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If You’re Stressed, Rosemary Can Help
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There are many methods of dealing with the stress including relaxation techniques, exercise regimens, breathing techniques, and even many kinds of foods that you can eat. One of the best things to do to help yourself relax though is to inhale some essential oils.
Not all essential oils are equally as beneficial for stress though. Some of the best essential oils for relieving anxiety and stress are lavender, rose, vetiver, ylang-ylang, bergamont, chamomile, frankincense, and rosemary. Lavender is widely known to be an essential oil that will help to calm those using it. Rose essential oil is used for relieving anxiety in first-time pregnant women, and both vetiver and ylang-ylang help to create calming, grounding feelings in their users. Bergamont has been tested on rats and shown to help reduce their stress responses and it has been shown to help treat depression and anxiety, as has frankincense. Chamomile is not only useful for anxiety but also for irritability and feelings of worry.
Rosemary in particular though has shown much promise recently as many studies have been published on how it can help participants relieve stress. It seems that rosemary essential oil has a long history of being used for this purpose too, as it was used by Greek scholars during test-taking because it was thought to help improve their performance. Recent studies have shown that the scholars wearing springs of rosemary was not in vain either.
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The Studies
The Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing in Boca Rotan and Department of Nursing at Nambu University in Korea each conducted studies on whether the Greeks were onto something. The studies found that inhaling the rosemary essential oil had significant positive effects on the test takers. Another study published in the BMC Complimentary and Alternative Medicine journal tested rosemary essential oil as a potential treatment for mood disorders – most of which are an after-effect of dealing with stress.
This study was conducted on mice that were subjected to the tail suspension test, where the mouse is suspended by the tail and tested to see how long it takes for the mouse to stop releasing itself, and also had inhaled rosemary essential oil. The sooner the mice gave up, the more stressed they were measured to be. They also examined the effect of rosemary essential oil for cells in vitro. It was found that the inhalation of rosemary essential oil reduced the amount of time that the mice were immobile and that rosemary essential oil also increased the levels of dopamine, the ‘happiness hormone,’ in the in vitro cells.
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