How To Trigger Healing With This Natural Remedy

Welcome to the interview. I’m Dr. Terry Wahls, and I’m going to be interviewing Jodi Sternoff-Cohen, who is a bestselling author, award-winning journalist, a functional nutrition practitioner, and founder of Vibrant Blue Oils, where she’s combined her training in nutritional therapy and aroma therapy to create unique proprietary blends of organic and wild-crafted essential oils. She’s helped over 50,000 clients heal from brain-related challenges, including anxiety, insomnia, and autoimmunity. Now, keep in mind that Vibrant Blue Oils is a Wahls Protocol sponsor. And with that, let’s get into our conversation. So Jodi, I am so glad that we are chatting. I’m thinking back, how many years ago was it that we met there? I believe it was up in Portland.

Gosh, probably like eight years ago.

Yes, yes, that would seem about correct. So you have an interesting healing journey yourself in terms of how you came to use essential oils to support your healing. Would you care to share that?

Yeah. I think like you and everyone in your community, necessity is the mother of invention. You suddenly find yourself navigating something new. You might not be getting the information, nothing’s helping, and everyone’s telling you, “Oh, you’re fine. Just take an antidepressant or an anti-anxiety medicine.” And you’re like, “That doesn’t seem to be the right solution.” And so for me, it started actually with my second child, with Max. My first daughter was easy. I thought I was this great parent and had another one 22 months later, and the second one was a lot harder. He was deeply sensitive to certain foods, which I didn’t know, so I just thought he was really ADD and had no impulse control. And fortunately, a good friend of mine noticed that his behavior changed when he ate something and suggested I took him to a nutritionist, which I’d been reading every book I could find and trying every protocol I could think of. And I was like, I can do that. I’ve done everything else.

The nutritionist identified that he was really sensitive to certain foods, a lot of the ones that you recommend avoiding. We changed his diet and within a couple days, we had a different kid. And I was so blown away by that. I mean, for anyone who has had that kid that does those things, parenting can be a very competitive sport and people can be very judgmental and critical and mean. And I had no idea that food was a factor and that my life could be so dramatically different with just changing our diet. And so I went back and I read your book. I read everything I could find. I got a degree in nutritional therapy and I was really trying to help other moms who had kids that … square pegs that didn’t fit in the round hole.

And then my life took another … It was a rollercoaster, took another downturn, and my husband who was bipolar attempted suicide. And I found him, I saved him. And then I was trying to figure out how do I work full-time, parent and keep him alive? And someone suggested a residential treatment facility, an inpatient facility in another state. And so once we moved him there and I knew like, oh wow, he’s not going to die on my watch, I can relax, it was literally like I had been running a 10-year marathon and I’d just crossed the finish line. And my adrenals had been so in overdrive for so long that they literally ran out of steam, which was not super convenient seeing as I was suddenly a single mom and my kids were five and seven.

And so I was doing everything I could think of. I was eating all the right foods, taking all the right supplements, and it really wasn’t helping. I would get up with my kids, make their breakfast, pack their lunch, take them into school, come home, crawl back into bed, and set the alarm for pickup. And that was just not sustainable. And someone who … a good friend who I had done a favor for was planning to gift me essential oils. And when she dropped them off, she said something that really caught my attention. She said, “You know, you have been so high stress, so high cortisol for so long, I bet that your gut is so inflamed that even though you’re eating the right foods, you’re not necessarily digesting, observing and assimilating them. Oils don’t require a digestion to work. You can smell them and they get into the brain really quickly,” which we can talk about. “You can topically apply them, and we know hormonal creams or nicotine patches, they get into the system that way. This might be a good workaround.”

And that made sense to me. And so I started playing with oils and just kind of made up my own blends to support regions that I already knew needed supporting; the hypothalamus, the adrenals, the vagus nerve or the parasympathetic nervous system. And it helped. It helped when nothing else did. And so when I started to feel better, all of my friends who had been following my journey were intrigued. They were like, “Oh, can we try that?” And it worked for them. And I, like you, have a background in journalism and research. And when I finally felt better, I was like, “God, I wonder. This is so weird that it’s working.” So I put on my research cap and started looking at the data, and all of a sudden it made complete sense why this would work and how this would work.

There are many companies that do oils, but none that I could find that were doing blends targeted to balance organ systems and regions of the brain. And so that’s why I put it out because I figured, well, this seems to help me and other people, and God, I wish I had known what I know now. I could have avoided years, decades of endless suffering. And so I felt compelled to share this because maybe it could help other people save time, energy, pain, discomfort in their own journey.

Now, this makes sense, and again, for the listeners, when you inhale things, going through your olfactory nerve is the closest way to get these molecules, these bioactive compounds into the brain. And then if we can apply them topically, they can enter the bloodstream again without going through a digestive tract. There’s no issue with leaky gut, no issue with liver biotransformation as well. So let’s talk about some of the areas that you think are relevant for the multiple sclerosis and neuro-immune patients. Those are people who have a autoimmune disease and have anxiety, depression, or funny neurologic symptoms.

Yeah, and I suffer from Hashimoto. So while separate, I can certainly speak to what has helped me. And the main thing, honestly, the two main things have been supporting sleep and helping to calm my nervous system. As your listeners probably know, your nervous system is designed to keep you alive. And there are kind of almost two gears, right? There is danger. I’m allocating resources to survival, known as your sympathetic branch of your nervous system. And the I’m safe, it’s okay to allocate resources to resting, digesting, repairing, parasympathetic branch. And many of us, it’s pretty easy to activate the sympathetic branch. It could be toxins like metals, molds, viruses. It could be actual physical stressors like living in a dangerous situation. It could be mental stressors. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between a thought-driven stressor. My husband is mad at me, I might lose my job. My kid is struggling and I’m worried about them, and an actual tiger chasing us.

So, so many of us get into that survival state. And what happens then is blood flow, for example, is routed away from our core, from our organs of digestion, detoxification, recovery repair, immune function to our arms and our limbs so that we can either flee or fight back. And ideally in the wild … There’s this great book Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers because the zebra is being chased by the lion. It outruns him, it survives, it shakes. And what it’s doing is it’s basically exiting kind of fight or flight sympathetic and turning on parasympathetic rest and digest. And that’s why they heal. We are constantly walking around either worried about something that might happen in the future, worried about something that happened in the past, or living in pain, discomfort, what whatever’s going on. And so we’re never really regenerating and healing. And so by helping the body naturally kind of shift into that healing state, we help to turn on all healing functions, which often in autoimmunity or MS are not as active as we would like them to be.

Many, many people with MS and neuro-immune, we have difficulty sleeping. I’m certainly one of them. So what type … Am I inhaling an essential oil? Am I putting it on topically? Is it a combination of both?

It can be a combination of both or whatever you prefer. For people who are sensitive to smell, I have a whole foot chart. You can put it on the bottom of your feet and then put socks on so you don’t need to smell it. You can smell it. And as you mentioned, it goes directly into the limbic system. Smell is correlated with safety and survival. We smell food, we smell water, we smell predator odor. So it kind of gets into the brain more easily than other remedies. Or you can topically apply it. One thing that I found to be interesting, so topical application, most people think of it as kind of local and not systemic. You know, you hurt your elbow and you put a local cream and it makes it feel better, but it’s not necessarily affecting your back. But what people may or may not realize is that there are a lot of reflex points. They tend to be divots. By applying oils on a reflex point, you can have kind of a systemic effect. So it doesn’t necessarily need to go into the bloodstream, travel to the heart, and then get pumped to the whole body. It can travel through those energy meridians, reflex meridians, and-

So an acupuncture point.

Exactly, exactly. I’m using oils on acupuncture points instead of needles so that it allows you to do it. It’s a self-care program that you can do from home. But in regard to sleep, I kind of try to deconstruct it a little bit further because I think there can be different things that are interrupting your sleep. For example, if the challenge is falling asleep, often what’s happening is it is the sleep hormone melatonin that is released in response to darkness that allows us to restfully fall asleep. All of our hormones work together. So if the stress hormone cortisol is elevated, it kind of interferes with our ability to naturally release the sleep hormone melatonin. Because if there’s danger, you don’t necessarily want to fall asleep because you’ll die.

So we have an oil called circadian rhythm that is designed to support the pineal gland releasing melatonin. So if it’s 10:00 and you’re watching the clock, it’s 10:02, it’s 10:10, it’s 10:15, this is a good one. And we tell people to put it never on the face if you’re sleeping, because if you’re a restless sleeper, it could get in your eyes. So top of the head, on the skin above the ears and back of the head. And these are all points that allow it to kind of support the pineal gland. If your issue is you have no problem falling asleep, but all of a sudden at 1:00 AM you’re like wide awake and you could go clean the kitchen, that’s often related to blood sugar. And obviously you can address that through diet. You can have something like a nut butter or coconut oil before you go to bed.

But if you’re wide awake, what’s happening, it’s nocturnal hypoglycemia. Your energy dipped too low, and so your body released kind of emergency blood sugar to keep you alive. But now that sugar’s in your veins. And so it’s the pancreas that releases insulin that carries the sugar out of the bloodstream and back into the cells so that you can then restfully fall asleep. So we have a blend called pancreas that you can use for that. If you’re waking up around 3:00 AM maybe to use the bathroom and you’re kind of groggy but can fall back asleep, that’s usually the time when your liver is processing excess toxins. And so anything you can do to support your liver, including topically applying oils over the liver even before bed, or if you wake up smelling it before you fall back asleep, that can be very restorative and helpful.

So the 3:00 AM is a liver issue, you think?

It detox overload. Yeah, in Chinese medicine, 3:00 AM-

Interesting.

… liver, gallbladder time.

That’s new information for me.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I was certainly not aware of that. Now, I know people with MS and neuro-immune conditions, we have higher rates … Or I should back up. If you have a heavy metal exposure, cadmium, arsenic, if you’ve been a former, smoker, lead, mercury if there a lot of coal-fired plants in your area or a lot of industrial processes in your area. And there may be more lead in mercury in either the air or the water. And then you are more likely to have a autoimmune condition and a more severe autoimmune problem. So as a result, I talk to people about reducing their exposures and improving their ability to excrete these heavy metals. Are essential oils a useful tool to support that?

Absolutely. Because if you think about how the garbage leaves the cell, it goes from the cell through the fascia to the lymph to the blood, to the liver, to the gallbladder, to the gut, ideally to the toilet. It also goes through the kidneys. At any point, it can be … It’s a little bit like a traffic jam. If you’re driving from point A to point B and at point B there might be traffic congestion, it backs up all the way. There isn’t traffic congestion … The backup isn’t like 20 miles out. It’s kind of at that point. So anything you can do to kind of clear out the backup allows for easier removal from the body. And I think everyone does a fairly excellent job of talking about supporting the liver and the gallbladder because we know that’s a common bottleneck. I think the harder thing is the fascia, which is kind of the scaffolding, but if we’re bracing for impact, it’s clenching down and kind of compressing against the lymph. And the lymph is really the sewer system of the body, right?

We should maybe take a moment to remind people what fascia are.

Right.

Do you want to describe that? Or …

I’m sure you’ll do a better job, but I think of it as kind of the scaffolding of the body. It’s what gives us structure and connection. It also is the collagen and a little bit of the electrical current that [inaudible 00:15:27] connected.

Okay. So you think of it as the wrapper around muscles.

Yes.

The wrapper around the blood muscles. It goes outside. It’s sort of the saran wrap around tissues that help hold them in place and they can become tight to provide a little more support or more relaxed. There’s more awareness that there may be a lot of communication down along our fascia and that may be more instantaneous and faster than we certainly realized. So, I’ve never thought of essential oils as support for fascia. So tell me, how does that work?

[inaudible 00:16:17]. Okay. So if you think about how fascia is released, it’s usually like heat and compression. It’s you go to a fascia massage therapist and they touch it and press on it. So what I did, what I realized is that a lot of the fascia is right below the surface and it responds to plants and remedies. And so we actually created … I think we gifted you some of these. We have all these roller bottles now. So you can roll it on and just gently touch it. And if you think about big bottlenecks in the body, the neck. Where is all the garbage from the head draining? Down the neck.

Oh, yeah.

What’s going on in the neck? You’ve got your bones, you’ve got your muscles, you’ve got your nerves, you’ve got your lymph, you’ve got your blood flow, you’ve got your fascia. And if there’s any congestion in the neck, then it’s harder for the toxins to drain. So they stay in the brain and the immune system thinks that they’re a pathogen. And so it causes brain inflammation and then it causes a lot of symptoms. So when you’re talking about detoxing heavy metals, especially since so many of us have metals in our mouth, what we really need to think about is opening up the drainage pathways. We would never yell fire in a crowded movie theater without opening the exit doors. So sometimes when we’re even seeing a biological dentist, we’re mobilizing these toxins, but where are they going to go? So we really need to make sure.

So let me stop for a moment. I want to remind everyone, when Jodi mentioned metals in the mouth, that’s the silver colored fillings. Those silver fillings are 50% mercury, and there’s a small release of mercury every day. If you remove your mercury fillings all at once, then there’s a large release on one day. And we know that people who have silver fillings have a higher mercury content in the brain than those who have never had any silver fillings. Now, back to you, Jodi.

Yes. And the good news is even if you have silver fillings, there are ways to make sure that you can remove the metals that are kind of off-gassing in a safe way. And the way that a lot of the practitioners I work with recommend doing that is by moving lymph. And lymph responds really well to oils. It responds really well to gentle light massage. So many of the practitioners that we’ve worked with have found when people have kind of that detox reaction, that Herx reaction, basically what’s happening is that they’re mobilizing toxins. And it’s often the lymph that’s congested and the lymph … You know, your heart has a pump. Your lymph’s pump is like moving. You have to move your body. You can be on a vibration plate, you can be in a sauna. Sweating moves lymph. Epsom salt bags. There are many, many positive things that you can do. But oils just amplify that because they encourage the vasodilation, the expansion, and the downward movement, ensuring that everything in the neck is not a bottleneck, but it’s opening.

And in fact, there’s some research to back this up. Dr. Marco Ruggiero was taking sonogram photos of the neck. And what was interesting, we can talk about the vagus nerve in a moment, but if you’ve ever been in that middle seat in an airplane, and maybe the two people next to you are a little bit big, and I’ve had times when I couldn’t even read a book because I couldn’t move my arms. Think of if there’s all this drainage on the neck, but your lymph is compressed and you’re congested, there’s really no room for things to drain. And so he was taking sonograms and he was basically finding that in a photo image. And then he was topically applying oils. I know you love frankincense. Things like frankincense. And he was watching the congestion go down and taking another photo. And he was finding that correlated with improvements in health because all of a sudden there’s more space, there’s more area for drainage. Think of a freeway that has four lanes under construction. All the cars are in one lane and there’s congestion, and then suddenly you pass the construction and all the lanes open up and everyone is flowing [inaudible 00:20:35]. Yeah.

Yeah. So let’s go ahead and talk about the vagus nerve. There’s more recognition that vagal nerve stimulators can be very helpful for people with rheumatoid arthritis. I anticipate that we will find that … I’m looking forward to when we finally investigate that for multiple sclerosis. So the vagus nerve certainly has a big impact on parasympathetic activity, on our ability to heal and repair. What can essential oils do to support the vagus nerve?

Yeah, so the one device that’s actually been FDA approved for … Here’s the interesting thing. The vagus nerve is literally the gear shift between that fight or flight sympathetic state and rest and digest parasympathetic state. It’s the longest nerve in the body. It connects the brain to the body, body to the brain, and all the signaling back and forth. Starts at the base of the brain, splits and is the most accessible and thickest right behind your earlobe on that bone, your mastoid bone. And so that is where this stimulatory … you stimulate it to activate parasympathetic device. It’s a pacemaker like device that can be surgically implanted there. And then I think there’s a battery here, but they use it to stimulate the vagus nerve. And the domino cascade is you stimulate the vagus nerve and then you activate parasympathetic.

Now what we found is that essential oils, because they’re able to assimilate through the skin, you can apply an essential oil drop right there, both sides, one side, and it does the same thing. It stimulates the vagus nerve to activate your parasympathetic nervous system. So it’s just a far more affordable … I mean, I’ll show you it. You can carry it in your pocket, in your purse, and you just go like this. You can do it to your children. And when you turn on your parasympathetic nervous system, you’re turning on digestion, you’re turning on detoxification, you’re turning on your healthy immune response. So it’s just a way to make sure you are in the right lane to optimize everything else that you’re doing.

And again, listeners, you cannot begin the process of repairing damage or repairing your myelin, repairing any damaged areas when you’re in the sympathetic state. You need to be in the parasympathetic state. So this is certainly a very, very helpful tool.

Yes.

Where can people find you, Jodi?

They can find me at vibrantblueoils.com. And if you have any questions, just shoot us an email at info@vibrantblueoils and we do our best to get back to you in 24 hours.

Okay. So, this has been a fabulous, fabulous interview and this is why I do these interviews. I want everyone to know about the products and the types of services that I use every day in my healing journey. And certainly, essential oils are part of my self-care routine. They were certainly critical to my healing in terms of improving my sleep, in making it possible for me to sleep well through the night. So again, in the comments below, tell us one key item that you learned, what key action you’re going to take, and please go over to my website, terrywahls.com, sign up for my email so you get my weekly research updates and you’ll hear when we are doing our next really wonderful interview. Thank you.