Your feet are necessary for survival. They support all forms of movement, enabling you to stand, balance, move, navigate your environment, and, when required, escape danger.
Stress triggers a cascade of physiological responses to prepare you for perceived threats. This “fight or flight” response involves the release of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.
Increased levels of stress hormones may constrict blood vessels, reducing blood flow to peripheral areas such as the feet. This can result in reduced nutrient and oxygen supply to the feet’s tissues, potentially leading to discomfort, pain, and slower healing in case of injuries.
Stress heightens muscle tension throughout the body, including subconscious gripping of the feet, in preparation for survival, i.e., gripping for dear life. The “fight or flight” response helps prepare you for immediate physical action if you need to move quickly. However, chronic stress prolongs this response and leads to muscle tension, which affects the lower limbs. The muscles in the feet and calves can become tight and may grip to prepare you to fight or flee.
Like emotional armoring, unconscious or involuntary physical tension in your muscles and connective tissue can act like physical armor to shield or protect you from physical danger, unresolved traumas, and negative emotions.
Benefits of Feet
Each of your feet contains 26 bones, 33 joints, around 72,000 nerve endings, and over 100 muscles, tendons, and ligaments, all working together to allow you to walk, run, and jump. The feet also help support your:
Mobility: Your feet allow you to move, which is fundamental for survival. It will enable you to find food and shelter or escape danger.
Balance and Stability: Your foot’s complex structure, including bones, joints, muscles, fascia, lymph, tendons, and ligaments, supports your balance and stability in life.
Survival: Your feet allow you to fight back or flee in a dangerous situation.
Grounding: Your feet are often the primary point of contact with the Earth, allowing your body to connect to the planet’s energy and recharge. More here.
Reflexology Points: Foot reflexology is a form of massage therapy that involves applying pressure to specific points on the foot that are believed to be correlated to other organ systems and regions of the body. Traditional Chinese Medicine focuses on healing through the movement of energy along meridian lines. It’s believed that when pressure is applied to reflex points along the meridian, the health of the area of the body that corresponds to each point is affected. To this end, applying essential oils to specific points on your feet is believed to benefit specific organ systems. You can find a detailed foot chart here to help with oil application.
Indicators of Emotions: Your feet are directly in touch with your survival instincts, making them a good indicator of your emotional state and intentions, revealing what you are sensing, thinking, and feeling. Your limbic brain—the center of your emotional response system—reacts instantaneously to incoming information from your environment. Emotional reactions occur before thought. Before you’ve had time to develop any conscious plan, your limbic brain has already ensured that your feet are geared to freeze in place, run away, or kick out in defense.
Symptoms of Gripping in the Feet
Gripping in the foot represents the involuntary excessive tightening of the muscles in the feet and toes. This could respond to the need to hold on to the Earth for stability and self-support.
Symptoms of foot gripping may include both physical and emotional symptoms:
Emotional
- Feel stuck in an extreme environment and unable to take action
- Experienced continuous traumatic events and weren’t able to leave the situation
- Desire to run away (but perhaps cannot)
- Seeking Stability: foot gripping might be an unconscious attempt to find stability or a sense of grounding, especially when dealing with emotional or mental distress
- Digging your toes in might subconsciously relate to inflexibility or control issues
- Prolonged mental or emotional disturbance may trigger a tightening of your foot’s arch or curling of the toes
Physical
- Restricted Mobility affects your ability to move freely and comfortably, as your feet are the foundation of your movement and mobility
- Stiffness, pain, and weakness in the feet and ankles
- Altered posture, gait, or stance as stress may impact posture, resulting in a bracing response or an imbalance of weight distribution to your feet and ankles
- Referred pain in other areas of your body, such as tightness in the feet, may exacerbate existing muscular imbalances, leading to uneven stimulus of the affected structures
- Foot pain or cramping
- Plantar fasciitis (inflammation of the plantar fascia, the thick band of tissue running across the bottom of the foot) and other foot problems. Stress can cause tiny tears in the plantar fascia, making walking difficult.
- Poor Circulation and Cold Feet—Under stress, cortisol, and other stress hormones may constrict blood vessels and redirect blood flow away from the feet and ankles toward more essential organs. This can result in a lack of oxygen and nutrient supply to your feet and ankles, causing pain. As the farthest point from the heart, your feet often bear the brunt of circulation issues. This may feel like a burning, cold, numb, or tingling (pins-and-needles) sensation in your feet and ankles. Poor circulation can also delay the healing of wounds and exacerbate conditions like varicose veins or peripheral artery disease.
Essential Oils for the Feet
Essential oils can be topically applied to the soles of your feet and between your toes to help release gripping and support health.
Essential oils are lipophilic (fat-soluble) and comprise super-small molecules that penetrate the skin for easy absorption into the bloodstream.
As an extremity, your feet are located furthest from your heart, making it more difficult to receive healing remedies, especially if circulation is challenging. For example, cold, tingly toes, plantar fasciitis, heel spurs, hammer toes, and fallen arches are examples of poor blood flow to the feet, which can impact your posture and how you move, sit, and stand.
Topically applied essential oils impact the feet immediately and directly, allowing the oils’ physical, mental, and emotional benefits to reach multiple organs, systems, and areas of the body that need support.
Your feet are the foundation of your body. If they grip, it throws everything upstream, causing the rest of the body to be out of alignment.
Applying essential oils topically to the bottom of your feet can improve blood flow and mobility, release fascia, stimulate muscles, reduce tension, and ease pain.
1. Fascia Release™
Fascia is the band of thin, fibrous connective tissue that wraps around and supports every structure in your body, including the feet and toes. It twists and turns from the feet up the body, helping to support the arch of the foot and playing an essential role in standard foot mechanics during walking.
When your fascia is healthy, it’s flexible and stretches with you. When stressed, it tightens up, restricting movement and pulling you out of alignment. Patterns in your fascia develop to compensate for how you walk and stand. These facial misalignments can contribute to gait issues, including pronating and supinating, foot issues like bunions, or even ankle instability. These misalignments can impact everything up the chain.
Fascia Release™ is formulated to improve the ankle muscles’ physical, mental, and emotional flexibility. Helping to release fascial adhesions in the feet may help strengthen proper alignment and unwind the challenges responsible for creating adhesions in the fascia and blocking energy flow throughout the body.
Fascia can help with functional movement by reducing friction between structures. The collagen that makes up fascia is organized in a wavy pattern. Healthy fascia layers are flexible and can slide over one another. When pulled, these tissue lines resist tensile and shear loads, helping keep your feet and body parts together.
Stress and tension can limit flexibility, and the fascia can become matted and form hardened areas called adhesions. Fascial adhesions or hardened and adhered fascia—which can no longer slide smoothly—lead to restricted movement and foot gripping, especially if the fascia becomes so thick that nerves constrict. Fascial compartments may also become tight and not allow for normal movement of lymph and blood into and out of the compartment, contributing to pain and swelling.
As you may know, fascia lies just below the skin, so topically applying essential oils to 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 that can permeate the tissue and may help release adhesions and fascial restriction, increase circulation, and decrease swelling in the tissue around the feet.
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.
Fascia Release™ blend can be topically applied to the soles of your feet and between toes to create space between those joints and help bring the body into balance. For example, you can roll essential oils on the bottom of your feet to improve blood flow and release fascial adhesions. Roll the Fascia Release™ on the back of the toes, then slide your fingers between your toes, pressing to the point of discomfort, and hold for three minutes. This can undo the fascial holding pattern and tremendously help with your balance (be patient with this one; it could take some time to fit your fingers between your toes!)
2. Adrenal®
Your adrenal glands are essential to the body’s stress response, secreting stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. To help your adrenal glands support the healthy release of stress hormones, you can topically apply Adrenal® on the adrenal reflex point on the inner edges of the feet. These reflex points play a crucial role in managing stress hormones. Applying pressure here can help balance cortisol levels and contribute to overall relaxation.
To locate the adrenal reflex, follow a line straight underneath the ball of your big toe, called the Tendon Line (the tendon that pops out when you point your big toe towards your chin). The reflex is located slightly off the tendon line towards the medial side (towards the big toe side of your foot), halfway between the ball of your big toe and the highest point of your arch. Topically apply Adrenal® along with gentle but deep thumb pressure to this point for 1-2 min.
You can also topically apply 1-2 drops of Adrenal® on the adrenal glands (on the lower mid-back, one fist above the 12th rib on each side). Dilute if desired or if any redness occurs.
Inhaling Adrenal® blend through the left nostril helps to stimulate the left frontal lobe and create a balance between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, which then balances the over-activity of the right frontal lobe and leads to feelings of calm.
3. Parasympathetic®
Foot gripping is a physical response to “fight or flight” situations.
Calming the sympathetic “fight or flight” nervous system response may help promote overall nervous system balance and release gripping. The lime oil in the Parasympathetic® blend can help promote emotional grounding, fostering a balance between the heart and mind, the connection of which enables you to ground.
To experience these benefits, apply Parasympathetic® over the vagus nerve, located behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone where the vagus nerve is closest to the surface of your body.
4. Limbic Reset™
Your limbic system governs your emotional responses and survival instincts, including the “fight, flight, or freeze” response. This response then influences your feet’s reactions, movements, and stances.
Your limbic system—your “threat-detection & response” mechanism wired to respond to sensory information—reacts instantaneously to incoming data from your environment. Emotional reactions occur before thought. Before you’ve had time to develop any conscious plan, your limbic brain has already ensured that your feet react instantly to any threat or concern.
Your body and the limbic system can get “stuck” in hypervigilance and over-reactivity, categorizing non-threatening stimuli as threatening, triggering involuntary protective responses, like feet gripping. Helping to restore 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” and “freeze” responses.
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.
Olfactory stimulation with essential oil blends like Limbic Reset™ can reset the volume of threat perception and help calm the over-firing of your limbic system.
Limbic Reset™ contains essential oils designed to calm threat arousal and send safety queues to help reset your limbic system and support healthy emotional regulation. Topically apply Limbic Reset™ on the bottom of the feet, and especially on the amygdala reflex point on the big toe. You can also apply Emotional Points on the forehead (above the eyes and on the temples) and an emotional release point at the base of the skull at the back of the neck.
5. Anti-Inflammatory™
Topically applying the Anti-Inflammatory™ blend to the bottom of the feet before bed can calm inflammation in the body and the skin.
Anti-Inflammatory™ is designed to reduce inflammation and encourage regeneration of damaged or stressed connective tissues, including those involved in foot gripping. Anti-Inflammatory™ is especially helpful for calming inflammation in protective tissues around nerves, reducing the inflammatory compression contributing to nerve pain. Anti-Inflammatory™ contains Ylang-ylang, which has healing properties that repair nerve damage.
It also includes Frankincense™, known for its anti-inflammatory, analgesic, and sedative properties. Frankincense™ has been shown to improve the accurate transmission and communication of messages between the nerves and the brain. Incorrect sensory messages can result in nerve pain, so improving the accuracy of signals can eliminate pain.
Anti-Inflammatory™ also contains ginger, an excellent antioxidant that helps reduce inflammation and kill bacteria to heal infectious areas. Ginger oil is a rubefacient, which means it is warming in nature. It helps dilate capillaries and increase blood circulation.
It’s perfect for chronic joint pain, stiff muscles, and tendons and ligaments that need softening. When applied topically, ginger directly inhibits vanilloid receptors to soothe nerve pain, increase blood flow, reduce inflammation, and relieve achy pain. Apply 2-3 drops of Anti-Inflammatory™ to the bottom of the feet before bed.
6. Circulation™
Circulation™ helps support the delivery of oxygen and nutrient-rich blood to the feet to help speed healing and pain relief. Formulated to support healthy circulation to deliver oxygen and nutrient-rich blood to the body and the brain while simultaneously carrying toxins and waste away from the cells to be eliminated, the Circulation™ blend may help open the vasculature to allow for optimal blood flow to both carry healing oxygen and nutrients to cells and allow a painful and inflamed area to heal faster.
Circulation™ contains powerful oils known to support bone health, including Cypress oil, an antispasmodic known to improve circulation and reduce fatigue and stress. Similarly, Nutmeg oil soothes pain, and research has proven its anti-inflammatory properties in reducing pain and swelling.
Black pepper is one of the best oils for alleviating deep tissue pain. It warms muscles and increases blood flow to the injury while reducing inflammation and pain. In combination with ginger essential oil in the Circulation™ blend, Black Pepper helps enhance circulation, reduce inflammation, and block pain. The heat of these oils is known to speed up the healing process. Apply 2-3 drops of Circulation™ on the bottom of the feet or around the ankles to help increase blood flow.
Featured Oils:
- Fascia Release™ available here
- Adrenal® available here
- Parasympathetic® available here
- Limbic Reset™ available here
- Frankincense™ available here
- Anti-Inflammatory™ available here
- Circulation™ available here
