The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Lavender Oils for the Win (A Science-Backed Sleep Solution) | Foundations Friday 76

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

In Lavender Oils for the Win (A Science-Backed Sleep Solution) I share the results of a 2015 scientific study. The study was conducted by Angela Smith Lillehei, Ph.D., Linda L. Halcón, Ph.D., MPH, RN, Kay Savik, MS, and Reilly Reis, MS that included 79 college students that reported difficulty sleeping. Lavender oil patches were used on college students in conjunction with good sleep hygiene habits (see Got Sleep). Alternatively, the other group also practiced good sleep hygiene, but without the added lavender oil patch.If you want to dive deeper on essential oils listen to the great conversation I had with Dr. Tracey Marks on the episode Dr. Tracey Marks | Dealing with and Treating Anxiety. Want to learn more than what Dr. Marks and I talked about? Then you should read her book Why Am I So Anxious?Have a planStay informedGet involved

lavender and sleep hygiene together, and sleep hygiene alone, to a lesser degree, improved sleep quality for college students with self-reported sleep issues, with an effect remaining at follow-up. Hey, everybody. Thanks for coming to this Foundations Friday on the KevTalks podcast. Today, I'm sharing a bit of a secret. I talked about this with Dr. Tracy Marks about treating anxiety, and we talked about her book, Why Am I So Anxious? And she has a great section in there all on essential oils, lavender being one of the key.

And one of the ones that she mentions is her favorite. When we spoke, I also talked about sleep hygiene in the Got Sleep. So check that out. That's from October 2022. And I talked to Dr. Tracy Marks in September. And I wanted to share this just quick tip. I didn't really use essential oils. I think I've talked about that here before a whole lot. My mother-in-law uses them a lot. And then when I started really honing in on my sleep hygiene, that really getting into the cognitive behavioral therapy and really just less screens in the evening and just winding down, not low lights in the evening, just the whole thing about it. So check out Got Sleep. But anyway, when I started to do that, I said, let me try this lavender as well. And I've always smelled lavender and it smells good and it's pleasant. But I started kind of applying it

to my wrists. And then we got like a mister, kind of a humidifier type thing for essential oils is probably a more official name. But I started putting a bunch of drops in that and some water and then running that each night. And I think that in addition to the magnesium glycinate that I take really helps me sleep and calming down. I have one of those muscle massage things, so I do that on my neck and hip flexors and where your sciatic is. The combination of that sleep hygiene. What I'm talking about now is a study from July 2015, J. Altern,

Compa Medicine. This is a PubMed National Library of Medicine study, and I'll link to it on the website. What they did is they studied some college students, 79 of them exactly, and they gave them 55 milliliters, or microliters rather, of lavender essential oil on like a patch. And then they studied that against folks that didn't have the patch. They helped them do good sleep hygiene. They tracked with a Fitbit tracker, did sleep diaries and measured. They use what's called the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index and the NIH Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System. So really where those questionnaires touch on things like, do you have nightmares a lot? Do you stay asleep? Do you go to sleep? Just all this,

a whole myriad of sleep questions. And what they found out is the lavender and sleep hygiene group demonstrated better sleep quality at post intervention and two week follow-up than to the sleep hygiene only group. So sleep hygiene on its own is great, right? Controlling when you go to bed at the same time, getting up at the same time, controlling light in the evening, getting sunshine in the morning. But the clinical effect, they said, was found for the lavender group at post-intervention along with a significant finding for waking feeling refreshed, right? Sleep quantity didn't differ between groups, right?

So the sleep quality was better, but the amount of sleep they got wasn't necessarily more or less. So lavender has been studied for a long time. Like I mentioned, Dr. Tracy Marks and I talked about that on the episode I did with her in September. And I speak about the hygiene for the got sleep from October. So go check those out. But give lavender a try. It's available almost anywhere at grocery stores.

You don't have to go to a natural food store or anything. Put a little bit on your wrist, rub them together, and smell it before you go to sleep in addition to winding down, and it makes a big difference. So I hope maybe that's helpful. You'll give it a try this weekend. Have a restful weekend in this mid-December as we get ready for Christmas and other holidays. And thanks so much for coming back here to the KevTalks podcast.

Check out KevTalksPod.com for all the K-Panel Productions items, which is this podcast, the Jiu-Jitsu podcast, Y-I-U-J-I-T-S-U podcast, where I talk about new Jiu-Jitsu, basically if you're new to it, if you're curious about it, things to consider, things that affect me. I'm training four years now. And then I also have an at Panel5Fit, P-A-N-N-E-L-L, number 5, F-I-T on a YouTube channel. So I share workout ideas and some of my workouts in 15 second increments. We just passed on that channel about 115,000 views. So thank you so much for checking out and all the comments. I really appreciate it. And feedback and guidance, you know, form checks, those kind of thing. So thanks a lot, everybody. Make sure you have a plan going into the weekend. Stay informed with those facts, not fear and get involved so you can

help make a difference in your own life and the lives of others. Godspeed.