Stress and Anxiety: Are We Coping Correctly?

You may wonder, “Okay, so I’m in a yoga practice, I’m sipping calming tea and I’m still stressed...what gives?” Let’s dig into those two words, “stress” and “anxiety” a little bit. Stress is defined as, “a force exerted when one body or body part presses on, pulls on, pushes against, or tends to compress or twist another body or body part.” Anxiety is defined as, “apprehensive uneasiness or nervousness usually over an impending or anticipated ill.” In the world of humans these words are often seen as very similar experiences, but the thing that one can take away from these definitions is that we are dealing with two factors, the physiological and the emotional.  

Stress + Anxiety: Evil Twins

Without question, these two factors piggyback off one another and one spurs the other to grow, eventually leading to that overwhelmed feeling we’ve all experienced at some point. If we’re going to tackle improving our levels of stress and anxiety, we need to focus on how everything we do affects both our body and our mind. The focus cannot be on just the mind or just the body. 

For instance, it may be that your stress lingers after yoga when you’re practicing to alleviate your stress. If we apply the mind-body approach to healing and coping, it could be that your stress remains because of how you’re practicing yoga. In other words, you could get better results from a yoga practice with more focus on tuning into your emotions instead of doing poses while thinking about your to-do list or the looming exam coming up. If you’re sipping your calming tea, are you in a comfortable chair or an uncomfortable one? Tuning into the comfort of your body may make that tea sipping a more memorable experience as well as a more relaxing and beneficial one.

Aromatherapy: Now you Can Exhale

Recently, many people have begun to appreciate the role aromatherapy and essential oils can play in helping cope with stress and anxiety. Essential oils have an ability to really help with this idea of effecting our emotional as well as our physical worlds. That said, there is still a lot of misinformation out there about what essential oils are, and what they can do and what they cannot do.  

When we look to science, and evidence-based research, we learn a couple of things. One, there is already some reliable evidence showing both physiological benefits as well as emotional benefits to therapeutic use of essential oils. Two, the evidence suggests the method of inhalation may be the safest and best tolerated way to engage with and use essential oils. There is a ton of research still needing to be performed in order to improve what we know about the power of essential oils, but there is no question that enough evidence exists to show their efficacy.

Reviewing the physiological benefit essential oils can provide, several studies have shown a correlation between inhaling certain essential oils, such as lavender, to reduced levels of cortisol (often known as your “stress hormone”) in the body. Reduced cortisol levels are a good indication that levels of stress, and the body’s response to it, will be reduced as well. Many hospitals now offer aromatherapy inhalation as a way of dealing with pre-operative anxiety. The use of aromatherapy in various medical situations is a growing trend.

Anxiety, Stress and Emotions: A Mixed Bag

The emotional side to stress, anxiety and essential oils is perhaps easier to understand, if more difficult to prove since there are so many factors that can affect one’s emotional state. Fundamentally, inhaling a nice smelling fragrance is often pleasant on its own, being that our sense of smell is usually neglected at best and assaulted at worst.  

Humans only have five major senses, so taking care of our noses seems like it should be a priority. Digging a little deeper though, we find some incredibly interesting connections between our sense of smell and our emotions, specifically our limbic system. The limbic system is the part of our brain that deals with behavior and emotion. There is a lot that could be said about how this system functions, but for our purposes, we need to know that the sense of smell is a very connected and influential part of it. Anyone who has had the experience of having a strong memory attached to a certain smell can attest to both the near transformative power of that moment as well as the immediacy with which it is felt. There is science behind why that is, as our limbic system is known to be one of the older parts of the human brain. It is sometimes described as our “lizard brain.” 

Lizard Brain 101

We have a lizard brain, now what? What does this have to do with our levels of stress and anxiety? A LOT! The limbic system controls our “fight or flight or freeze” response--our most reflexive reactions to danger that are hardwired into each of us. Where cave-people used it to escape a dangerous predator, modern life seems to have this fight-or-flight-or-freeze response turned on at a low level nearly all of the time, and often without any consciousness that it is actually running, sort of like a background computer program. 

Aromatherapy can have an impact on that background program that is constantly running. The essential oils breathed in can disrupt and short circuit some of those “on all the time” patterns of stress that we experience.  If you’re someone who feels this type of undercurrent of stress throughout your day, you may want to consider trying a little aromatherapy break in your day instead of (or in addition to) a coffee break. Even just 15 minutes of engaging your sense of smell, breathing and connecting with your feelings about the day and throughout the day can really improve how that day finishes.