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Essential Oils for Hope

By Jodi Cohen

I was sitting at the airport gate waiting to board a slightly delayed flight to Iceland with my daughter when the text came through.   

One of my closest friends from college was dropping her daughter at college. They had finished moving her into her sorority house and her husband was just putting a bag in the trunk of the car, preparing for the long drive home.

Out of nowhere, a speeding car crashed into the car parallel parked behind him which crashed the car into him, crushing his lower body between the cars. His right leg was immediately amputated and they were fighting to save his left leg and his life.  

I involuntarily burst into tears. The unexpected trauma felt so familiar to my experience with Max six years ago. And my dear friend who was now navigating through this nightmare has been one of my strongest pillars of support since we met at age 18. She has always been kind, gracious, warm, and unerringly hopeful.

When Max passed away, she sent me a book “Rare Bird” that had a profound impact on my own ability to find hope in the face of tragedy. The book was written by another mother who lost her 12-year-old son in a tragic accident right before the start of 7th grade and follows her through her year of grief. I devoured the book clinging to the idea that if someone else could survive something like this, then I could too. The book that my college friend sent gave me a role model for hope.  

In the face of this tragic accident, my friend continues to serve as a role model for hope – highlighting the small wins and navigating the disappointments with such grace and optimism that I am once again inspired to explore the health benefits associated with hope.

My dad used to say, “You need someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to” in other words something to hope for. I believe a hopeful mindset is key to mental, physical, and emotional health.

Hope is the belief that your future will be better than the present and that you have the ability to make it happen. It involves both optimism and a can-do attitude.

American psychologist Charles Snyder developed the “Hope Theory,” which focuses on developing strengths and positive traits rather than healing weaknesses or diseases.  It highlights:

  • Goals – big or small – as a cornerstone of hope.
  • Agency – the ability to stay motivated to meet your goal. It involves believing that good things will come from your actions.
  • Pathways – specific routes you develop to meet your goals. If your one pathway doesn’t work, you problem-solve to find a new pathway. High-hope people understand that roadblocks are inevitable and that it might take several tries to reach your goals.

Hopeful thinking may help set the groundwork for creating the outcome you desire. It’s a bit like manifesting.  When you focus your mental and physical energy on hopeful outcomes, the probability of achieving that particular goal or outcome becomes much more likely. 

Actively focusing on hope, allows you to more easily imagine and envision, enhance coping, and actively work toward a positive outcome. Research finds that positive emotions may help build resilience against depressive responses in times of crisis. The research observes that hope differs from other positive emotions because hope can be experienced in both safe and dire circumstances. Feeling hope in a crisis motivates people to act against the crisis and find solutions to the problems that have generated it. Conversely, the lack of hope—or inability to picture a desired end to your struggles—may undermine the motivation to endure.

Hope helps improve health. Harvard researchers found that older Americans with more hope throughout their lives had better physical health, better health behaviors, better social support, and a longer life. Hope also led to fewer chronic health problems, less depression, less anxiety, and a lower risk of cancer.

Characteristics of hope include:

  • Optimism 
  • Perception of Internal Control
  • Strong Problem-Solving Ability
  • Overcome Negative Affectivity
  • Expect things to work out for the best.
  • Believe you will succeed in the face of challenges.
  • Think that even good things can come from adverse events.
  • View challenges or obstacles as opportunities to learn.
  • Feel gratitude for the good things in your life.
  • Trust that good things will happen in the future.
  • Look for ways to make the most of opportunities.
  • Accept responsibility for mistakes but don’t dwell on them.
  • Don’t let one bad experience muddy your expectations for the future.

Hope can have many physical, mental, and emotional benefits, including: 

  • Physical health by boosting immune function and decreasing pain
  • Lower levels of anxiety, sadness and depression
  • Increased confidence, self-esteem, and sense of purpose
  • Enhances agency
  • Encourages positive action 
  • Reduces distress, wallowing, and self-pity.
  • Decreased loneliness
  • Reduced physical pain: People with higher levels of hope tend to have lower perceptions of pain. This may be because they are less likely to catastrophize about the pain. 
  • Increased adaptability: Optimism can help people be more adaptable, agile, and creative. 
  • Increased courage, strength, and boldness
  • Increased endurance and patience

When you have hope, you are better able to access the parts of your brain that allow you to create clear pathways forward toward your goals, in other words, hope helps access problem-solving potential. This then enhances your sense of agency or confidence in your ability to act or exert power or influence over your future goal.  

Hope may help you feel more optimistic and less helpless or uncertain about your future. Hope can also offer a buffer to sustain setbacks or unexpected bumps in the road.

Research demonstrates how positive emotions, like hope, “broaden your repertoire of cognitive and behavioral actions available” which then “builds resources for creativity and problem-solving.” 

“Positive emotions have immediate physiological and cognitive benefits. They counteract the physiological consequences of negative emotions, de-escalating arousal and returning the body to a relaxed state. Cognitively, positive emotions broaden attention and enable you to access a greater variety of cognitive and behavioral responses.” 

Much like gratitude, hope can shift you into a state of coherence where your creativity, energy, and problem-solving skills are more easily accessed to support a more hopeful outcome.

The research describes this as a “broadening mindset to build enduring personal resources and capabilities”, including resilience, coping, mental health, and social benefits. In other words, hope shifts you into a state where you are better able to access your problem-solving skills to achieve your desired outcome.  Conversely, the lack of hope —when you cannot picture a desired end to your struggles—correlates with a loss of motivation necessary to endure.

Essential oils support overall mental health and mood, helping to inspire optimism and hope.

Whether they are inhaled or used topically, essential oil compounds influence the chemistry of your brain and body by activating your olfactory receptors located in the nose or through skin absorption.

Your sense of smell connects directly to the part of your brain that regulates the release of hormones that impact your mood and emotional state. 

Essential oils travel through the nasal passageways to the brain where they bind to olfactory receptors. From there they reach the emotional center of the brain – known as the limbic system – where they can stimulate the release of neurotransmitters, like serotonin, which can influence your neurochemistry, helping to enhance mood and reduce anxiety. 

Research validates this, noting that “inhalation of essential oils can communicate signals to the olfactory system and stimulate the brain to exert neurotransmitters (e.g. serotonin and dopamine) thereby further regulating mood.”  Additional research shows that essential oils can significantly impact the brain, calming emotional states and decreasing blood pressure, heart rate, and skin temperature, which indicates a decrease in autonomic arousal.

Citrus oils, for example, are known to lift mood as their chemical composition of monoterpenes like limonene may help to lift mood, calm anxiety, alleviate depression, and literally make you feel lighter.  Citrus trees and their fruit are the embodiment of sunshine. Growing in the warmth of climates found close to the equator, citrus fruits absorb the sun daily and bring us their fruit amid winter, just when that lightness is needed the most.

Research on the Effects of citrus fragrance on immune function and depressive states found that “citrus fragrance was more effective than antidepressants.” Similar animal research found that lemon essential oil reduces anxiety.

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

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

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

Heart™  blend also contains Neroli which is also known to soothe anxiety and frantic thoughts calm negative emotional responses and support optimism.

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

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

Parasympathetic®

Parasympathetic® calms your nervous system and helps you be present in the moment, to both your own body and to your mental, emotional, and physical needs.

This blend of clove and lime essential oils helps energize your physical body and mental capacity, helping to support the brain to embrace optimism and hope.

Your sympathetic “fight or flight” state turns on when survival and safety are threatened.  When you are stuck in a cycle of sympathetic dominance – and not activating your parasympathetic nervous system –  your body’s alert mechanism for survival remains on high and you can become trapped in a perception that you are not safe, which lays the groundwork for pessimism and negative thinking.

The parasympathetic system restores a sense of safety and balance which calms the brain and the body by activating your parasympathetic nervous system to help you identify and support your own needs.  The research found that – when stimulated, your vagus nerve releases anti-anxiety chemicals that help you focus on positive emotions, decrease mental distress, and improve mental well-being. 

Parasympathetic can help you develop learned optimism by thinking about your reactions to adversity in a new way and consciously challenging negative self-talk. This learned optimism involves cognitive restructuring, where you can help yourself and others become more optimistic by consciously challenging negative, self-limiting thinking and replacing it with more optimistic thought patterns.

When you do not feel safe envisioning a positive outcome, you might activate what is known as a freeze response of your nervous system – also known as disassociation so that you don’t feel pain.  This often includes a disconnection to your sense of smell.  Smelling essential oils, like Parasympathetic®can help thaw the freeze response and restore your ability to sense your environment and feel safe in it.  This sense of embodiment and safety may help allow you to better feel engaged, attentive, and present in the moment, which may help you avoid worrying about future events and things that are outside of your control.

Apply Parasympathetic® over the vagus nerve (behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone) to activate the vagus nerve.  This helps discharge energy and shift out of the frozen state into the healing parasympathetic.

Inhaling essential oils is the fastest and most efficient way to reset the volume of threat perception and help calm the over-firing of 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.

Your sense of smell is key to survival! The smell is often the first warning of safety or danger.  For this reason, 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.

Limbic Reset™ contains a proprietary blend of essential 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 essential oils such as Frankincense and Sandalwood that contain the chemical constituent Sesquiterpenes, which are thought to help to increase the oxygen in the limbic system which in turn “unlocks” the DNA and allow emotional baggage to be released from cellular memory.

The citrus oils contained in. Limbic Reset™ helps to lift your mood and clear your energy so that you do not take on or carry negative emotions or a pessimistic mindset for others.  For example, Melissa is known as an antidepressant that possesses uplifting and emotional balancing compounds.

Limbic Reset™ also contains Helichrysum oils which are touted for brain function and known to cross the blood-brain barrier and carry oxygen to the limbic system to help rewire neural circuits in your limbic system and calm an over-active stress response.

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.