Essential Oils and Nervous System Regulation: Using Smell to Heal Grief and Trauma with Jodi Cohen

Why does the simple act of smelling essential oils directly regulate the nervous system during trauma and grief? How can practitioners support clients who struggle with feeling their bodies? What if smell is the most underutilized tool for creating safety and embodiment?

Seven years ago, Jodi Cohen's 12-year-old son died suddenly in a car accident. Her 14-year-old daughter, about to start high school, needed her mother to stay present through the unimaginable. This episode shares Jodi's journey of daily choosing what helps and what hurts, discovering that smell became her most accessible pathway to nervous system regulation when everything else felt too overwhelming. 

You'll learn the science of why our sense of smell is our most direct connection to the limbic system, how rose essential oil counteracts the fear response in the brain, and why smell allows us to titrate our emotional experience in micro-moments rather than getting flooded.
This episode bridges functional medicine and somatic trauma healing for both practitioners and individuals navigating grief, chronic pain, or trauma recovery. Whether you're supporting clients through loss or learning to regulate your own nervous system, you'll discover how to use essential oils as deliberate cues of safety that shift your state without anyone noticing.

In this episode you'll learn:

• [00:01:28] Jodi's Story of Loss: How her son's death became a daily practice of choosing what helps and what hurts while parenting through grief
• [00:03:08] Why Smell is Critical to Survival: The science of olfactory receptors and how rose essential oil counteracts the brain's fear response
• [00:05:27] Stories Follow State: Why shifting your nervous system state automatically changes your thoughts without working on the stories
• [00:07:04] Parasympathetic Blend Behind the Ear: How applying essential oils on the vagus nerve regulates sympathetic dominance during overwhelming moments
• [00:09:11] Flooding Shuts Down Problem-Solving: Why you must regulate your nervous system before you can think clearly or make decisions
• [00:12:36] When Bedtime Brings Up Everything: How stillness at night surfaces all the grief and feelings we've avoided all day
• [00:14:24] Creating Neutral Space for Dorsal Vagal: Recognizing shutdown and using oils to observe feelings without reliving trauma
• [00:21:05] Titrating with Smell: Using essential oils for micro-moments of feeling followed by safe action to build capacity without flooding
• [00:24:37] Fascia, Lymph, and Nervous System Integration: Why addressing all three systems together creates coherence and lasting regulation
• [00:27:16] Where to Apply Essential Oils: Finding the divot behind the ear, belly button, and feet for maximum nervous system regulation

Main Takeaways:

• Smell is Our Most Powerful Survival Sense: Of the five senses, smell connects most directly to the limbic system because it alerts us to food, water, predator odor, and fire—making it the most critical sense for survival and the most underutilized tool for nervous system regulation.
• Rose Essential Oil Counteracts Fear Biology: Research on olfactory receptors shows that rose essential oil directly counteracts the fear response triggered by predator odor in the brain, making it a powerful tool for trauma healing and embodiment.
• Your Stories Follow Your State: Thoughts and narratives automatically shift with your nervous system state—when you're in calm aliveness you notice beauty, in stress you spiral with worry, in shutdown everything feels hopeless. Shifting state is often easier than changing thoughts.
• Smell Creates Space Between Stimulus and Response: Essential oils provide the easiest accessible tool to create that critical pause between what happens and how we react, allowing us to move from automatic survival responses to conscious choice.
• Titration Makes Healing Sustainable: Using smell to titrate emotional experience—feeling for 30 seconds, then shifting attention—builds capacity to stay present with difficult feelings without getting flooded or retraumatized.
• Go Slowly When Activating Parasympathetic: People who've been sympathetic dominant for years will start detoxifying when they finally feel safe. Start with just smelling oils before topical application to prevent overwhelming the lymphatic system.
• Fascia, Lymph, and Nervous System Work Together: These three systems are woven together like a marriage—the vagus nerve is the masculine aspect, fascia is the feminine, and when both are in harmony the body moves into coherence.
• Grief Requires Daily Practice: Healing from trauma and loss isn't about being fixed or finding one solution—it's making a daily choice to lean into tools that work, even when you don't feel like it.
• Coherence Creates Lasting Change: When you align the nervous system, fascial network, lymphatic system, heart coherence, and limbic system together, you create deadbolts on the door of safety rather than just one lock.

Notable Quotes:

"When you're flooded, it turns off your access to your prefrontal cortex, which is kind of your problem solving skill. And so you need to regulate your nervous system so that you can problem solve."

"It's not like I am fixed or I found this thing. It's that every day I live with chronic pain, I live with hard things, and every day I make a choice to deal with it."

"The nervous system, lymphatic system and the fascial network are all woven together. The fascia is kind of the feminine aspect of the nervous system and the vagus nerve is the masculine, and I think they're married and they work together."

Episode Takeaway:

The healing journey from grief and trauma don't require you to be fixed—they require daily practice of choosing tools that work even when you don't feel like using them. Jodi's journey through the loss of her 12-year-old son reveals why smell became her most accessible pathway to nervous system regulation: essential oils create that critical space between stimulus and response because olfactory receptors connect directly to the limbic system, allowing us to titrate emotional experience in micro-moments, shift our state (which automatically shifts our stories), and regulate before our prefrontal cortex shuts down from flooding.

Resources/Guides:

• Jodi Cohen's Vibrant Blue Oils - Jodi's Parasympathetic blend (clove and lime) applied behind the ear on the vagus nerve, along with her Rose, Lung Support, Limbic Reset, Fascia Release, and Heart blends mentioned throughout this episode.

• The Biology of Trauma book - Available now everywhere books are sold. Get your copy

• Foundational Journey - If you are ready to create your inner safety and shift your nervous system, join me and my team for this 6 week journey of practical somatic and mind-body inner child practices. Lay your foundation to do the deeper work safely and is the pre-requisite for becoming a Biology of Trauma® professional. 

Related Episodes:

• Episode 100: 3 Power Stories: How to Reclaim Your Mental & Physical Health Through Biology of TraumaⓇ with Dr. Aimie Apigian

• Episode 97: Pain as Protection: Why Your Body Creates Chronic Pain & The 3 Questions to Ask to Release It with Georgie Oldfield

 

Guest: Jodi Cohen is a bestselling author, award-winning journalist, functional practitioner, and founder of Vibrant Blue Oils, where she creates proprietary blends of organic and wild-crafted essential oils designed specifically for nervous system regulation. After her 12-year-old son's death in 2018 and navigating her ex-husband's bipolar disorder and suicide attempt, Jodi discovered that essential oils provided the most accessible pathway to regulation during overwhelming grief and chronic pain. Her #1 bestselling book "Essential Oils to Boost the Brain and Heal the Body" (Random House) synthesizes decades of scientific research on how essential oils support the body and brain. She has helped over 100,000 clients heal from anxiety, insomnia, autoimmunity, and inflammation, and was recognized as one of the 2024 Enterprising Women of the Year. Visit her website and follow her on Instagram.

Your host: Dr. Aimie Apigian, double board-certified physician (Preventive/Addiction Medicine) with master's degrees in biochemistry and public health, and author of the national bestselling book "The Biology of Trauma" (foreword by Gabor Maté) that transforms our understanding of how the body experiences and holds trauma. After foster-adopting a child during medical school sparked her journey, she desperately sought for answers that would only continue as she developed chronic health issues. Through her practitioner training, podcast, YouTube channel, and international speaking, she bridges functional medicine, attachment and trauma therapy, facilitating accelerated repair of trauma's impact on the mind, body and biology.

Disclaimer: By listening to this podcast, you agree not to use this podcast as medical, psychological, or mental health advice to treat any medical or psychological condition in yourself or others. This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your own physician, therapist, psychiatrist, or other qualified health provider regarding any physical or mental health issues you may be experiencing.

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