Do you often have difficulty sleeping? Does your lack of sleep impact your day to day life? Aromatherapy for sleep can be your solution! You might have come across suggestions to exercise, invest in sleep aids, or even medications. However, here we have for you, cost-effective yet sensational ways to sleep — essential oils for sleep.
Benefits of Aromatherapy For Sleep: How It Affects Your Body and Brain?
Before you start using essential oils for sleep, you should learn a little about how your body responds to aromatherapy and how your system absorbs them.
When you inhale these oils, the olfactory nerves (responsible for understanding smalls) are stimulated by their airborne molecules, and this transmits neurochemical signals to the brain’s different areas. Then, the olfactory nerves send signals to the limbic system, the part of the brain that controls emotions and stress response and regulates sleep and wake hormones.
In simple words, these smells trigger your mind to tell your body to relax, hence easing you into a night of peaceful sleep.
Essential oils are excellent for using topically as they are absorbed easily by the skin. They are then able to pass easily through the cell wall as they have very small molecules. This means that your body is not only receiving the potential healing properties of the oils that promote sleep via the brain, but also rapidly through your bloodstream.
No matter how you use aromatherapy, it helps in reducing stress and anxiety, making you feel relaxed and at peace.
How to Use Essential Oils for Sleep
Essential oils are one of the most popular kinds of aromatherapy for sleep. When you need a natural sleep aid, one of the best options available is essential oils. They are easy to use and extremely versatile. You can easily create a custom sleep blend with these oils or get some inspiration from Martha Stewart and make your very own sleep balm, lavender sleeping spray, or lavender sleep lotion.
There are many ways to use essential oils for sleep – the simplest is to add a few drops of aromatherapy oils in massage oils, bath salts, and diffusers. The best essential oils for promoting sleep are lavender, ylang-ylang, bergamot, valerian, and clary sage essential oils.
Best Aromatherapy Oils:
The best essential oils for promoting sleep are
- Lavender
Lavender is one of the most preferred essence used in aromatherapy for sleep. The pleasant smell also helps cope with stress, anxiety and mild pains as well.
- Ylang-ylang Aromatherapy Oils
Ylang-ylang has a strong floral scent with several benefits. Some include disinfecting, stimulating thinking skills, and sometimes even to increase sexual drives.
- Bergamot Aromatherapy Essential Oils
Bergamot is a more earthy smelling essential oil that allows for several health benefits including sleep-inducing. It is also used for treating skin infections, reducing inflammations and even to diminish anxiety.
- Valerian
Valerian is a root from which beneficials extracts are taken for mild symptoms. Apart from promoting relaxed sleep, it also aids in easing menopause symptoms and anxiety.
- Clary Sage Essential Oils
Clary sage is an oil used in aromatherapy for sleep specially made for relaxation. Some studies have shown that these help bring a sense of calmness and balance that is ideal for sleep.
Aromatherapy Massage Oil:
One of the best ways to use essential oils to promote sleep is to use them as an aromatherapy massage oil. This will help you fall asleep better and faster.
Lavender essential oil is one of the best choices for people who cannot sleep well due to stress and anxiety. Using lavender oil for sleep helps reduce stress and anxiety and promote relaxation. The scent, as well as properties of essential oils like lavender, will relax your muscles and ensure sound sleep. Bergamot essential oil is also known to ease tension, anxiety, and reduce blood pressure and heart rate. If you are going to use massage oil, make sure that you mix the essential oil with a quality carrier oil like cold-pressed coconut, sweet almond, olive, jojoba or grapeseed oil.
Aromatherapy Bath Salts:
There is nothing that is quite as relaxing as a warm bath. There are aromatherapy bath salts that you can use to relax and relieve tension, pressure, and anxiety so that you can get a good night’s sleep. Ylang-ylang has an aroma that can help in calming the nervous system, which in turn lowers blood pressure and heart rate. Clary sage essential oil is another wonderful oil that works as a natural antidepressant, helping relieve depression, which is one of the most common causes of difficulty sleeping.
Aromatherapy Diffusers:
These are small ceramic discs that contain essential oils and make the air redolent with their scents. You can find electric diffusers that you can set to go off at a specific time. These are safer alternatives to aromatherapy candles and scent warmers using tea light candles which will continue to burn even after you fall asleep and potentially be a fire hazard.
You can choose the essential oil that has your favourite scent and use it in your diffuser to lull you to sleep and get the much-needed rest to wake up feeling refreshed and revitalized.
If you are planning to use aromatherapy for sleep, you should try out different essential oils to find the one that works best for you. When buying these oils, make sure that you research the brand and check to see that it is of therapeutic purity and quality.
To get the results you desire, you need to make sure that you buy high-quality essential oils from well-known brands. Once you find the right essential oil, you can use aromatherapy to get the sweet, deep sleep you need so badly.
Other Ways to Improve Your Sleep
Essential oils and aromatherapy is a subtle, yet effective way to induce sleep when someone is feeling anxious or disturbed. However, in many cases, disturbed sleep can simply be due to poor sleep hygiene.
For those cases, it’s essential to check that you have two of the most important factors that enable undisturbed sleep:
- A supportive mattress
An unsupportive mattress leads to tossing, turning, backaches and disrupted sleep. This is why you need to ensure that your mattress is engineered to support your back, while ensuring that it helps you sleep.
- A soft, hygienic pillow
Pillows come in various shapes, densities and firmness. It’s integral that you browse through a quality range of pillows to understand what helps you drift into sleep.
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