Is your body rejecting oils or are you experiencing an unusual response?
How and why do some people experience complete rejection of any and all essential oils when previously they used them without issue? Here’s my best explanation.
When you over use (I can’t determine if you are or not as each person is different) sometimes after about 2 years of doing the same thing with 20 or more drops internally your body may start to reject them in the form of rashes or what seems like an allergic response. You may feel defeated because even simple topical or diffuser use can pose a problem.
The question I always ask myself and others when they are having these unusual responses is, “Are you under any abnormal stress lately?” Nine times out of ten the answer is “yes”. For these people, my only recommendation is to calm down and try to manage your stress. CortiStop and EndoGize are two helpful supplements.
When you are stressed out, your body creates more cortisol than normal. Your adrenals work overtime, and with larger amounts of cortisol coursing through your body, essential oils will try to help you out by attacking it. The result of their “help” is rapid and often rashy detox.
Here is my advice if you find yourself in one of these categories. I encourage you try to manage the stress better and stop using all essential oils for 120 days to fully reset your system, and then start again. Your blood recycles fully and is brand new every 120 days.
Please note, any full essential oil supplements need to be stopped too. Powdered supplements with powdered oils is fine. You get about the same when you eat a salad. Essential oils are present in most raw plant foods we eat, but concentrated forms of essential oil from a bottle will be too much during your reset.
When you start to reintroduce essential oils again it will be like you are new, so expect 2 weeks of normal detox, but after that, if you are still having reactions, then I’d say stop and consider the next potential issue.
If you think it is not an overuse response then you’ll need to figure out if your body is on the acidic side (bad) rather than pH neutral (better) or slightly alkaline (best). The oils will react in abnormal ways in a body that is highly acidic. You’d need to determine that on your own by checking the following areas.
Factors that contribute to acidity in the body are smoking, prescription meds, high animal protein diets, drinking alcohol or coffee, eating anything processed, eating too much processed sugars, eating too much processed wheat (bread and past), getting little to no exercise, not sleeping enough, plus a whole host of other things. If your body is acidic all the time, then you will experience detox responses all the time with essential oils.
The number one goal of an essential oil is to seek and destroy oxidative stress usually in the form of acid. They want to placate it first and then give you the therapeutic action it is known for. Oils will always work, but the more acidic you are, the more detox response you will have.
An interesting example of this is using lavender or other essential oils directly in your belly button. This method is highly effective for several reasons, better sleep and helping soothe stomach discomfort, but some people, when they try it, report a major rash on and around their belly button, often lasting for several days.
The belly button is a magnet for debris and build up of random toxins. Sunscreen, lotion, synthetic fibers from clothing are just a few invaders. There are thousands of bacteria found in belly buttons. The belly button is considered the “rain forest” of our body since there is such a random selection of bacteria present in each belly button.
A research team who studies belly buttons found a bacteria strain that is found only in the soil of Japan in one of their test subjects and that person had never been to Japan before. This goes to show you how international trade and possibly the clothing you buy from different countries can work like the earth’s bacterial pollination playground. You can check out the whole article here: www.tinyurl.com/buttonbacteria
My recommendation is to thoroughly clean out your belly button before trying this method and use a carrier oil for the first few times.
This would also translate to people’s personal care product use. If you’ve decided to use essential oils, but are unwilling to give up your Bath & Body Works soaps and lotions (honestly it took me a while to give up those) or your favorite face or body lotion, be prepared for the oils to potentially react badly with the synthetic fragrances, synthetic preservatives, and and other synthetic ingredients that are present in most store bought products.
All this to say, there could be any number of reasons someone has a negative reaction to all-natural essential oils, assuming they are, in fact, all natural as many essential oils on the market contain synthetics as well.
The multi billion dollar personal care industry would like us all to believe that essential oils are the problem. If we all would use just a little common sense and read the back of the labels to see what we are using, it may help clear up a lot of issues.
While this is not an exhaustive list of why you may be responding, and it may not be exactly your issues, it may be helpful for you to help someone else down the line. Essential oils are God’s gift to us, but sadly we can even mess them up too by contaminating them or overusing them or stressing ourselves out so much that they just stop working the way they are designed to work.