Essential Oils and Sleep: How They Can Help and the BEST Ones to Use
INSIDE: This article is about the importance of sleep, an abridged version of the sleep cycle when disrupted, how essential oils can help both physiologically and psychologically, the BEST essential oils for sleep and a bit of the phytochemistry behind these, AND how to use them for helping with sleep. Plus, enjoy some aroma blends for sleep!
I've always had trouble sleeping.
Even when I was a little girl...I remember having nightmares. When I was seven, and we had just moved into a new house out in the middle of the desert in the boonies, I dreamed over and over for weeks of ants crawling all over my bed.
I'm sure part of this was due to an overactive imagination and a love of reading Grimm's Fairy Tales at too young of an age.
But my sleep--it's light, fitful, and prone to colorful dreams.
If you or someone you know has sleeping problems or is a light sleeper, here are some tips for using essential oils to help. In fact, they're one of my favorite things to use (besides herbs) to help me get enough of that precious Z-time.
In fact, let's talk a little about the science of sleep, first, and I promise to make this science-y part quick.
Why is Sleep So Important?
Well, if you’ve ever had a night of no sleep, or had your sleep cycle disturbed, or been a nursing mama waking up every two hours…you have FELT why sleep is vital to our health. It affects our energy levels, our immune system ability, healing processes, stress levels and adrenal function, our overall mood, hormone balance, inflammation in the body, our mental focus and memory, and even our cardiovascular system….
Sleep has a hand in ALL of our bodily and mind functions. All of them.
For many people, getting enough sleep and GOOD sleep at that is a problem.
The Stress Cycle and Sleep in a Nutshell:
1) When you have a stressful period in your life, your body produces more cortisol. Too much cortisol in the body keeps you awake. (In addition to this, any hormone excretion in the body has an affect on all other hormones in the body…they “talk” to each other. So if you’re heavy in one, then the others will be affected too.)
2) This means you have trouble sleeping.
3) A lack of sleep (especially "good" sleep) harms your entire system, especially your immune system---this makes you a target for illness.
4) AND of course you feel more tired. Feeling tired is stressful, especially if you have a difficult job or home life.
5) This exhaustion makes it super hard to deal with any additional stress in your life, which we always have, right?
6) Additional stress that's not dealt with well negatively impacts our ability to focus, our productivity, and even our self-control.
7) All of these things cause us even more stress, and this causes more cortisol outside of normal times and limits, and this causes....
8) Difficulty sleeping.
This is an abbreviated and simplified cycle, but you can clearly see how important sleep is to your life. The fact that a few drops of lovely smelling essential oil can help is incredibly powerful.
It’s vital as you can see, to reduce your stress load, especially if you’re a person who is obviously over-stressed on the daily. People under the influence of chronic stress have many more health issues than those who aren’t (or who know how to manage their stress in healthy ways).
I know it’s terribly annoying to hear, “You need to manage your stress” because so many of us are truly dealing with high level difficult lives and situations. You can’t just always stop what’s going on around you and what you need to deal with.
BUT we need to learn how to manage our thoughts around situations and be sure to give ourselves ample ways throughout each day to relieve stress, even if just momentarily. Here are some of my favorites:
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Effective Ways to Deal with Stress so You Can Sleep Better
1) Take a quick walk—especially if you can get out into some nature. But at least get some sunshine if you can.
2) Stretching or restorative exercise that calms
3) Breathing exercises or meditation and prayer
4) Music that you love can be helpful, especially if it’s joyful. Personally I love worship music. It never fails to help.
5) And? There’s one more……
Essential Oils to the Rescue!
One of the areas in which aromatherapy absolutely SHINES is in stress management and relief. Using certain essential oils can elicit rather strong relaxation responses, and thank heavens we have this tool at our fingertips!
Essential oils are also complementary to other relaxation techniques including meditation, prayer, deep breathing, restorative exercise, warm baths, etc. This means essential oils can greatly enhance these other experiences.
Incorporating essential oils into your bedtime routine and having an easy essential oil plan for those times when you wake up and can't get back to sleep is a REALLY good idea. Ask me how I know!
By choosing essential oils that are relaxing and even sedative in nature, we can train our minds to start associating these pleasant scents with rest. This training cues our mind to begin the relaxation response when we smell these lovely scents. And best of all, the association also powers up the actual physical effects of the essential oils.
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Let’s Talk Bedtime Routines for a Moment
When you have a bedtime routine that starts at the same time every evening ensuring you’re in bed at roughly the same time each night, magic happens. Your body and mind start associating the routine with rest, and over time it becomes easier to get healthy sleep. These activities done in the same order every evening helps your brain recognize that it’s time to rest.
Habits (good and bad) allow the prefrontal cortex of the brain to operate automatically, reducing thinking and even the willpower it takes to perform the tasks. This is great news for both children AND adults! Setting up good habits that lead to relaxation and rest help everyone in the family.
When I was raising my own children decades ago, we had a routine that didn’t vary. It started with a warm bath, to rinse away the day. Then we brushed our teeth. Then we read a book or two and said our prayers once tucked in. And often, I would lay down with my younger babies for a few minutes which allowed them to drift off peacefully. (Sometimes I ended up sleeping there for hours myself.)
For both adults and kids, having a bedtime routine helps us gain and maintain a healthy circadian rhythm and to help us all benefit from intentional calming practices.
Here are a few tips I’ve found to be helpful with myself, students, and clients:
1) Be sure your bedroom is cool. Shoot for 62 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
2) Turn off all harsh overhead lights an hour or two before bed and use warm, dim “mood” lighting. Candles are great, too.
3) Use your diffuser with calming and beautiful essential oils. Scent is a powerful way to tell your brain it’s relaxation and sleep time.
4) Use blackout curtains when it’s time to get into bed if you have light coming in the windows.
5) Take a warm shower or a bath. It’s counterintuitive, but a warm bath or shower helps the release of melatonin (the sleepy hormone) through the action of the body cooling down after the warmth of the bathing.
6) Journal or read a book for a little while.
7) Calming music instead of the harsh bright light of a screen (which can disrupt sleep patterns)
8) If you’re sensitive to noises in the night, try turning on a nearby bathroom fan or other white noise.
9) Be prepared for the next day so you’re not stressed and rushing in the morning. Just knowing you’re ready to go helps you sleep better.
10) In the morning when you get up….Make your bed! First thing! Because the act at night of turning down a fresh bed makes you feel more like sleeping. Also, it’s a way to accomplish a task first thing in the morning too. Double win!
Why Do Essential Oils Work for Sleep?
1) Physiological Effects:
The chemical makeup of essential oils have various physiological effects on the body. This means the tiny molecules actually affect how our body functions….for the positive. For example, essential oils rich in ester alcohols (such as linalyl acetate found in lavender and others) are well known for their sedating properties that have a direct and clinically proven effect on the nervous system.
Ester-rich essential oils include lavender, bergamot, black spruce, clary sage, tsuga, valerian, and spikenard among others.
Some essential oils increase the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system, helping to lower heart rate and blood pressure while increasing heart rate variability. These can then help increase and enhance deep sleep, the restorative period of the sleep cycle.
2) Psychological Effects:
There's a direct connection between the olfactory (scent) system and our limbic (emotional) system in our brains. Scent is more powerful to our survival and well-being than most people realize. In fact, some scientists believe it's more powerful even than our sight.
When we smell a pure essential oil that we find pleasant or have happy memories of, it can immediately shift our mood upward and depending on the scent, induce a relaxation response in our mind-body.
The truth is, when you can relax your mind, your body can then relax.
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My Favorite Essential Oils to Support Sleep:
1) Lavender:
One of the most popular essential oils for supporting the nervous system and improving sleep quality. Heavily studied, it's been scientifically proven over and over and over again to be effective.
2) Roman Chamomile:
This is one of my favorites to work with in conjunction with lavender and tangerine for children. Adults usually like it too. It has an "apple-honey" aroma and calms an overactive mind.
3) Black Spruce (or other evergreen essential oils high in alpha-pinene):
Alpha-pinene has also been clinically studied and shown to support healthy sleep. It's also very helpful for the respiratory system and supports release of upset emotions that won't go away.
4) Sweet Marjoram:
Sweet marjoram is a sedating essential oil and is another of my favorites to work with. It's a star in my Calm Heart blend (which I also use for maintaining healthy blood pressure in times of stress as needed). Clinically studied in this blend, it's just wonderful. Sweet marjoram is also an anti-spasmodic essential oil and may help with RLS (Restless Leg Syndrome) which tends to rear its ugly head at night.
5) Tangerine/Mandarin:
Containing both esters and aldehydes, these citrus oils are also mildly sedating and calming to the nervous system. **Some aromatherapists differentiate between them. Others say they're the same plant. I'm in the latter camp.
6) Clary Sage:
If you're peri-menopausal, menopausal, or post-menopausal...clary sage just might become your favorite essential oil. Besides its ability to support hormone balance, clary sage is known for its relaxing qualities.
7) Patchouli:
Patchouli grounds and relaxes the mind, helps your body release tension, and its scent is sweet and peaceful for many.
8) Spikenard:
Spikenard is distilled from the root of Nardostachys jatamansi, the same plant rumored to be offered to Jesus on the cross in vinegar water. It’s quite a sedative essential oil, and even just inhaling it deeply from the bottle helps the body to calm and relax for most people.
Ways to Use Essential Oils to Sleep:
There are many ways to enjoy essential oils for supporting healthy sleep. Here are some of my favorites:
1) Inhalation: Directly inhaling or diffusing essential oils of choice is a great way to start taking advantage of their relaxing benefits. In fact, I keep a little bottle of spikenard next to my bedside or a blend with sweet marjoram, clary sage, spikenard, and tangerine which I inhale deeply through each nostril 3-4 times.
2) Topical Use: Another tip I use myself is after I take a warm shower, I keep an unscented lotion base near the shower. I drop a few drops of essential oils into it, combine well, and slather all over my body. (A 1% dilution is best for all over body use.) Or, you can be smarter than me and just make up a bunch of your own scented lotion at a 1% dilution and have it be ready to go.
Another way to use them topically is in roller bottles. These are easy to keep right by your bedside and use on your temples, neck, around the ears, and on your wrists. Inhale and relax!
3) Dream Pillows: I LOVE these. They are so effective...and they make the cutest gifts. You can see how to make one here: Dream Pillows and why they work. You can also spritz or apply a few drops to your pillow directly.
4) Linen spray: Use this to spritz onto your sheets and pillow. Find out how to make a safe and effective linen spray here.
5) Cupping: This is my favorite method for when I wake up in the middle of the night and the good old monkey mind starts thinking. I add a couple of drops of essential oil to my palms, rub them together (and perhaps pat them on the back of my neck), then I cup them over my nostrils and breathe deeply several times. Then I say a prayer of thanks for the knowledge of these lovely scents....and fall back to sleep.
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Blends for Deep Sleep and Relaxation:
Peace for Mama:
3 drops clary sage
3 drops patchouli
**********
The Deepest Sleep:
2 drops cinnamon leaf
2 drops spikenard
2 drops tangerine or orange
***********
Sleep, Baby, Sleep
2 drops lavender
2 drops tangerine
1 drop Roman chamomile
1 drop bergamot or yuzu
************
Serenity
2 drops black spruce
2 drops lavender
2 drops bergamot
************
Final Thoughts on Using Essential Oils to Help you Sleep
As an aromatherapist, I use essential oils throughout my day to support my health and the health of my family members. I also love working with essential oils to support my students and clients in their health endeavors. There’s few health needs more important than sleep, and essential oils can and should play a role in your evening choices.
I hope this article inspires you to try setting up a great evening routine and to give some of the essential oils spotlighted here a try!
Hugs, Health, and Herbs,
Heidi
P.S. Don’t forget! Get your FREE Guide: How to Relax Using Herbs and Oils by clicking that link. I’ll get that sent to your email right away. This will also add you to my newsletter! If you decide you don’t like it, you can unsubscribe at any time, and yes. It’s free, too.