Are Essential Oils… Essential?

Written by: Ashley George

Thanksgiving is just around the corner! This time of the year always serves as a great opportunity to express our appreciation for what we have and the wonderful people around us. As my family and I have been preparing for Thanksgiving, my mother has discovered a new love of diffusing essential oils. She has many oils that each serve their own purpose and can help people in different ways. After further investigation, I came up with a new idea for this week’s study habit to try out. I wanted to see which essential oils are the best to diffuse for studying to increase productivity and focus. 

My plan was to try a different essential oil each day that I worked on school work to see what impact each smell had on my productivity. I was able to borrow my mom’s diffuser and some of her essential oils to see which ones worked best. As I began to research more about the oils, I found that peppermint, rosemary, lemon, ylang-ylang, and eucalyptus are supposed to be the ideal oils to diffuse to increase concentration, focus, and memory. I started out by using the peppermint oil on Monday. To diffuse the oil, I filled the diffuser with water and added a few drops of the essential oil. Then, after plugging in the diffuser, I could immediately smell the cool, refreshing peppermint. When I first started my work for that day, I found that I was getting distracted by the smell of peppermint, since I don’t usually use the diffuser or light candles when I work. After a while, however, I was able to regain my focus and work on studying for my math and biology tests, in addition to planning for a history essay. Overall, I considered this day to be a success, as my focus did seem to increase in response to the peppermint oil. As I continued each day with a different oil, I realized that some of them seemed to work better for me than others. For instance, I didn’t like the smell of eucalyptus oil, so in that case the diffuser was more distracting than it was helpful. The ylang-ylang oil also gave me some issues, but I did end up liking the lemon and rosemary oils. 

Overall, I found that this studying habit was successful. There were some smells that I liked better than others, and those oils were the ones that helped me to stay more focused and productive while I was studying. I think that to make this habit more successful, you should experiment and try to see which essential oil works best for you, so that you can stick with what helps you the most. 

My rating out of five stars:★★★★☆