Limbic System Dysfunction

Your limbic system works with your nervous system to help you regulate your emotions, like anger and fear.  

In fact, your limbic system is often referred to as the “emotional nervous system” as it helps control your emotion health in combination with your parasympathetic nervous system.

As you may know, your limbic system is a complex set of brain structures that helps you regulate emotional and social processing, as well as learning, motivation, and memory.

Your limbic system in wired to respond to sensory information – especially the sense of smell – making essential oils a powerful tool to help regulate 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.

What Is Your Limbic System?

Your limbic system consists of several interconnected areas of the brain that lie beneath the outer, wrinkly part of the brain and above the brain stem, including your:

Amygdala: All emotion is processed by your amygdala. When in senses danger, it sends messages to the body in the form of stress hormones (cortisol) and is intimately related to the autonomic nervous system’s sympathetic “fight or flight”. Fear conditioning is driven by an interplay between the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex. 

Hippocampus: Primarily involved with olfaction (smelling), consolidation of memory and creating new memories, and connecting those memories to smell, sound and emotion. Your hippocampus supports mood regulation, and can shut off the stress response when needed.  Failure of the hippocampus to modulate the amygdala’s activity can make it difficult to create a safe environment for incoming information or sensations, contributing to chronic anxiety.

Hypothalamus: Controls your body’s response to stress, helps you maintain a steady internal state (homeostasis), helps form and release hormones that control energy and mood. Your hypothalamus also links the pituitary gland (the “master” gland, which controls most of the endocrine system) to the nervous system.

Thalamus serves as the main relay station for information such as sensory and motor signals to and from the rest of the brain. It transforms sensory information into a more manageable form for higher brain functions. The thalamus also maintains alertness and directs your attention to sensory input. 

Olfactory cortex: Your olfactory system is unique among the sensory systems for having direct anatomical and functional links with the limbic system. Thus, olfactory stimuli – like the inhalation of essential oils – can have a strong effect on mood. 

Cingulate cortex: Integrates input from different areas of the limbic system, creating pathways for information and brain messages to travel across. It is also connected to memory, learning and emotional processing.

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 perfumes, household cleaners, personal hygiene products, or other chemicals (i.e. immediate experience of  brain fog, fatigue, headache, nausea, or neurological symptoms)
• Inability to concentrate or focus 
• Anxiety and irritability or panic attacks
• Mood swings
• Depression
• 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 weaken 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 viscous 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.

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.

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.

How to Calm the Limbic System with 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 3 powerful blend that can be used in combination to help rewire neural circuits in your limbic system and calm an over-active stress response.

Heart™

Your heart integrates and balances your physical, emotional, and mental body.

More specifically, your heart’s electromagnetic field affects your limbic system, which is responsible for emotions.  This is because your brain’s rhythms entrain with your heart’s rhythm. 

Your heart actually sends more communication to your brain than the other way around.

Coherence is the state when the heart, mind, and emotions are in energetic alignment.  Positive emotions such as compassion and love generate a harmonious pattern in your heart’s rhythm, leading to coherence and greater emotional regulation. 

It’s interesting that your amygdala is primarily involved in information processing related to negative emotions, whereas positive emotions tend to reduce amygdala activation, according to The neurobiology of positive emotions.

Heart™ blend helps increase your heart’s harmony and activate heart coherence.

With an electrical component about 60 times greater and an electromagnetic energy field 5000 times greater than the brain’s, the heart has a significant influence on the body down to the cellular level. 

Your heart plays host to 40,000 sensory neurons through which it communicates to the brain and the body, producing and releasing hormones into the blood stream.

Heart™ blend was designed to harmonize these chemical and electrical signals to help support an optimal state of heart coherence that allows you to detoxify and transmute intense emotions.  To use it, simply apply 2-3 drops over the front of the heart (left side of chest).

READ THIS NEXT: Essential Oils for Heart Coherence

Parasympathetic®

Quieting down your nervous system allows your limbic system to quiet down.

Calming your amygdala’s hair-trigger reaction helps to calm and reduce emotional outbursts.  This begins by helping you feel safe.  

Your sympathetic “fight or flight” state turns on when survival and safety are threatened.  

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 and quiet limbic system overwhelm.

Activating your parasympathetic “rest and digest” state can enhance your sense of safety.  

Applying Parasympathetic® behind your earlobe on your mastoid bone helps stimulate your vagus nerve which triggers your “rest and digest” parasympathetic state, alerting your body and your amygdala that the danger has passed so it can stop over reacting.

Research titled “Fear and anxiety take a double hit from vagal nerve stimulation” documents how activating your parasympathetic nervous system via vagus nerve stimulation helps to quell an overactive limbic system.

Your vagus nerve helps your autonomic nervous system communicate fear and danger information to your amygdala. In simple terms, the vagus nerve detects the release of the stress hormone epinephrine which acts as a “something important just happened” signal that is communicated to other fear centers in the brain. Activation or inhibition of this signal “can enhance or decrease the rate of fear extinction.  By enhancing fear extinction while quelling anxiety, vagal stimulation delivers a double hit against maladaptive fear. This may make vagal stimulation particularly useful in cases where severe anxiety prevents effective exposure therapy.”

What’s more, when stimulated, your vagus nerve releases the neurotransmitter Acetylcholine which calms anxiety by relaxing the smooth muscles in your artery walls, dilating the arteries, and slowing your heartbeat. It also may enhance memory consolidation and enhancement which may help with the processing of fear memories, which helps inhibit exaggerated fear expression, like anxiety. (read more about Acetylcholine).

Applying Parasympathetic® behind your earlobe on your mastoid bone helps you drop into the “rest and digest” parasympathetic state, alerting your body and your amygdala that the danger has passed so it can stop over reacting.

Hypothalamus™

While the amygdala is the emotion center of the brain, the hypothalamus is charge of your ability to change your emotional response and emotional reactivity.  Supporting your hypothalamus can often help fix downstream hormonal and endocrine issues that impact your emotional reactivity, especially related to anxiety.  The direct pathway from the olfactory system to the hypothalamus can also be used to help return your hypothalamus to balance.

Essential oils may help balance the various feedback loops to regulate the production of the stress hormone cortisol, including the hypothalamus and the adrenal glands – part of the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis – to ensure that they are not chronically activated or dysfunctioning which can lead to chronically elevated cortisol levels.

In response to stress, your hypothalamus triggers your adrenal glands to release the stress hormone cortisol until your hormones reach the levels that your body needs, and then a series of chemical reactions known as the negative feedback loop begins to switch them off.  In other words, when the hypothalamus receives the signal that cortisol levels in the body are sufficient, it signals the adrenals to stop releasing cortisol.  So long as the hypothalamus is able to correctly send and receive signals, cortisol levels in the body should return to balance.

Hypothalamus™ blend contains a proprietary blend of organic essential oils, including  Patchouli and Frankincense, which are high in sesquiterpenes.  Research shows that sesquiterpenes are able to cross the blood-brain barrier and have been found to increase oxygen around receptor sites near the hypothalamus because they are so small they are capable of penetrating deeply into your brain and carrying oxygen molecules into your brain tissue to help your brain heal. Sesquiterpenes also specifically have an effect on our emotional center in the hypothalamus, helping us remain calm and balanced.

To help return the hypothalamus and the amygdala to the balance, apply 1 drop of Hypothalamus™ to the forehead right above the third eye (right above the nose between eyebrows and hair line) up to 6 times daily.

Featured Oils:

• Heart™ available here
• Parasympathetic® available here
• Hypothalamus™ available here

References:

• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/13751335_Emotion_Experienced_during_Encoding_Enhances_Odor_Retrieval_Cue_Effectiveness
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149763405000904?via%3Dihub
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4176918/
• https://nba.uth.tmc.edu/neuroscience/m/s1/chapter11.html
• https://vibrantblueoils.com/essential-oils-for-memory/
• https://nba.uth.tmc.edu/neuroscience/m/s1/chapter11.html
• https://academic.oup.com/chemse/article-abstract/19/4/359/301399?redirectedFrom=PDF