I have long wished to be more patient.
Less reactive.
More emotionally regulated.
And yet, in those moments when I was too hungry, too tired, or just too moody, I would lose my cool.
It deeply embarrassed my daughter to the point where she refused to travel with me unless I could figure out how to keep my sh*t together.
So I leaned in.
And figured it out.
I succeeded to the point where we just got back from an epic trip to Croatia together, and she shared, “Normally after a trip with you, I need some time away from you, but you were so pleasant this time that I don’t feel that way.
I won’t pretend that this is my new natural default.
It is not. I still have those moments when I feel frustrated and tempted to fall back into my old pattern of over-reacting.
In those moments, I have learned to take a deep breath—well, actually a deep inhale of Limbic Reset—that allows me to pause and sit in my own internal discomfort instead of expressing that discomfort externally.
It is the process of using smell to support emotional regulation.
What is Emotional Regulation?
Emotional regulation is the ability to exert control over your emotional state. It allows you to manage or regulate strong emotions when they feel too intense or overwhelming.
Emotional regulation enables you to respond to external and internal challenges and stimuli with a sufficiently flexible range of emotions, allowing you to react in ways that you—and those around you—feel good about, rather than responding in ways that you may later regret.
We all experience emotions, both positive and negative, on a daily basis. These emotions may include feelings of guilt, sadness, overwhelm, frustration, anger, self-blame, or low self-worth.
When you are feeling regulated, you may be able to manage, express, and cope with these emotions in a healthy, socially acceptable way. When you feel dysregulated, you may experience these intense feelings and emotions more frequently and for longer durations, making it more challenging to monitor and control your reaction to intense feelings.
The more you can regulate yourself and your ability to feel safe in the world, the better able you are to regulate your response to intense emotional stimuli and experiences.
Symptoms of Poor Emotional Regulation
Poor emotional regulation—also known as emotional dysregulation—may influence what you say and how you act, including:
- Becoming easily frustrated by minor inconveniences or annoyances
- Difficulty controlling temper and outbursts
- Overreacting to minor events, perceived slights, or criticisms
- Difficulty calming down after an emotional outburst
- Mood swings or rapid shifts between different moods (from happy to angry, sad to anxious)
- Impulsivity: Acting without thinking about consequences or making rash decisions based on emotions
- Feeling like emotions are intense, unpredictable, or uncontrollable
- Verbal outbursts (shouting, yelling, screaming, or crying).
- Persistent irritability or anger between outbursts.
- Aggressive or even violent behavior (towards objects, animals, or people).
- Difficulty with relationships: High conflict or struggles to maintain healthy and stable relationships
- High levels of anxiety, shame, or anger
Using Smell to Support Emotional Regulation
Your sense of smell has direct access to the part of your brain that helps you manage and regulate intense emotions when they feel overwhelming.
Smell has a direct pathway to the emotional center of your brain, known as the limbic system. This system controls your hormones and influences your emotions and mood, giving you a powerful tool to support emotional regulation.
On a physical level, only two synapses separate your olfactory nerve from your amygdala—a part of the limbic system in the brain that helps process and release stored emotional energy and enhance both your emotional and physiological state. No other sensory system has this 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 different brain regions before reaching your limbic system.
This makes smell unique among the five senses as it bypasses your thalamus and projects directly to the regions of your brain associated with emotional regulation. This direct pathway allows smells to trigger subconscious emotional responses before they reach the brain’s conscious awareness.
Research shows that “olfactory stimulation can directly activate amygdala neurons to help shift emotions.” Smell often provokes emotional or memory reactions before you can consciously identify or label it.
This direct physiological access can rewire your physiology and help enhance your capacity for emotional regulation.
The inhalation and topical application of essential oils work with your natural physiology to support emotional balance and well-being!
Essential oils can also send safety signals to help calm your subconscious survival response. The chemical constituents in essential oils known as sesquiterpenes—found in the essential oils of frankincense and sandalwood in the Limbic Reset blend—can penetrate the blood-brain barrier. These molecules have a significant oxygenating effect on the brain’s limbic system. The combination of oxygenation in the brain and the stimulation from aromatic molecules appears to assist the amygdala in facilitating the release of emotional blockages.
Finally, topical application of essential oils may help enhance emotional regulation by increasing awareness of bodily sensations to release tension, enhance relaxation, and facilitate emotional healing. This enables you to foster a deeper connection with your body and relieve tension by being aware of bodily sensations. Touch can help access and process emotions held in the body and help release physical tension and stress stored in the muscles and tissues.
How I Used Smell to Support Emotional Regulation
I have been actively using the following combination of essential oil blends to enhance my emotional regulation.
Parasympathetic®:
Your autonomic nervous system is responsible for receiving information, processing it, and triggering the necessary responses, including coordinating and regulating the functions of all other bodily systems. Unfortunately, when the nervous system senses physical, mental, or emotional danger, its delicate balance can be disrupted, triggering survival responses, such as a state of heightened sympathetic “fight” or “flight” response or a dorsal vagal “freeze” response, to help navigate threats.
While these nervous system states can support survival, they can often lead to over-reactive emotional responses. Supporting parasympathetic activity helps you enhance your capacity for emotional regulation.
The key to emotional regulation is signaling safety to the body.
Your vagus nerve is your body’s internal safety signal. As the main pathway of the parasympathetic “rest and digest” system, it helps calm the body, reduce stress hormones, slow the heart rate, and support digestion and healing. When you activate the vagus nerve—by applying Parasympathetic® oil behind the earlobe—you tell your body: “You’re safe now. It’s okay to relax and heal.”
Parasympathetic® calms the nervous system to support emotional regulation. Apply Parasympathetic® over the vagus nerve (located behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone) to activate the vagus nerve to send safety signals to your body. This helps calm emotional reactivity and soothe the sensations of fight or flight.
Hypothalamus™
Your hypothalamus serves as a command center for regulating hormones and managing your stress response, thereby helping to maintain emotional stability and aligning physical reactions with emotional states.
It acts like a thermostat, constantly assessing and adjusting your body’s internal balance—including how you regulate emotions—by linking feelings from other brain areas to the body’s physiological responses, such as increased heart rate and the release of stress hormones like cortisol.
When you experience stress, the hypothalamus initiates the hormonal cascade through the HPA (Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal) axis, telling your body how to respond. Chronic stress, trauma, inflammation, or even poor sleep can disrupt this process, leading to emotional dysregulation—things like mood swings, anxiety, overwhelm, or feeling “stuck” emotionally.
The Hypothalamus™ blend helps reboot and reset the hypothalamus so it can restore optimal hormone signaling. Because the hypothalamus is part of the limbic system—your brain’s emotional center—aromatic application via the olfactory nerve (just under the nose) delivers signals straight to this region. It bypasses the blood-brain barrier and works almost immediately to modulate mood and perception and support emotional regulation.
Apply 1-2 drops of Hypothalamus™ topically on the forehead (just above the third eye) or inhale deeply from the bottle for 3–5 breaths to bring your emotional “thermostat” back online, so you can respond rather than react—and feel like yourself again.
Limbic Reset™
Your limbic system works to regulate your emotions and respond to physical, mental, and emotional threats in combination with your parasympathetic nervous system.
In fact, your limbic system is often referred to as the “emotional nervous system” as it helps you interpret sensory information and determine whether external stimuli are threatening or benign. If a threat is perceived, your limbic system will then prompt your nervous system to activate the “fight or flight” sympathetic nervous system response. This threat response can become maladaptive and overly reactive, leading to poor emotional regulation and overly reactive emotional responses.
Restoring 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” response, and rewiring your response to emotional triggers.
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.
Scent has direct access to the emotional center of your brain, which controls your hormones and influences your emotions and mood, known as the limbic system. 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 different regions of the brain first, before reaching your limbic system.
This makes essential oils a potent tool for calming the intensity of the emotions, allowing you to chunk the release so that it feels more manageable.
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.
Limbic Reset™ contains a proprietary blend of essential oils designed to calm threat arousal and send safety cues 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 increase the oxygen in the limbic system, which in turn “unlocks” the DNA and allows emotional baggage to be released from cellular memory. The citrus oils in Limbic Reset™ help 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 emotionally balancing compounds.
Limbic Reset™ also contains Helichrysum oils, which are touted for their benefits to brain function and are known to cross the blood-brain barrier, carrying oxygen to the limbic system to help rewire neural circuits and calm an overactive stress response.
Featured Oils:
Ready to get started? Click the links below to order today:
References:
