why essential oils for anxiety (cavewoman biohack)?
Posted by Sinead Duffy on
so why are essential oils the most useful bio-hack for anxiety? and, while we're at it, what is the stress reflex?
we all know that the stress hormones trigger the fight-or-flight response, which goes on to deliver a wide range of wildly inappropriate physical happenings:
- blood to the hands and feed
- digestion paused
- heart rate increased
- immune function paused
- rational brain capacity diminished
all these would be most useful if you did need to a) fight or b) flight - but of course you don't....
you need to simultaneously mentally finish a project while planning a meal while speaking to your mother while driving your child to a jujitsu class
the fight-or-flight response is really not that useful!
it's a cavewoman hangover and is so ill-fitted to the physiological response that would actually serve us, that it would be funny... if it wasn't so damaging
the problem is we're still pretty primal beings - not all that long down from the trees really, but we've got to stop looking for solutions in the rational world.
the fight-or-flight response is too powerful - and it doesn't speak rational but it does speak smell.
in fact - it speaks smell so fluently that it will transform odor molecules( the molecules that hold smell) into neurotransmitters (the body's chemical messangers), and these neurotransmitters have the power to interrupt the stress response.
breaking the flight and fight response and giving you time to breathe...now how's that for a bio hack? (thank you Cavewoman forebears!)