Should You Try Aromatherapy?
Why Should You Try Aromatherapy?
For chronic pain sufferers, there are a lot of different natural remedies, from herbs to essential oils. Speaking of essential oils, one of the top ways to use them is with aromatherapy. This is the practice of using the scents of essential oils to help with reducing your pain by stimulating the receptors in your nose, which can pass straight to your brain. Here are some reasons to consider aromatherapy if you suffer from chronic pain.
How Does Aromatherapy Help?
The reason aromatherapy is so beneficial is because your sense of smell is one of the strongest and most important senses. Your response to stimuli is often from smell first, from warning you that there is gas or a fire before you actually see the smoke and flames, to letting you know something might be rotten before you can taste that it is. It is essential that you are able to smell things, both good and bad. So when you have a lot of bad pain, what you smell can make a very large impact. Positive, healing, calming scents go far in helping you to deal with the pain, if not help get rid of it.
For aromatherapy when you have chronic pain, you will typically use essential oils. While you can also get aromatherapy candles that you just need to burn, this can get expensive, and are not always as effective as using pure oils.
What are the Top Essential Oils for Chronic Pain?
While you can probably benefit from aromatherapy with any essential oils you want, there are certain ones to start with. The essential oils you want to use are ones that are good for pain management, but also excellent for calming and relaxing both your body and mind. For example, both lavender and chamomile are good for pain because they can relax you, which helps to handle the amount of pain you have. Some other essential oils that tend to help with pain during aromatherapy are peppermint, African marigold, clove, and wintergreen.
How to Use Aromatherapy
There are a few different ways you can use aromatherapy and essential oils for chronic pain. Since you want to inhale it, using an essential oil diffuser is a great option. These are easy to use and you don’t have to worry about using carrier oils to diffuse the essential oils. You just put a few drops into the diffuser, and inhale the scent when it begins coming out of the diffuser. Another option is to massage them into your skin,
which gives you other benefits aside from the scent. However, you should not put oils directly onto the skin. They need to be diluted first. If you are planning on taking a bath, that is the perfect time to get some aromatherapy in by dropping some essential oils directly into the bathtub.