Essential Oils for Resilience

001: Tara Hunkin
This is My Child Will Thrive and I'm your host, Tara Hunkin, Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, Certified GAPS Practitioner, Restorative Wellness Practitioner, and mother. I'm thrilled to share with you the latest information, tips, resources, and tools to help you on the path to recovery for your child. With ADHD, Autism, Sensory Processing Disorder, or Learning Disabilities.

My own experiences with my daughter combined with as much training as I can get my hands on, research I can dig into and conferences I can attend have helped me to develop systems and tools for parents like you who feel overwhelmed, trying to help their children. So sit back as I share another great topic to help you on your journey. A quick disclaimer, before we get started,

My Child Will Thrive is not a substitute for working with a qualified healthcare practitioner. The information provided on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat your child. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before implementing any information or treatments that you have learned about on this podcast. There are many gifted, passionate, and knowledgeable practitioners with hundreds, if not thousands of hours of study and clinical experience available to help guide you.

Part of our goal is to give you the knowledge and tools you need to effectively advocate for your child so that you don't blindly implement each new treatment that comes along. No one knows your child better than you. No one knows your child's history like you do or can better judge what is normal or abnormal for your child. The greatest success in recovery comes from the parent being informed and asking the right questions and making the best decisions for their child in coordination with a team of qualified practitioners in different areas of specialty. Today's podcast is sponsored by the Autism, ADHD and Sensory Processing Disorder Summit. In order to learn more about the Summit and to sign up for free, please go to mychildwillthrive.com/summit.

2:09 Tara Hunkin:
I want to welcome you to the My Child Will Thrive podcast. Today I'm really excited to have with me a guest of, well, actually she's a repeat guest to the My Child Will Thrive community, but first timer on the podcast itself, it's Jodi Cohen. Jodi is a best-selling author, an award-winning journalist, a Functional Practitioner and Founder of Vibrant Blue Oils, my favorite oils that are out there. She's combined her training in Nutritional Therapy and Aromatherapy to create a unique proprietary blend of organic and wild crafted essential oils. She's helped over 50,000 clients heal from brain-related challenges, including anxiety, insomnia, and auto-immunity. For the past 10 years, she's lectured at wellness centers, conferences and corporations on brain health, essential oils, stress and detoxification. She's been seen in the New York Times, Wellness Mama, Elephant Journal and numerous publications and her website vibrantblueoils.com is visited by over 300,000 natural health seekers every year. And she's rapidly become a top resource for essential oils education on the internet today.

And today actually we are celebrating the launch of her new book. So Jodi, welcome, and I want to start off, we're going to talk about a whole bunch of things essential oils, but tell us obviously, first the name of your book, why you wrote your book and, we'll start right off for anybody that wants to find it. Where are they going to be able to find it today because it, it actually goes your book baby goes out into the world today. So we're here to sell it Today.

4:03 Jodi Cohen:
It's "Essential Oils to Boost the Brain and Heal the Body." The easiest way to get it and actually grab a gift while you're at it is to go to boostthebrainbook.com/gift and just enter your email address. We'll give you a really detailed download with some of the things we're going to talk about today, and then it will direct you to easy book links.

4:27 Tara Hunkin:
Yes, that's great. I wanted to get that out of the way, right from the beginning, because I didn't want anybody that didn't have a chance to listen to the entire episode, not hear about the fact that you have a book. And one of the reasons why I wanted you to have, have you on is one because you are my go-to resource itself for essential oils. We, my whole family has their little blue bottles all around the house. We use them all the time because they are my favorite and so many different ways for so many reasons. But also I am a huge book lover as I was just talking to you before we started to record today.

And I really think there's nothing better than a book as a resource to have when you want to learn about a particular topic. I mean, obviously I have a website, I host summits, but I absolutely love books. So I couldn't be more thrilled that you've taken all this knowledge and distilled it into a resource for the parents and practitioners that are listening today.

5:26 Jodi Cohen:
Yeah. Thank you. No, I do, too. I like to earmark books. I highlight and I really tried to organize it in a way, I have found from working with oils for like almost two decades, that there are really five things that are kind of challenging with most people, anyone who has health issues, anyone whose kids have health issues.

It's usually there are five underlying factors that seem to be out of balance with most of us and oils happen to be really well-suited to return those factors to balance. And that's what I really wanted to share and make sure people, if one of them like stress, or sleep kind of hits home, you can go to that section, focus there.

6:09 Tara Hunkin:
Yeah, it's great. I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy through digitally. So I have had a chance to, and you have broken it down to a really easy step-by-step sort of breakdown of how you can go about supporting yourself. But we want to talk today about essential oils for resilience, which I think is an incredibly good topic right now. As parents, and especially parents of kids that might be struggling, resilience is something that we have to muster, our kids have to muster on a daily basis. And obviously in the times that we're living in right now, it couldn't be more needed. Resilience is something that we all are having to stretch ourselves to be resilient on a day in day out basis. So let's start by talking about what you mean. So, when we talk about essential oils for resilience, what, what does that mean to you?

6:09 Jodi Cohen:
Yeah, basically I went through, well, I'll just share. I have two children. My daughter, Carly is 16. My son Max would have been 15 March 8th, but he was killed in a car accident two years ago at the age of 12, rather unexpectedly. And there were other boys in the car and there was a lot of insanity in the aftermath which involved attorneys. And my dad wound up passing away six months later and was in hospice.

And while I was sitting with him, saying goodbye, one of the attorneys called and what I hadn't known about attorneys at that time, especially personal injury attorneys, is that they do this interesting thing where they try to force you into a horrible state of fear and then ask you to make a decision in that state. And I just, I was so flooded. I couldn't do it. I hung up on the attorney, focused on my dad and it was the house I grew up at. I'm prone to anxiety anyway, and this was just too much. So I didn't even feel like I could drive.

8:19 Jodi Cohen:
I went for a walk in the woods where I used to walk when I was a kid just to calm myself down and I have an oil that's called Parasympathetic and what it does is helps you shift your nervous system into the safety gauge where you don't feel like you're in danger. And as I was walking and trying to kind of think through this, the situation that had been positioned as black and white, I realized, wait a minute, I need more information. How could I make a decision right now? I need to know this, I need to understand this, and this could be a possibility. And the more I walked and the more I felt safe, the more it was like I could access my problem solving and my ability to kind of see things more clearly.

And I suddenly realized, wait a minute, there's absolutely no need to decide this today. And I need more information. And maybe this attorney isn't even the right fit. Who calls somewhere with their dying father. It was almost like I went from back to the wall, completely disempowered and overwhelmed to feeling empowered and having options.

9:29 Jodi Cohen:
And it was really profound because I realized in that moment, it didn't change the situation. It didn't bring my son back, didn't make the legal challenge go away. It just gave me that safety gauge that gear shift into kind of my best self to be able to make different choices. And that's what I really want to share with people because my son Max was that kid. He was a total sensory-seeker. He had no impulse control. He was completely ADD, he was super sensitive to different foods. And, you know, I would spend a lot of time making healthy food that he sometimes wouldn't even eat. It was just, it was really exhausting to have the kid that got up at five in the morning and was nonstop all day.

And there were definitely times when I don't think I was my best self, because for whatever reason, I was trying to get something else done and he needed me. And instead of kind of dropping what I was doing and leaning in and giving him all my attention, I tried to do both. And I just always kind of felt like,

I wasn't really doing the best. It was kind of likeI was half-assing everything in a way. And now that I've realized that you basically have the power to gear shift your response to stress, I like the way I navigate life a lot better. And I really wish I had known that when he was alive, I really feel like I could have felt better about myself and the way I navigated things. And so that's what I'm really hoping to share today and oils are a really easy way to do it. There are many ways to do it. That gift I mentioned, boostthebrainbook.com/gift - there are 25 ways to do it, but basically the crux of this and your audience probably knows this:

11:15 Jodi Cohen:
Your nervous system, your autonomic nervous system controls your automatic functions - it's your operating system. It controls your heart rate, your breathing, your digestion, your detoxification.It's super critical in healing because it allocates resources differently depending on how safe you are. So if there is a danger response and you know, they talk about lions running down the street.

I don't see lions running down the street, but I definitely have a lot of anticipatory stress. I worry about my health, my finances, my relationships, my children, my children's relationships. And all of that anticipatory stress releases the same chemicals and hormones that actual physical stress does. And so when you're in that branch of the nervous system, the survival fight or flight sympathetic branch, you really aren't able to show up as your best self because all of your resources are kind of allocated towards survival. And it even changes your focus, your attention. Your pupils, the black parts of your eyes, get really big. They expand and it changes selective focus. It means that you can't really problem solve or connect in a bigger way.

12:32 Jodi Cohen:
Your child can't hear you and listen in kind of a better way because you're so locked in on that next survival step. When my kids were little, one of our favorite preschool teachers used to say connect before you correct. Meaning that if he had just walked and whacked someone with a shovel at the playground, instead of yelling at him in the sandpit, you scoop him up, you take him to the swings, you swing a little bit, you calm down. And then when the pupils are a normal size, you say, "Hey, everyone needs to be safe. We can't do that here."

You need to feel safe yourself and the safer you feel, the easier it's going to be to get your kid to take supplements, get your kid to calm down, get your kid to watch his Zoom class, get your own stuff done. I live in Seattle and I bike and there are a lot of hills and so I'm constantly shifting gears. I'm shifting down to go up the hill. I'm shifting back to go down the hill. And as long as I shift into the right gear, whatever I'm doing is really manageable. And so that's kind of what I want to share is how you can use oils to shift gears in your brain and your reaction so that you always show up in a way that you're proud of.

13:50 Tara Hunkin:
I love that analogy. And I think that you are not alone in what you're talking about in terms of how we feel we show up for our kids on an ongoing basis. It is hard. It is hard to take yourself out of that moment where you're busy doing something else and working on those things and wanting to be able to quickly shift and help them when they need help the most, as opposed to, you know, we all have a point of patience and an often we run out of it really quickly.

And I think right now we're all suffering from that because there is a lack of, you talk about safety. The feeling of safety has been taken away from pretty much everyone and especially our kids who really don't cope well with change to begin with. Right now, we can't really plan for anything, which is really making life stressful for them and, and in turn for us as well. So I think we need every tool we can possibly get our hands on right now to help us with that down regulation and bring us more into that feeling of safety as we can right now.

One of the things you talk about in the book is one of the reasons why I like it is that it's very well-researched. And I know that you love to research and pull the research out. There was a study that you referenced in there with respect to the use of smell for this. We'll talk about the different ways that in terms of different ways that the oils can get in, but what is so special about the sense of smell or the sensory system and how that can actually help us tap into the nervous system?

15:43 Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I wonder as we've evolved over time, if our sense of smell has been a little bit down-regulated, but it really has priority for our senses. It's the number one of the five senses - scent that keeps us alive, scents it keeps us alive, right? Cause we can smell food, we can smell water, we can smell predator odor and avoid them, we can smell fire.

Basically what's happening is our brain is taking in all the sensory information and then responding. Different sensory information is kind of routed through different areas of the brain. Smell goes directly to the amygdala, which is really kind of the security epicenter - it's the Pentagon of the brain. You know, all the other senses are routed through the thalamus first. So scent takes priority. And that's why for me, it's blackberries in the summer. Something about that, it's like I'm five again at my grandma's cabin. It's amazing how quickly you can correlate memory with smell and that's partially to keep you alive.

16:53 Jodi Cohen:
I think the research you're referencing is actually a Nobel Laureate, also out of Seattle named Linda Buck. She did a lot of research on olfactory receptors and specifically the ones that were sensitive to predator odor that kind of invoked a fear response. And what she found is that smelling roses actually turns off that fear response. So that idea of stopping to smell the roses, it has a lot of merit and research to back it up.

So in your own life, if you're feeling overwhelmed, smelling a flower, smelling a rose. If you have rose oil, smelling it. I find applying it over the heart is really, it's kind of a lovely ritual that always makes me feel calm. You know, it was my go-to for grief. So that's just an easy thing you can do.

17:46 Tara Hunkin:
Yeah. It's, it's pretty amazing. You also explain the relevance or the importance of the olfactory epithelium as well in the book. Can you talk a bit about that as well?

17:58 Jodi Cohen:
Yeah, so the epithelium, the outer layer of our skin, is really accessible through the nasal pathway. There are varying theories on how the oil actually gets into the bloodstream.

There's a lot of belief that it goes directly through the epithelium into the capillaries. And so when you ingest something that you need to digest it and then it goes to the liver and then it gets into the blood, and smell is the fastest way into the system. It's interesting. The reason that cocaine is inhaled and they kind of do anesthesia in our nasally is because that's the fastest way to get anything into the brain.

And also the blood-brain barrier is the thinnest there. It's like the security system is a little bit less rigorous in that area, so things can pass into the brain more quickly.

18:49 Tara Hunkin:
Yeah, that is really interesting. And it's also one of the reasons why oils are such a beautiful thing for parents is because we're always struggling to find the things that we can use very easily and they're very non-invasive. And obviously the sense of smell is a really easy way to get your kids, especially if it's something that they like the smell of. Can you talk about some of the oils that you recommend for things to support the nervous system and calm anxiety?

19:28 Jodi Cohen:
Yeah. I have two favorite ways to apply them. And one actually is whatever oil your kid likes - Max loved orange. Citrus oils have a lot of research that they're really calming and help with focus. So anything your kid likes, if they like lemon, lemon is great for cleaning Sharpie off of anything, also grapefruit is a good one. Any of the oranges. Bergamot and Neroli have a lot of research, but they're also more expensive. Basic orange is usually less than $10 and most kids like it, but here's a cool thing, especially for anxiety. So there's a whole branch of Chiropractic known as Functional Neurology, where they're looking at different hemispheres of the brain and how to activate or sedate different areas.

So Functional Neurologist, Titus Chiu, taught me that if you're having an anxiety attack or your kid is your right forehead, your right frontal lobe, that's overactive. So the way he calms it is smelling anything through the left nostril, because the left nostril goes directly to the left forehead. You stimulate that area by smelling, balancing the two hemispheres and the anxiety attack goes away. As someone who's prone to anxiety, I can tell you from personal experience,

it's amazing. It works really quickly and any remedy that you use is additive and cumulative. Like if you're exercising, maybe you can start with one mile, you work up to two, it keeps building. The more you do this, the less likely you are to suffer from anxiety attacks. So that's my favorite because it's oil. Any oil that you have in your house is good.

21:12 Tara Hunkin:
Yeah. Well, so favorite for lots of different reasons, non-invasive, helps to rebalance the brain and also you can use whatever they like. There aren't too many things that we do for our kids that fill all those buckets. So that's a really great trick. And I, as people who are listening know, I'm a very big fan of Functional Neurology and so that's always great to hear another option for them. One of the things actually I do want to bring up is I know that you've told me this before, because we've had conversations before, is one of the things you've done in the book is although I am a huge fan of your actual oils that you can purchase.

But one of the things you've done because of frustrations of not being able to make them available to everywhere around the world and everything else and getting lots of requests, is that you are opening up the backend of what you do to create these amazing oil blends that you have. Can you tell us a little bit about what's in the book about oil blends and what you're sharing?

22:16 Jodi Cohen:
Yeah. I basically give away the recipes so that if you're affiliated with an oil company and you love their products, you can make it yourself. I'm really trying to meet people where they're at. I've come to realize, we went to a big raspberry farm this summer and decided to make jam. It's March and it's still in my freezer cause I don't need that much.

I have tons of friends who are huge do-it-themselves and they love it. And that's fantastic. Now in the future, when I go through my supply in seven years or when it runs out, I'll probably buy jam from the supermarket because I'm not really a do-it-yourselfer. So my goal is, if you like to mix your own oils and you have some in the house, fantastic, here's the recipes. If you're worried about doing it wrong, or you just want someone to do it for you, you can buy it from me. Everyone gets to kind of show up as their best self.

But the big one that I've never shared before is what I call our parasympathetic oil and I'll explain why it works and then what it is. So we talked about the two branches of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic fight or flight and the parasympathetic rest and digest, and the on-off switch, the gear shift between these two states is your vagus nerve. It's the longest nerve in the body that most people have never heard of.

23:38 Jodi Cohen:
Quick anatomy lesson: it starts in the back of the head, splits and is most accessible right behind the ear on that mastoid bone, at then runs through the throat, the mouth, the heart, the lungs, the gallbladder, the liver, the kidneys, the large intestine, small intestine. It's really the information highway between the gut and the brain. And it kind of turns on the whole digestive cascade, the moving walkway to keep things going motility.

But what's interesting is at any point where the nerve, the vagus nerve travels, you can basically activate it, stimulate it, and shift into parasympathetic. This is why deep breathing is great. Coffee enemas are great. Splashing your face with freezing water, gagging yourself with a tongue depressor. You know, all of these things work, but compliance is challenging. It's like trying to get your kid to eat kale - what recipe are they actually going to eat. But here's what's cool. This point that I talked about right behind the ear lobe on the mastoid bone, there was a lot of research.

They were actually doing kind of surgical implants, like a pacemaker-like-device, and studying the use of that to stimulate the vagus nerve at that point. And that's actually been approved by the FDA for epilepsy, depression, migraines, stimulatory oils, like this blend of clove and lime, can travel through the skin and stimulate the same spot without invasive surgery, without unpleasant gagging or freezing water. It works just as well.

25:18 Jodi Cohen:
So the process is this: you just take the oil bottle, flip it, put it on yourself, or your kid. One ear, both ears, doesn't matter, depends on how stressed out you are. It stimulates the vagus nerve, which is then the gear shift into parasympathetic. So if your child is kind of feeling overwhelmed, that's often a safety gauge like Steven Porges, who came up with the Polyvagal Theory, talking about all of this, said that a lot of the things that you see autistic children doing are really just them trying to kind of gear shift themselves into parasympathetic. The more you can help them feel calm, feel safe, the easier it is for them to show up as their best selves. And it gives you kind of the boosted resilience, patience, whatever you want to call it, to hold that space for them.

26:12 Tara Hunkin:
Yeah. Well, and as I said, we keep these little bottles around and I have this around all the time, the parasympathetic bottle, for those of you that are listening, that's what I'm holding up right now. I love your analogy about the do-it-yourselfer. I am the person who thinks they're a do-it-their-selfer, but then in the end would really rather just have someone do it for me. So I might buy all the little bits and pieces, but then I really just need someone to do it for me. I never quite find the time to make that jam or other things, at least not these days. I can give you a bunch. Now that I'm out of my GAPS cooking days, which I was for many years, I think my do-it-yourself, cooking up batches of personal care products and all those types of things, I kind of burnt out. So now I always look for an amazing resource that can do it for me so I can spend my time on a few other things.

One of the other things I do want to talk about while I have you here too, is one of the other big struggles for many of our parents is sleep. I also know that essential oils can support sleep. Can you talk about what oils typically can support, sleep, and how they work?

27:33 Jodi Cohen:
It's interesting, there's tons of research that lavender is good for sleep, but I find it to be when people say, "Oh, when you're on a red eye, give your kid Benadryl and it either works it doesn't," We tried that with Max on a six hour flight to Boston red eye, not our best day. So if you're going to use lavender, the best way to use it is in an Epsom salt bath. There is something about the topical application through the skin, the heat, magnesium opening the pores. That really seems to be the most relaxing way if it's just about relaxing. If it's about, there's often kind of circadian rhythm dysregulation.

What that gets into is your stress hormone, cortisol, is supposed to be high in the morning and then wane throughout the day. And then the sleep hormone melatonin is supposed to be kind of higher in the evening, but there's a lot that can dysregulate that. It's our pineal gland, right in the middle of the brain, that releases melatonin, ideally in response to darkness.

Sometimes artificial light, sometimes environmental toxins, like aluminum, glyphosate, fluoride in the water can throw that off. So we have an oil that I call circadian rhythm that you can apply. It's really interesting. This spot on the skin right above the ears is really good for getting into the brain, whatever you're using. If it's kind of a transdermal, melatonin oil, the top of the head, back of the head and above the ears, or if you have a little, just put it on a cotton ball on their pillow case and I give that recipe in the book.

29:11 Jodi Cohen:
But what's interesting that I found about oils is that a lot of the research actually looks at blends because when you combine them, you get something different. You know, most people know, "Oh, peppermint for energy," "Oh, frankincense for wounds," "Oh, lavender for everything." And that's true. It does, you know, lemon oil does work really well for Sharpies all by itself. But sometimes when you combine them, it almost enhances and brings out different aspects and makes them work better. And so that's what I really try to focus on.

29:47 Tara Hunkin:
Yeah, it should. There’s a good part in the book where you do talk about the synergistic impact of using the different oils, which is really interesting. An important thing to note because it's not unlike, as nutritionists like you and I, when we talk about, nutrient isolation is not, how is not typically very impactful. It has to be with particular cofactors and other things. So it makes sense to me that when it comes to essential oils, that you can have those kinds of synergistic impact. That's also amazing that that comes up in the book. Because you have formulated these blends, and now that you are giving away your recipes in the book for the blends, it saves us all a lot of time and energy, trying to figure out which ones of these oils we should be putting together for certain results.

30:38 Jodi Cohen:
And Terry Wahls was kind enough to write the foreword and she uses oils. Her protocol is amazing. It's drawing on plants for the flavonoid purposes of healing the gut. One thing she said is that she allows for oils and different herbs and different teas, because she really encourages people to have a diverse plant diet of like 200 different plants a year. It's challenging to do that just with food alone.

What I've found with oils, especially the ones that have the best research are oregano, thyme and clove continually and you can use those oils on very specific points. I actually gave away a foot chart. So on the bottom of your feet, especially if you have someone who's sensitive to smell, or anyone in your family is sensitive to smell, there are all these reflex points on the bottom of the foot that you can apply these oils and they actually help the gut. It's almost like having a probiotic boost along with what else you're doing.

31:41 Tara Hunkin:
That's amazing. Well, I am so happy that you were able to take the time to be with us again today, because we've been fortunate enough to have you around a number of times in the community over the years. Just to wrap up, let's remind everybody again, I will put the links in the show notes, but if you're listening to this while you're in your car, let's just remind them the name of the book, and where's the best place to get that and their gift.

32:05 Jodi Cohen:
Yeah. It's "Essential Oils to Boost the Brain and Heal the Body." It's sold anywhere you can buy books. If you like to support your local bookseller, get it there. And then if you go to boostthebrainbook.com/gift, you can download 25 ways to activate your vagus nerve. Oils is one of them, just pick the one that you like the best or that you think is easiest for your kiddo to integrate every day.

32:34 Tara Hunkin:
Thank you so much for being here with us again and congratulations on the book because I know how much work they are. I'm thrilled that we get to share it with everybody here today.

32:46 Jodi Cohen:
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

32:48 Tara Hunkin:
Thanks for joining me this week on My Child Will Thrive. I'm so passionate about giving you the tools and information you need to help your child recover.

And as they say, it takes a village. So join us in the My Child Will Thrive Village Facebook group, where you can meet like-minded parents and stay up to date on everything we have going on at My Child Will Thrive. This is Tara Hunkin and I'll catch you on the next podcast or over at mychildwillthrive.com.