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FIND YOUR BLISS WITH LAVENDER OIL
Aromatherapy, using the essential oil lavender, is becoming a go-to wellness treatment for stress. Here’s what the research says—and why steam-infused lavender aromatherapy may be the best delivery system for its calming benefits.
Stress kills. That’s not hyperbole or an exaggeration. The body’s inflammatory response to regular stress leads to a number of troubling disease states. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says that stress is a major factor in contributing to six major conditions:
- Heart disease
- High blood pressure
- Depression
- Diabetes
- Anxiety disorder
- Other illnesses (while making other diseases worse)
In total, the CDC says that stress is responsible for 110 million deaths each year. It’s no wonder that the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) calls stress “the health epidemic of the 21st century.”
While it’s a global problem, Americans are the most stressed people on the planet. Research by Gallup reports that U.S. citizens suffer stress for at a higher rate than global averages. And it’s getting worse every year. “Stress in America 2019,” a report created by the American Psychological Association (APA), found that everything from healthcare, national politics, mass shootings, and our everyday work environments are creating unhealthy levels of stress in greater numbers than previous years.
But you probably don’t need well-funded research to tell you that stress is at an all-time high in the U.S. You probably feel it yourself every day. The question is, what are you doing about it?
Aromatherapy: The Surprising Stress Treatment
Everybody has their own stress management ritual. Or at least they should have one. But even if you do the recommended techniques of regular exercise, getting quality sleep, developing a social support system, eating a balanced diet, meditation, etc., you’re likely overlooking a surprisingly effective stress-relief treatment: aromatherapy using lavender oil.
To some people, the suggestion that using specific scents as a health balm comes out of left field. But research on aromatherapy is showing that it just may be a pathway to better health, including significant stress reduction.
No less than the Mayo Clinic suggests that aromatherapy may help reduce pain, improve sleep duration and quality, and reduce nausea and indigestion. As the Mayo Clinic notes, aromatherapy is even finding its way into hospital surgical units to help patients deal with pain and stress.
Other studies on aromatherapy, which is produced by using essential oils, backs this up. An essential oil is “a concentrated hydrophobic liquid containing volatile (easily evaporated at normal temperatures) chemical compounds from plants.”
Essential oils are hardly a new invention. In fact, they’ve been used for health and vitality since antiquity. The ancient Egyptians are believed to be the first to harness these compounds from plants for health purposes. For centuries it’s been a common balm used in Chinese and Indian Ayurvedic medicine, and essential oils were touted by the father of modern medicine himself, Hippocrates. In fact, as researchers note, “Hippocrates claimed that the way to health was through aromatic baths and massages.”
While many plants and aromas are utilized for essential oil treatments, lavender is emerging as the go to aromatherapy treatment for help in reducing stress. This isn’t just the result of anecdotal evidence—science has weighed in, and lavender is emerging as a potential powerhouse in promoting relaxation and stress relief. But that’s only the beginning of its benefits.
Lavender: Heaven Scent
What’s intriguing health-care practitioners is research like that published by the journal The Mental Health Clinician. The scientists found that “standardized essential oil extract of Lavandula angustifolia (SLO)” supported the “treatment of anxiety disorders, including subsyndromal anxiety disorder (anxiety not otherwise specified), GAD, restlessness and agitation with disturbed sleep, and Mixed Anxiety and Depressive Disorder.”
What’s truly eye-opening is that the lavender extract scored well against pharmaceutical treatments for anxiety. According to the researchers: “The SLO appears to have a calming effect without producing sedation, which is advantageous compared with benzodiazepines or pregabalin.”
In other words, you get the stress relief but not the side effects. That’s exactly what a highly effective wellness treatment tries to achieve. And lavender, at least according to this study, delivers.
More research concurs with the above investigation. One study from Australia found that lavender helped reduce anxiety experienced by dental patients. Another study discovered that aromatherapy using lavender can help reduce pain after it proved to be “an efficient therapy for alleviating psychological and physiological responses among older women suffering from acute coronary syndrome.”
But lavender’s benefits may go far beyond pain and stress relief. Another report says that lavender oil has shown the ability to kill common strains of fungi and bacteria in laboratory studies. And a brand-new study performed at Indiana University found that lavender may speed up wound healing by increasing cell growth and cell migration to wounds and injuries. This accelerates healing of the wound and helps reduce scarring. This process also helps relieve inflammation—another condition tied to stress.
But even more exciting is that this cell rejuvenation by lavender may help reduce hair loss by an “increased gene expression of hair follicle stem cells….” Possible hair growth from lavender was the result of research published by Toxicological Research. While it was an animal study, the scientists found a “marked hair growth-promoting effect of LO (lavender oil), as evidenced by morphological and histological observations.”
But it’s stress relief and overall improvements in mental health that lavender continues to shine in studies. Among them is Iranian research that found that “inhalation of lavender can lead to prevention of stress, anxiety, and postpartum depression, [and] can be used as a complementary method to prevent these disorders.”
It’s time to get your lavender on. But how? What’s the best way to absorb the exceptional wellness benefits of lavender?
The Steam Advantage of Using Lavender
The most common delivery system for essential oils is a diffuser. Essential oil diffusers disperse essential oils into the air to be breathed in through your nose and mouth, and absorbed by your skin. But there may be a better way to utilize the potentially beneficial properties of lavender.
Remember Hippocrates citing “aromatic baths”? That should give you a clue. If lavender from a diffuser is effective, imagine lavender oil dispersed over every inch of your body in a hot, enclosed environment? In other words, a steam room. A steam shower is like a super-concentrated diffuser for your entire body.
Even before lavender or any other essential oil enters the steam room, steam showers are delivering profound potential wellness benefits. Research has supported steam therapy’s ability to help improve respiratory health, skin integrity, hypertension, metabolism, musculo-skeletal health—the list goes on and on. And, yes, steam therapy can help reduce anxiety and stress.
Now add essential oils—specifically, lavender. How? By using installing a MrSteam Steam Shower system and adding their exclusive AromaSteam system. AromaSteam’s state-of-the-art injector pump electronically atomizes essential oils into your steam shower. This isolates the most bioactive elements in the oil and keeps it in a clean environment, unlike a diffuser that circulates the aromatic oils in rooms that are filled with indoor and outdoor toxins. And since you sit in a steam room close to or fully exposed, your body is much more likely to absorb a more efficacious dose than by using a simple diffuser.
Because steam therapy has shown an ability to help reduce stress, adding the relaxing properties of lavender will only exponentially increase its calming, peaceful properties. For any stressed-out person, which is pretty much all of us, this is truly heaven scent.
MrSteam doesn’t just stop at lavender. They offer a range of six essential oil fragrances that you can use with the AromaSteam system. They also offer a set off five essential oils and a set of seven proprietary chakra oils designed to exert a number of targeted benefits, including Violet Nirvana, which, as the name suggests, uses lavender for relaxation and stress relief.
We can tell—you’re feeling better already.
Calm Down and Get Steamed
Of course, you can get AromaSteam in a public steam room if your spa or Gym has a MrSteam Commercial system. Fortunately, installing a home steam system is much easier and more affordable than you may think. If you have a bathroom, then you can have a steam room!
These MrSteam case studies will show you just how easy it is to put a steam shower in your own residence. And if you want a closer, more hands-on look at residential steam units, visit a dealer showroom in your area. After all, you have nothing to lose but chronic stress. Aren’t you, and your loved ones, worth it?
