This recipe was given to me by Carole, a client who’s been using essential oils for the last 25 years. This is, by far, one of her favourite diffuser blends, originally shared by her aromatherapy teacher, Vannoy Gentles Fite, the author of Essential Oils for Healing book. It is a powerful diffuser recipe that uses the essential oils best known — and shown below — for their stress-reducing benefits.
It packs a punch as it delivers the sedative, tranquilizing, antidepressant, and nervine properties right to your brain and soul. Your stress level will sink lower and lower as your take in this aromatic blend. I really love the aroma of this blend, and I know you’ll love it, too.
Vetiver is sometimes called the oil of tranquility. It helps to ease stress, calm the nerves, and relieve insomnia. It also helps with feelings of being disconnected, scattered, split, stressed, ungrounded, needing to escape, and in crisis. This is a powerful oil to use!
Basil has a warm, spicy, yet herbal aroma known to reduce anxious feelings. Basil provides great benefits to both the mind and body due to its high linalool content, making it an ideal application to help reduce feelings of tension when applied to the temples and back of the neck. Basil is commonly used in cooking to add a fresh, herbal flavour to meats, pastas, and entrée dishes; it is also cooling to the skin. The aroma of basil helps promote a sense of focus and a stress-relieving experience.
Now, let’s look at the power of aroma, there are many ways to use essential oils for their aromatic properties. One way is to diffuse the oil into the air. Not only does diffusion make the oil accessible to the body, but also research indicates that there are air purification benefits when diffusing oils. Diffusing oils helps to purify and cleanse the air, kill germs in the air, open airways, and affect mood.
One of the best-studied areas of aroma research is the effect of smell on emotions and mood. For example, there is convincing evidence that demonstrates that simply inhaling the aroma of an essential oil is effective for calming nervous or anxious feelings in a variety of settings. The smell receptors located on the upper surface of the nasal cavity make direct links with the limbic system of the brain, an area that governs the body’s emotional responses.