Your body uses minerals, like calcium, to protect itself from stress and shield you from perceived threats.
Calcium is an essential mineral that plays a crucial role in several functions of your body, including bone health, nerve function, and muscle contraction.
Calcium is a very calming mineral known to have a calming or numbing effect on your nervous system activity, helping you slow down and calm your reaction to trauma and stressful experiences.
For example, high tissue calcium diminishes the sensitivity and reactivity of the nervous system. This may help reduce your awareness of the stress or the uncomfortable emotions that arise from stress, like fear, anger, or grief, helping to make the stress more tolerable.
When stressed, the body releases calcium from your bones to help counteract the effects of stress hormones. This can create a “calcium shell” as an adaptive or protective defense mechanism against stress and trauma.
These calcium shells in the body’s soft tissues, like the fascia, are one way your issues stay calcified and trapped in your tissues.
What is a Calcium Shell?
The term “calcium shell” suggests a potential biological mechanism by which the body attempts to cope with stress, emotional trauma, or a dysregulated nervous system by depositing calcium around your cells as a protective mechanism.
In this protective state, the body builds a hard shell made from calcium. Calcium salts are draw out of the bones and teeth, where they float around the body in precipitates (an insoluble solid that emerges from a liquid solution), and build up with calcium deposits accumulating in areas where they form a kind of shell around the soft tissues of the body, including the skin, muscles, and organs.
A calcium shell may serve as a protective coping mechanism that may protect and numb you to external stress, emotional overwhelm, and past trauma. It may shield you from feeling painful feelings or outside threats.
Excess tissue calcium tends to harden the cell membranes and can decrease the cell permeability. This “shell” may also hinder normal cellular function and emotional awareness, preventing the entry of nutrients and hormones and the exit of toxins and cellular waste products.
This ‘protective shell’ may also contribute to emotional numbness and fatigue, inhibiting expression and contributing to difficulty processing emotions. Calcium has a slowing effect that may be helpful for those who tend to drive too hard, which can contribute to feelings of lethargy, fatigue, and depression. In its protective capacity, a calcium shell may help reduce stress levels by inducing fatigue to prevent overworking or overstressing the body.
Symptoms of Calcium Shell
Calcium shells can protect you from harm and also block access to the positive, presenting as symptoms like:
- Fatigue and lethargy
- Apathy
- Detachment or withdrawal
- Inability to express emotions
- Mood swings
- Racing thoughts
- Anxiety or Panic Attacks
- Depression/ feelings of despair
- Brain fog
- Headaches/migraines
- Psychological withdrawal and dissociation
- Problems concentrating / problems with memory
- Weight gain and digestive issues (High calcium can lead to bile sluggishness, causing bloating and poor fat digestion)
- Impaired circulation or reduced spine movement
- Poor dental health and tooth decay (Ca pulled out of teeth into tissues)
- Sensitivity to EMFs (calcium is very conductive)
- Feeling of being disconnected, apathetic
- Emotional numbness, psychological withdrawal
- Anxiety, irritability, emotional outbursts
- Anger and a racing mind
- Insomnia (calcium has an impact on the pineal gland, which releases melatonin to support sleep)
- Rigidity, withdrawal, defensiveness, suppression, or repression
What Causes a Calcium Shell?
Calcium shells develop in response to an emotional trauma or overwhelming stress that you cannot process, so instead, the body helps to create a protective shell against the trauma.
The shell reduces stress by reducing the intensity of the impact of the stress on your nervous system. In essence, it is a numbing effect to protect you from real or imagined stressors, including the stress of a difficult childhood, where you were not in control of your environment and had to use any defense possible to survive and protect yourself from overwhelming emotions.
A “Calcium Shell” is a physical armoring against real or imagined stressors—a trauma response or coping mechanism that occurs if you cannot handle stress. The calcium shell serves as physical armoring to protect you from stressors.
Other factors that may contribute to the development of a calcium shell include:
Adrenal Fatigue: If your adrenal glands are tired, it may throw off levels of sodium and potassium—the body’s solvent minerals that keep calcium and magnesium in solution in the blood. If the level of these minerals becomes too low in the tissues, then calcium and magnesium will begin to precipitate out of the blood into the soft tissues and form hard deposits all over the body.
Sodium and potassium decrease in the tissues when the adrenal glands are depleted. Aldosterone, an adrenal hormone, maintains the sodium level in the body, and potassium often rises and falls with sodium.
Supporting the vitality of the adrenal glands increases the tissue sodium and potassium levels, which helps allow calcium reabsorption into the bones.
Sensitivity: Sensitive individuals may use body chemistry as a “wall of protection” to help adapt, escape, withdraw, run away, and hide from the world.
Trauma: Severe physical or emotional trauma. Unprocessed traumatic experiences may create a lack of safety to interact, be yourself, or socialize, or function without a protective wall to lessen the impact of stress.
Fear of expression: Fear of speaking out, of taking responsibility, of what people may say or do, or of becoming angry or upset if you speak up may contribute to a calcium shell.
Patterns of Stagnation or Dissociation: A pattern of “advancing very slowly with the brakes on” where part of you may want to move ahead, but another part does not want to move ahead so you move through life in a slow, calcified or petrified way driven by extreme fear, extreme withdrawal and often some trauma. This movement pattern may attract a calcium shell to form.he foot cannot pronate correctly, the impact stress may be transferred to the knee and ultimately the lower back.
Essential Oils for the Calcium Shell
Essential oils can help crack the calcium shell, both physically helping to support the physical release of the calcium and integrate the emotional debris of the trauma stored in the tissues.
A calcium shell can block emotional processing to avoid pain. Safe, natural, gentle remedies like essential oils can help emotions surface gently. Your sense of smell through the inhalation of essential oils is one of the easiest ways to help support emotional processing. Smelling or diffusing essential oils can help to feel safe to release the calcium shell and begin to process the emotions that the shell was protecting you from. Your sense of smell also 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, binding 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 release 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.
Supporting the Nervous System (Releasing the Trauma)
1. Parasympathetic™
Healing the nervous system is an essential part of emotional healing. Trauma creates dysfunction in your nervous system—you have to heal the nervous system to feel safe in your body again. The body gets stuck in the state that it was in when the trauma occurred, and keeps you stuck in that calcified state.
Stimulating your vagus nerve by inhaling or topically applying the Parasympathetic™ blend behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone tells your body that you are safe.
This helps activate your parasympathetic nervous system, promoting safety and relaxation, which may help melt the calcium shell, inducing a state of calm and openness, which can help you process through the underlying emotions and traumas. Apply Parasympathetic™ over the vagus nerve (behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone) to activate the vagus nerve. This helps promote a sense of embodiment and safety, which allows you to discharge energy and release the calcium shell.
2. Fascia Release™
Trauma lives in your tissues, specifically your fascia, the tissue surrounding every cell in your body. Your emotions—or energy in motion—travel through your fascia to be released. When your fascia is tight and constricted, emotions do not flow and are not released, but instead become trapped in your tissue.
You must release the fascia to release the trapped energy and negative emotions in the tissue. Essential oils offer a safe and simple way to release negative emotions from the tissue and create an easy flow for healthy fascia. Releasing my fascia with Fascia Release™ essential oil has been extremely helpful.
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. Fascia Release™ blend is 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.
Application Tip: I have been applying Fascia Release™ to my fingertips and tapping on key reflex points to actively engage my safety response. The video and graphics in this post show how to tap in more detail.
Supporting Lymphatic Movement with Fascia Release™ and Lymph blend can help flush out excess calcium deposits.
3. Adrenal®
The adrenals are small triangular glands that sit on top of your kidneys and produce and release the body’s stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol provides the body with the energy it requires to survive physical or emotional stress. When your adrenal glands are overtaxed or fatigued, they cannot supply the body with the energy it needs to heal.
When the adrenals are fatigued, they throw off levels of sodium and potassium, the body’s solvent minerals that keep calcium and magnesium in solution in the blood. If the level of these minerals becomes too low in the tissues, then calcium and magnesium will begin to precipitate out of the blood into the soft tissues and form hard deposits all over the body. Restoring the vitality of the adrenal glands may help correct calcium shells.
Essential oils can be used like adaptogenic herbs to help support the adrenal glands for the optimal energy reserves required to support your healing. The Adrenal® blend also contains several stimulatory oils like Thyme, Cinnamon, and Rosemary, so you feel invigorated, revitalized, and energetic. To use, either smell or 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).
