As you may know, I lost my 12-year-old son, Max, in a car accident seven years ago.
In the aftermath of the accident, I relied on several essential oils to help me process the trauma, heartbreak, and grief.
I often share that I believe that necessity is the mother of invention.
What I have not yet shared are some of the deepest, darkest moments that forced me to experiment with everything—essential oils, talk therapy, and yoga, to name a few—in the hopes of finding a modality that helped me ease the intense pain of loss.
The most vivid and intense moment of this pain hit that first evening after I learned that Max had died. Well-intentioned friends dropped off pharmaceutical drug prescriptions, CBD oil, and flower essences that they all insisted I take for sleep. It must have worked, as I did drift off to sleep.
But not for long.
Around 1 a.m., I was jolted awake by the deepest, most intense physical pain I’d ever experienced radiating through my chest. Similar to a charley horse, but over the heart. I had never felt pain like that before. I literally felt like I was splitting in two.
I knew that with a charley horse, it helps to stand up. This allows the muscle to release its involuntary spasm by stretching the cramped muscle and lengthening its fibers, which interrupts the tightening signal and forces it to relax.
I suspected there must be some similar action I could take to relax the muscles of my heart.
I recalled that Rose Essential oil could help with grief. I kept some in Max’s room, so I crawled into his now vacant bed, tears streaming down my face, reached for the bottle, and inhaled deeply.
In addition to inhaling, I applied the blend topically over the heart, the combination of which provided immediate relief.
I had no idea at the time, but my reaction was based on science. Nobel-prize-winning researcher Linda Buck calls rose a “safety-signaling scent.” A smell that can override your fear response and suppress stress, even in the midst of what I now understand to be the intense pain of broken heart syndrome.
What is Broken Heart Syndrome?
My experience of intense physical heart pain following intense and unexpected grief is known as broken heart syndrome.
It turns out that an intense or sudden emotional experience that hurts your heart on an emotional level can also have a physical impact on your heart.
Intense or sudden emotional or physical stress—like the loss of a child—shocks the heart and puts the body under severe stress, which can lead to chest pain and other symptoms that mimic a heart attack.
When you react to physical or emotional stress, your body releases a surge of stress hormones—such as adrenaline and cortisol—into your bloodstream to help you cope with the stress. These excess hormones can then “stun” or overstimulate the heart, triggering temporary changes in heart muscle cells or coronary blood vessels (or both) that prevent the left ventricle from contracting effectively.
More specifically, the heart muscle may be overwhelmed by the massive amount of adrenaline suddenly released in response to stress. It is speculated that excess adrenaline may cause narrowing of the small arteries that supply the heart with blood, resulting in a temporary disruption in the blood being pumped to the heart and a weakening of the left ventricle, the heart’s primary pumping chamber.
Alternatively, adrenaline may bind directly to the heart cells, causing large amounts of calcium to enter the cells. This large intake of calcium can prevent the heart cells from beating properly.
While the chest pain is real, the underlying cause is the body’s reaction to emotional stress, which has come to be known as stress-induced cardiomyopathy, or broken-heart syndrome.
What are the Symptoms of Broken Heart Syndrome?
You may experience broken heart syndrome symptoms within minutes to hours after a traumatic emotional event. Signs and symptoms of broken heart syndrome include:
- Sudden, severe chest pain
- Chest tightness or pressure
- Nausea
- Shortness of breath
- Irregular heartbeats or heart palpitations
- Dizziness or Fainting
- Fatigue
What causes Broken Heart Syndrome?
Severe emotional or physical stress can cause broken heart syndrome, including:
- Grief from the death of a loved one – family, friend, or pet
- Any significant or unexpected loss – romantic breakup or divorce, job loss, financial loss
- Sudden illness
- Car or other accident
- Traumatic events like natural disasters or earthquakes
- Receiving bad news
- Intense fear
- Extreme anger
- Severe pain
- An exhausting physical event
Women are more prone to broken heart syndrome, especially those who experience anxiety. It is thought that, because estrogen helps protect the heart from adrenaline, reduced levels of estrogen during menopause may make the heart more susceptible to extreme emotional stress.
Essential Oils for Heartbreak
Sadness and heartbreak are natural responses to the loss of something or someone to which you have formed a bond or an attachment, like the loss of my son.
Essential oils can help you process and shift feelings of heartbreak, along with the emotions of sadness, loss, grief, overwhelm, and disempowerment often associated with grief. Research on Broken Heart Syndrome found that essential oils like Lavender and Rose “proved very effective” for helping to heal Broken Heart Syndrome, noting that “lavender flowers relax the nerves and help calm and relax” the heart, calming broken heart syndrome.
The benefit of essential oils has to do, in part, with your sense of smell.
You have a direct link between your sense of smell and the areas of the brain responsible for moderating your emotions and behaviors. When you inhale essential oils, airborne substances stimulate receptor cells in the roof of the nasal cavities. The olfactory receptors carry signals to the olfactory bulb in the brain. The information is then sent to the limbic system of your brain, which is responsible for memory, behavior, emotion, and your mood.
On a physical level, only two synapses separate your limbic system from your olfactory nerve. No other sensory system has this kind of direct and intense contact with the neural substrates of your brain’s emotional control center. Your other four senses, including sound, sight, taste, and touch, must travel to different regions of the brain first, before reaching your limbic system.
This makes essential oils a potent tool for calming the intensity of some emotions that often accompany heartbreak, such as sadness, fear, and anger.
Your sense of smell can be used to calm your danger response. Nobel prize-winning researcher Linda Buck found that rose essential oil can counteract your brain’s response to predator odor and fear. Her research found that inhaling rose essential oil in the presence of other fear stimuli can suppress your brain’s stress responses and hormonal signals.
By triggering specific memories or emotions, the aroma from an essential oil may help release heartache, improve your mood, and promote relaxation. In fact, research suggests that essential oils may help in the treatment of depression, which is one of several emotions that people tend to experience when dealing with heartbreak.
Oils allow you to gently release these intense emotions, much like you would slowly and carefully unscrew the top of a carbonated beverage to release excess carbonation without causing an explosion.
My Favorite Essential Oils for Heartbreak
Certain plants can aid in the grieving or transition period. Essential oils are the concentrated essence of these plants that provide support in times of sudden loss, shock, or grief, as they can help ease your body’s fight-or-flight response and calm the all-systems alert that contributes to broken heart syndrome.
I have found the blends below to help comfort, strengthen, and regulate the heart, encouraging healthy heart function and gently releasing heartbreak and sadness.
Heart™
Heart™ Blend was formulated to balance the heart, supporting, integrating, and resetting all the body’s systems, including mental clarity, physical health, and emotional balance.
The heart integrates and balances the physical, emotional, and mental aspects of the body, providing blood to every cell and organ. It also serves as a complex information processing center, influencing brain function, the nervous system, the hormonal system, and most of the body’s major organs.
The heart is our body’s reset button, but a state of constant stress can fatigue the heart and compromise our ability to reset, leading to inflammation, infections, toxicity, and heart disease. By returning the heart to balance, we support the cardiovascular and circulatory systems, regenerate the heart’s structure, and help to reset the homeostatic mechanism for the entire body.
Heart™ balances the heart to enhance compassion and support, integrating and resetting all bodily systems, including supporting feelings of open-heartedness, expansiveness, and receptivity, while mitigating loneliness, sadness, and grief.
Heart™ blend contains a proprietary blend of organic and/or wildcrafted essential oils of Neroli, Spruce, Roman Chamomile, Blue Tansy, and Jasmine that help you show love to others and yourself. Each essential oil possesses multiple properties that can support emotional processing and release. Research has shown that sweet smells, such as those found in the Heart™ blend, may help reduce pain and balance heart energy, promoting feelings of safety that allow your subconscious mind to release negative, stored memories and emotions, and replace them with positive beliefs.
Lung Support™
Lung Support™ was designed to help overcome grief and let go of negative experiences, including heartbreak.
Feelings of grief, bereavement, regret, loss, and remorse are often associated with the lungs. The lungs are sponge-like organs located near the backbone on either side of the heart. They function as a fundamental source of life energy, transporting oxygen from the atmosphere into the capillaries to oxygenate the blood, as well as an essential channel of elimination, releasing carbon dioxide from the bloodstream into the atmosphere.
Grief can obstruct the ability of the lungs to accept and relinquish, impeding their function of “taking in” and “letting go”. Grief that remains unresolved can become chronic, creating disharmony in the lungs and weakening the lungs’ ability to circulate oxygen throughout the body. When lung function is impaired, it leads to shortness of breath, fatigue, and feelings of melancholy, similar to those experienced with grief. Sadly, many chronic respiratory diseases and conditions develop after a significant loss or bereavement.
Lung contains flower oils, like Rose, which can be powerful when you need to get out of a dark place. Rose oil is also known to evoke a sense of love, promote well-being, and help release past hurts, such as grief. Its benefits were documented in studies that found breathing and blood pressure relaxed after Rose oil was applied to the skin.
Lung Support™ blend works best when applied topically over the heart, lungs, or around the ears. It can also be deeply inhaled and allowed to gently release intense emotions with your exhale, making it a powerful strategy for allowing micro-dosing of emotional release.
Rose™ Blend
Grief can have a profoundly negative impact and shut down the heart. Often cited as the top oil for grief, Rose™ essential oil is considered “heart-healing” and can be comforting during times of crisis. Studies indicate that its scent can help act as a heart tonic, helping to lower blood pressure and slow breathing, which can increase your ability to cope with stress and anxiety.
Rose™ essential oil has also been found to override this fear response, according to promising research. Nobel Prize-winning researcher Linda Buck investigated how different odors elicit distinct responses in the brain.
For example, Buck found that rose essential oil can counteract your brain’s fear response to predator odor. Her research found that smelling rose essential oil in the presence of predator odors (or other fear stimuli) can suppress your brain’s stress responses and hormonal signals. More specifically, the research found that “rose oil can block stress hormone responses to a predator odor; it is also conceivable that some transmit signals that suppress rather than activate hormonal responses associated with fear.”
Rose™ – when inhaled or topically applied over the heart – may help unlock a shut-down heart, heal feelings of despair, and allow feelings of love, forgiveness, compassion, and gratitude to flow.
Featured Oils:
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