked about cognitive dissonance and the parasympathetic state.  You can listen to the full interview on the Parasympathetic Summit during replay weekend or by purchasing my next steps: Parasympathetic Activation Program.

 

What is Cognitive Dissonance?

In case you are not familiar with this term, cognitive dissonance is the mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information.  It can occur when your own intuition falls in conflict with what you may hear from an authority figure, like a doctor.  For example, many of my clients tell me that they just KNEW something in their body wasn’t right, even though doctors assured them that there was nothing wrong with them.  They often endured a period of cognitive dissonance before deciding to trust themselves and their intuition and discovering food, lifestyle and essential oil choices that helped them feel better.

It can be incredibly challenging to access your intuition when authority figures and trusted friends and family fiercely see things differently.   Cognitive dissonance can then set in as a mental strategy to “keep you safe” by shutting down your ability to explore new concepts that might endanger your old way of looking at the world that you believed kept you safe.

We naturally seek to avoid pain, both mental and physical.  This is one reason why many of us don’t choose to rip off the band aid — because that hurts.  I get it.  There are many things that I have successfully avoided for years because ignorance can be bliss and with knowledge comes responsibility.

And then Max died….

And the world as I knew it died with him.

I was in so much pain that I couldn’t pretend anymore.  I just didn’t have the energy.  I stopped politely acquiescing to what others told me I “should” do as their advice almost always made me feel worse.  Instead of defaulting the self-anointed experts, I started tuning into my own intuition, noticing those moments when I felt better.  Time in nature, yoga, conversations with supportive friends, long walks, coloring, doing puzzles – all made me feel better and they all had one important thing in common.  They helped me turn on my parasympathetic nervous system and turn off the cognitive dissonance.

When your mind and body feel safe, as they do in the parasympathetic state, it is easier to access your intuition and full cognitive function to more fully assess situations for yourself and make the best possible choices for yourself and your family. The parasympathetic state activates your sense of safety which allows you to be open to new ideas and turn on your problem solving skills.

In contrast, your sympathetic nervous system narrows your vision so you can identify and survive threats and ignore irrelevant, outside information.  This shuts down your ability to thoughtfully contemplate different perspectives and amplifies cognitive dissonance, limiting your receptivity to new or different viewpoints and ideas.

The more you can activate your parasympathetic nervous system and access your intuition, the more you can expand your ability to focus, access your discernment and calmly observe external stimuli without being overwhelmed by it.

 

How Essential Oils Support Resonance and Calm Dissonance

The parasympathetic state shifts your body into a state of “resonance” or coherence, where the body and brain work in harmony.  This is how essential oils work.  Every cell in your body vibrates.  This is often referred to as the frequency of the body.  Every organ and region of the brain has its own optimal frequency.

These frequencies are influenced by internal and external factors including the food we eat, the external frequencies we are exposed to (like pollution and EMFs), the energy of the people we surround ourselves with and the thoughts and emotions we experience.  For example, exercise is known to raise frequency because it increases respiration and heart rate.  When you combine exercise with a clean diet or essential oils, the sum of the combined elements are often greater than the parts.  Similarly, when you layer essential oils and a healing bath  (with Epsom salt and baking soda) it amplifies the benefits of both.

This combination of like things is known as “resonance”, where you match and enhance a positive frequency to bring an unhealthy organ into balance.  The counterpart to resonance is known as dissonance, or canceling out a harmful frequency as in the case of inflammation.  Essential oils blends can serve both functions in the body, amplifying the positive or minimizing the negative.

The frequency of the essential oils seems to resonate with our tissues in helpful ways, amplifying healing in your organs and regions of the brain on the physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual level.  They also work in our limbic systems to help clear negative feelings and blocked emotions, thus eliminating the root causes of many diseases and conditions.

The counterpart to resonance is known as dissonance, or canceling out a harmful frequency as in the case of inflammation. Dissonance is defined as lack of coherence or confusion.  It is meant to cancel out disharmonious or conflicting frequencies but can contribute to confusion or lead you to disregard your own gut instincts and intuition.  It doesn’t just contribute to cognitive, or mental, confusion, it can also impact and compromise your health.

 

Cognitive Dissonance and Health Challenges

In her book, Dodging Energy Vampires, Northrup shares how cognitive dissonance can change the brain.  She notes “Sandra Brown “has found evidence of brain changes in those who have lived with cognitive dissonance for years.  Women describe not only anxiety and depression, but also brain fog and the inability to make decisions or trust themselves.  These oh-so-effective women who excel in every other area of life develop executive function disorders and lose the ability to think straight.”  Northrup also quotes research of brain scanning technology demonstrating that “people who have lived with cognitive dissonance have brain changes similar to people who have been diagnosed with PTSD.”  A 2017 study further correlated PTSD with a higher risk for developing auto immunity.

 

Essential Oils for Resonance

Remember that the opposite of dissonance is resonance.  Essential oils can support resonance and help enhance your intuition and your higher cognitive function.

To understand how essential oils support resonance, you need to understand that everything in the universe is made of energy or magnetically charged particles of energy, known as atoms, that literally vibrate in constant motion.

Every living thing is comprised of atoms that vibrate at a different frequency.  The organs in your body have a healthy frequency at which they vibrate. These frequencies help create the blue print of the body, guiding stem cells to develop into different organs.  It might also shed some light on how stem cell therapy is so effective. The stem cells have not yet been programmed to match a frequency, so they are in effect a blank canvas. By injecting them into specific organs or regions of the body, they help return that tissue to the original vibratory blueprint and help heal the body.

Vibrations like sound, light, color and smell can also be overlaid on damaged or diseased tissue to help it to return to its optimal frequency. This technique draws on the principal of resonance, namely the ability of a healthy vibration (from the sound, color, laser or essential oil blend) to trigger the body to match that healthy vibration/blue print.

While we are all bio-individual, the frequency/blue print of healthy organ tissue appears to be consistent across all individuals.  This frequency makes up the blueprint of healthy tissue. Every organ, in which cells of similar vibration have gathered to form that organ, will respond as a group to a particular frequency/vibration/blue print.

Since plants are bio familiar to humans and have similar vibrations/blue prints, you can combine the oils of individual plants into blends that match the blue prints of healthy organs and tissue, much as you might mix colors to create a distinct hue. By overlaying the blueprint of the essential oil on the organ/tissue, the principal of resonance occurs, meaning that the diseased or damaged tissue in the organ matches the blueprint/frequency of the pattern of the healthy tissue and starts to return to balance and heal.

 

My Favorite Essential Oils for Cognitive Resonance

Parasympathetic™

The parasympathetic state helps you feel safe which allows you to activate the neural connections necessary for healthy cognitive and emotion regulation. When you are able to shift out of the high alert state into a mental and emotional space of safety, your mind can relax, allowing you to calm your emotional state, expand your focus and work through cognitive dissonance.

Shifting your focus by engaging your senses, such as your sense of smell, 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. Inhaling or topically applying Parasympathetic™ behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone where the vagus nerve is closest to the surface of your body helps stimulate your vagus nerve to activate the parasympathetic state and calm your nervous system.

Adrenal™

Cognitive dissonance increases your level of anxiety, and with it, your need for energy in the form of blood sugar or glucose.  This emergency fuel is released from your adrenal glands in the form of stress hormones such as cortisol.

Balancing the adrenal glands with Adrenal™ can help calm these hormones and with them the anxiety symptoms that keep you stuck in cognitive dissonance. Smelling Adrenal™ though the left nostril or applying to the adrenal glands (on the lower mid-back, one fist above the 12th rib on each side). Dilute to start or if any redness occurs.

Focus™

Your frontal lobe (behind your forehead) helps you react appropriately by reasoning through and assessing situations.   Research shows that increasing blood flow to the prefrontal cortex can ensure attention and problem solving.

Essential oils, like Focus™on the forehead to draw energy to the prefrontal cortex.  This is because your prefrontal cortex contains several reflex points that can be stimulated with essential oils to help enhance focus and concentration to calm cognitive dissonance.

 

Featured Oils:

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About The Author

Jodi Cohen

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