Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:05:09] Absolutely. Well, you know, like so many practitioners, I was in it. My hormones hit the fan. You know, about 10 years ago, maybe even 11 years ago. And it actually it wasn’t like it came to a halt in about ten or eleven years ago. I was having hormone problems before that. I just didn’t know it was hormone problems. I remember asking my mom, my friends, like, if my being so tired normal or is my not be able to go to sleep so normal or is my cravings normal and everything was normalized. Everything was like, oh my gosh, that’s how women feel. That’s how women act. That’s how women are. And I was like, OK, well, then I’m going to keep doing me.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:05:48] And then I kept doing me until I remember one day I had just my practice had been off the ground for about a year. I was putting my entire life, every single cell of my being was being put into my practice and taking care of my patients. And I had been sprinting even before that into the practice and ever one day waking up. And I had probably gotten about seven to eight hours of sleep. You know what would be a normal amount of sleep? And I woke up and it literally felt like there was this heavy, invisible hand trying to shove me back into the bed. And I was like, what is going on? And I had this bubbling anxiety starting to fill my body. I had this my mind began to race. I was like, oh, my gosh, what’s going on with me? What’s happening with me? And I remember thinking, like, how am I going to get up? How am I going to get to the bathroom? How am I going to get ready to go see my patients? Oh, my gosh. How am I going to take care of my patients if I’m in this state? And it was I was in severe chronic fatigue. And I remember not knowing how to even deal with this level of chronic fatigue. I hadn’t really seen it too much in my practice yet. A lot of my patients weren’t at that level, not at the level that I felt like I was. And as I was looking in the mirror myself, I literally felt like a shell of myself at that moment. And I had a good friend of mine who recommended me to a great endocrinologist.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:07:17] And sure enough, we ran the labs. And, you know, it was quite obvious. The labs basically said you are a hormone hot mess is basically what the lab said in a nutshell. And I remember this practitioner scripted me up with birth control and Xanax. And I remember looking at those prescriptions. And Xanax is anxiety medication for those who don’t know. I remember looking at these prescriptions and I felt I felt so disempowered and I felt so, I just I do you know, when you know that this isn’t the solution for you. And I was just like, is this all that you’ve got for me? And I knew that I had to do my own work. I knew that I was gonna have to figure this out for myself. And luckily, before I went back to school, I was a biochemist for many years. And and the only reason why I was a good biochemist was because I’ve always been a bulldog for research. I’ve always been this great investigator. So I knew that in that moment that I could probably figure this out in number two. The other thing that I realized is that I wasn’t unique. I knew that there were millions of other people dealing with this. I knew that other people were being given these crappy solutions that weren’t actually going to get to the root cause of what was going on and that I was gonna be a part of the solution and not a part of the problem. And so for the last 10 years, this has been my life’s work. It is the mission that’s a non-negotiable. It’s the thing that gets me up every single day.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:09:28] Absolutely. It’s such a great question. You know, I was just working with a woman yesterday who, you know, symptoms of fatigue and weight resistance and brain fog and ensure enough it points. It was pointing to her thyroid and she went misdiagnosed for a good five to seven years before it finally landed on what was really going on. And the thing is, is that hormones are simply chemical messengers and they are mediating conversations on every single cell in the body. And these conversations are happening every single millisecond. Right. That are continuing to happen. And one of the things that we realize is that when we are dealing with stressors, whether they’re chemical or physical or emotional, whatever they may be, it could be a trifecta of multiple stressors that are happening. I call these root causes when when they begin to happen. I feel like the first type of thing that throws up the white flag is going gonna be our hormone system. So we’re gonna begin to experience things like anxiousness and insomnia, fatigue, brain fog, you know, gut issues, even weight resistance. Those are the types of things that we began to see. So I often find that hormones are always involved to some capacity when when we are struggling. And the thing of it is, is that our hormone systems are really downstream of what’s going on because something’s causing the hormones to do that. You know, there’s a quote that I read a couple of months ago that says, if your flower isn’t blooming, you’re not trying to fix the flower. You’re actually trying to fix the environment around it. And the same thing you are. Whether it’s our ovaries or it’s our thyroid or it’s our adrenals, it’s usually not those endocrine systems, those endocrine glands that we need to fix. It’s what’s causing the problem around those endocrine glands that we need to look at. So it’s not like the thyroid. I mean, not that there isn’t cases where your thyroid function is something’s not right with those cells, but usually something is causing it. This is a bigger picture that’s causing the thyroid to create dysfunction for sure.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:12:03] Absolutely. I think the big one I know the big one for me.I mean, if there was a little fire, I was dumping a very specific type of gasoline on my fire. And that was stress, you know, and I’m talking specifically about perceived stress in as fast as the world is working today. You know, just today is a great example of this. You know, I was living in this moment. I was in a two day intensive training for the last couple of days, Monday and Tuesday from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.. And in those days, I couldn’t look at my phone. I couldn’t look at email like we were we were very focused. We were very present in it. So I knew that today and today I have five podcasts in a row, five podcast interviews in a row. And so but I also have other assignments, like the girl that work I got to do after the podcast. And so I’m trying to get some of that work done earlier this morning before I get into the podcast. It’s like literally one after an hour for five hours. And one of my dear friends who is working with me and coaching me on something, she is blowing me up. She every text message is, have you done this? Have you done this? Have you done this? And all of a sudden, I start to feel overwhelmed because her text messages, she’s just sending me tasks, every single text message and the phone keeps buzzing. And we’ve all been there right where you are already locked and loaded with what your day needs to look like. You already know what your highest priorities are. And then some other perceived stressor comes into play and it just knocks down all the dominoes. And at the same time, my husband is shouting at me from the room, what do I need from Whole Foods? And I’m just like, one more person asks me one more thing.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:13:38] I swear to goodness, I’m about to crack, you know. And so so stress is one of and I think that that particular little example is an example that every one of us can relate to probably multiple times a day. And if you look at the research, we know that we go into the sympathetic dominance, basically that kind of overwhelmed mode inside of the system. 50 plus times a day on average, 50 plus times. So that’s a big one. I call that just constantly adding fuel to that inflammatory fire that’s driving those hormonal issues. The other ones are a little bit more hidden and we’ve got to kind of go and investigate. It’s going to be a stealth infection. So parasites, viruses, candida, maybe driving that skin rash that you mentioned, maybe it’s mold. It’s figuring out if there’s a self infection going on, endocrine disruptors. So toxins, whether it’s plastics, whether it’s heavy metals, that’s a whole different category. I find trauma. So emotional trauma, trauma that you had dealt with or haven’t dealt with. But that keeps kind of bubbling up to the surface and then nutrient deficiency. Which I find are created by a lot of this other root causes. But we know that we don’t have the right building blocks in the body. Your body can. Your cells cannot function at their highest capacity. And that can lend to a triggering of either. We’re not making enough hormones. We’re not converting hormones or we’re not metabolizing the bad hormones after we’ve leveraged them and use them. So I would say that on average, those are kind of the biggest root causes that I personally see.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:15:21] Yeah. Yeah. Diabetes, cardiovascular disease, skin rashes. Bring it in. Oh yeah girl. No. Yeah. It’s got the rest of it all.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:16:49] Absolutely. And you know what? You hit it so poignantly when you talked about how so often we think that we’re managing stress in a really great way. I was living this life for so long. I thought as long as I wasn’t on the floor crawling that I was killing it. I was on the ground crawling and maybe not all those years. I was not killing it at all. And I think, you know, I’m so glad that you doubled down on having that conversation.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:17:15] We cannot have that conversation enough. Right. Stress is into me. You know, as a hormone practitioner, as a chemist, as someone who understands a physiology, I’m still a girl. I’m still a woman who has a lot on her plate, as is a wife, is a friend, is a practitioner to her entire family. Right. And so, you know, things come up all the time. And it’s a daily practice. But symptoms that you should be looking out for. And clearly specifically, you know, there are specific hormones we can connect with. But if you’re dealing with painful periods, a painful menstrual cycle, if you’ve got severe PMS like symptoms, you get anxious, heavy cravings, irritable moods swings you feel really low, low, low energy before your period. Those are definitely those are warning signs. Your body is trying to tell you something isn’t right going on there and that there’s maybe some type of inflammation that’s impacting those reproductive hormones. You know, when we’re thinking about the thyroid, I always talk about the big three, the big three upstream hormones, which is thyroid, cortisol and insulin, because they have such a profound effect on each other. But they also have such a profound effect on the rest of the hormones in the body.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:18:22] And so when you’re feeling when you start to think that you’re not recalling information or you walk into a room and don’t know why or you are in the middle of a sentence and all of a sudden the word just flew away. Right. That that brain fog or if you feel like you’re crashing, your energy is crashing at 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon and you have to reach for caffeine or candy, that’s definitely a symptom of something not being right in the body. You wake up tired, you go to bed exhausted or maybe go to bed and your mind is racing because you’re trying to solve, you know, tomorrow’s problems or the world’s problems. You call that mental chatter. Maybe you are dealing with thinning hair or dry skin or a sluggish digestive system. Maybe it’s even constipation. Not normal at all. Right. Maybe it’s weight resistance that you’re all but sudden, no matter how hard you work out, no matter how much you limit your calorie intake, you’re putting on weight for some reason. Right. It’s not lifestyle there. It’s definitely something going on with the hormones. Right. Usually your thyroid.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:20:01] Absolutely. I mean, I think the freeways talk about that first step of self-awareness and, you know, just kind of listening to our bodies, checking in with our bodies, asking our bodies, what do you need, what what isn’t serving me today, what will serve me today?

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:20:14] But then, you know, when when we’re not feeling well, I know it’s so easy to say, don’t blame yourself, don’t feel shame around it. But we have been trained in this culture that at least for women, that we should hold on to a lot of blame and shame. You know, last summer I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, which is an autoimmune condition that affects the thyroid. And I was right at the time that this book, my newest book, The Essential Oils Hormone Solution, was coming out. And I remember getting the results back and I felt, I can’t tell you how much shame and blame I was feeling because here I am, this hormone expert, and I’m like, how did this happen? How did this happen to me of all people? And I was I sat on it for so long, I didn’t share it with people I didn’t talk about. It was like this dirty, hidden secret that I was holding on to because I didn’t think that I deserved I deserved healing. I had done this to myself. And so often we have this tendency, as you talked about, of feeling this guilt and the shame around our healing journey and that we don’t deserve to get well. And, you know, I think all of us have been at that point. And one of the things I talk about so much on my podcast in the book is that it’s first that first step is mindset.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:21:24] That first step is either writing it down or journaling it or just connecting with yourself and saying to yourself that I deserve healing, that my body is ripe for healing miracles. Because if we don’t get into the state, do you think about our thoughts and how powerful they are? We don’t get into that state where we believe that we deserve it. I mean, our cells are listening, our bodies listening. And let’s be honest, healing is cellular. So I know how difficult that can be. And it really is just a matter of figuring out where that may be coming from, kind of getting to the root cause of where we’re holding on to some of that those and disempowering beliefs. I think that’s up first step. And once we get to that first step, then we can start to uncover and unpack, you know, where the problem is opposed to continuing to beat ourselves up by over exercising or over restricting, because we find that sometimes, especially when it’s tied to feeling of unworthiness, it really has negative repercussions and sickness. I know it. I’ve been there in that space and I’m like, and you just want to be well, you know, and you’re not setting yourself up for success there for sure.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:22:59] Perhaps that’s number one. That is step one in it. I’ll be honest with you. It can be the hardest step sometimes for many of our body.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:23:22] Absolutely. And that’s the beauty is that we’re all perfect. You know, we’re all maybe imperfectly perfect, but we all are perfect. And our bodies are really just trying to do the best that they can. They really are your hormones. Their number one job is to navigate what you’re doing every day. If you’re running this way, they run in this way. You’re going this way. They’re going this way. You know, they’re just really trying to keep up with what you’ve got going on. They’re doing their best. Your body wants to be back to homeostasis, back to that beautiful Goldilocks place. And it’s really that mindset of that first step. And then I think the next step, really, and I think this is something we don’t explore enough of, but not only the realizing that we deserve it, but also starting to put the practices in place to show us so ourselves that we deserve it. So self-care, I think, is one of those non-negotiables. And I’m not talking about bubble bath and go into the hair salon or whatever people think self-care is. It’s the everyday things that you do to nourish your body, that self-care. You know, before I got on this episode or got in this interview, I went and fueled my body, who’s kind of I have my I do a little bit of intermittent fasting. And I took my supplements and I grabbed a glass of lemon water, you know, like I had these little things that I did. And it took me fifteen minutes to kind of put all those things in a place before I came on over to here. But that is a part of my self-care. It’s it’s built into my life so that I am by every step of the way. Throughout the day, I’m doing those components to nourish my body.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:25:26] Absolutely. I think the first step is having a morning ritual. Here’s the thing. And this is from a girl who chronically stressed ruled her world. And if I’m not careful, it comes right back in. You know, it’s what protects me from that. It’s having these rituals in place. And that’s the reason why, you know, when you find that something works for you, especially when you’re your type A, crazed kind of person thinks, I’m not going to pretend like I’m not.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:25:51] You can’t write seven books in nine years. You know, unless there’s something else going on there. So this was the big game changer for me. And the reason why you’ll see the oils in this book as well, essential oils, is that there was like my life before oils in my life after oils, because the essential oils I relish in them, they are they’re beautiful. They smell amazing. Their chemistry is powerful, especially for our mental and emotional well-being. And so I just leverage essential oils with a lot of my rituals. And I find that when I tag team them together, the results are exponential. And I just think also that we deserve to relish in our wellness. We deserve to relish in our self-care. I know this whole idea of love in the eye and taking care of our bodies seems very remember growing up. I used to think that healing was supposed to be a torturous process, was never supposed to be fun. And it wasn’t until I was in my thirties when I was on this journey that I was like, Oh my gosh, I can really love to do this, because let’s be honest, if you don’t love it, it’s not sustainable. No one wants to do something they don’t love, right? Nobody. So I have a morning ritual. And I’ll tell you what, people we’re trying to get into my morning ritual today. They were trying to encroach on mine, looking for control, and I was like backup. But my rituals. So I always start my morning. I start my morning with a citrus essential oil. I usually it’s wild orange or grapefruit or tangerine and I only do citrus is boost happy neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. But there energizer bunnies. I don’t know about you, but I want to wake up with that yummy, happy Energizer Bunny type of feeling. I just want to get up and start my day and have it feel good. And literally breathing in a little oil like that. It’s always by the bedside. It just sets the tone.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:27:40] Next I love you know, I take a shower every morning and I have a little spritzer in my shower. It’s like my little awake blend and it’s like a combination of rosemary, peppermint and frankincense, something like that. And I just spritz it around and it just feels like there’s a decadent self-care moment where I can do some conscious, deep breathing. Takes me literally five seconds to do this. And I just I love how some of these things can be so simple, yet so impactful. That just sets the tone, gets my brain working. Rosemary boosts working memory by up to 70 percent. And I know about you, but I could use always a little extra brainpower. I do second of water with lemon. I do my green smoothie with my supplements. I do my gratitude journal every day. And then I move my body at some capacity. Either I walk my hill. I do yoga. I just want to fire off these spiritual, the mental and the physical and nourish my body. So usually all that takes me because I like efficiency. I’m not going to lie about 30, 35 minutes, give or take.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:29:15] Oh, my gosh. Absolutely. And it’s consistency and gets what you deserve to book and your day and your night on your time. Gosh, if we don’t have time for ourselves, something is not right. And I used to tell myself, I don’t have time for myself, but that’s selfish. I don’t have time for any of that. That’s a luxury. And it was so disempowering. No wonder I landed on the floor. No wonder I found myself crawling to get ready every single day, you know, for several months. And that’s just we don’t deserve that. We deserve time for ourselves to recharge and reset, especially at night. I remember I used to Tasmanian devil myself into bed every night and wonder why I couldn’t go to sleep. Wonder why my brain was racing a mile a minute. I was running. I mean, I was literally hopping into bed.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:30:33] So really, important. We know now what sleep is. Oh go on.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:31:12] Absolutely I am. It just boils my blood when we are treating women’s hormone issues with birth control, because birth control doesn’t treat anything. It doesn’t treat anything. It is just a mask of symptoms. You’re just shutting down the hormone system.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:31:28] Also, even for women in pre-menopause and menopause, bio identicals don’t always serve right. What if it isn’t that we need more hormones? What if it’s that the cell receptivity is the problem? What if the receptors are being blocked? Maybe that’s the issue. Or what if it’s inflammation that’s driving the hormone chaos, would you want to call it? It’s very negligent of us to go in and just slather hormones on the problem. Now, that’s not to say I do want to give a caveat. You know, when I got diagnosed with hypothyroid and Hashimoto’s, I did go on thyroid medication because we needed a step up my metabolism. I mean, everything was sluggish, but I knew I knew that that medication wasn’t going to solve my thyroid problem. It wasn’t the medication that was going to solve it. There was other there was something driving my hypothyroid problem and we had to figure out what that was and that was the first thing that we started to do. So I don’t know why or how we got in to this system where we are just prescribing hormones like like it’s candy. I don’t get it. I don’t know why we’re not investigating what the root causes are. And it’s heartbreaking to see women who get put on thyroid medications or they put on birth control where they’re put on a bunch of estrogen and progesterone. And about three months later, they’re back to square one or they feel even worse. You know, yeah, we never got to the root cause of that.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:32:55] Also, I want to point a caveat and tell people that essential oils are not hormones. So they’re not also going to go in and clean up shop like that. I really leverage essential oils a lot for helping for lifestyle techniques. Not to say that essential oils can’t be used to help support brain function or can’t be used to help detox the liver or can’t be used to help clean up cell receptors. They absolutely can. But I think the first step in foundational and this is where I want to live in a high level of integrity is that first step is nutrition. You know, if we can clear up the nutrition piece, then it makes it easier for us to discover what is really going on behind the scenes, because nutrition can clear up about 70 to 80 percent of everything. And once we can clear those things out, then we can really begin to see. OK. Well, we can start to eliminate what may be the root cause is where I think oil’s really step into play is the stress component, is the brain component, is the cravings component, is the even menstrual cramps. I mean, you’ve got, you can use oil specifically for PMS, but it’s the essential oils aren’t going to cure that hormone issue. They’re just really acting as a really natural aid to putting some of that while we’re getting through the muck.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:35:23] Absolutely. So I talk about my five pillars and pillar number one, no surprise is nutrition. You know, if we let’s just take PMS, for example, you know what is going on there just really quickly. Right. Usually basically with PMS, we’ve got a situation where most likely we’ve got relative to progesterone, estrogen is dominating and we don’t have enough progesterone in that phase as we head into our menstrual cycle. And I mean, clearly, those hormones are what’s going on right there. But we look at the surface of that, we look upstream to that. It’s a combination of nutrient deficiencies and that’s a combination of inflammation. Right. And those are the things that we need to look at. So by giving someone progesterone, by giving someone birth control, we don’t solve that problem at all. We’ve got to look to see. We know. Do we need to manage our nutrients? Do we need to look at nutrients and do we need to manage inflammation? Is dairy, gluten, grains, alcohol, sugar? Are those things in the gut microbiome actually causing that inflammatory impact that’s happening on our reproductive system? So that’s the first thing that we got to look at. And that’s why I always say nutrition. Because if we can clear out that inflammation and bring back the right nutrients into play, we can then begin to rule things out very, very quickly. And the results are very fast.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:36:41] Number two is moving our bodies. You can call it exercise. I like to call it movement because movement is life. But figure out what’s right for you. I have definitely over exercised myself into the ground. I have over exercise myself in distress because exercise is a stressor working out the stressors. If fasting is a stressor, a lot of things are stressing the system. So we just have to be really mindful, just listen to your body. Not every day is gonna be a hit training body. Not every day is gonna be SoulCycle. Some days your body just wants to hike or walk or or do yoga, right? Or just you need a break in general. So kind of figuring that out.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:37:18] Number three, no surprise. Stress management. I think that stress is fueling a lot of what’s going on. Number four is going to be reducing your toxic load because as you can imagine, when you’ve got a toxic buildup, you’ve got that bucket filling up and we’re gonna be creating inflammation. Our hormones have an impact there. And the number five is gonna be the self-care rituals because it really is those daily, consistent, self loving, you know, nourishing rituals that are going to be the game change. And I think that they’re just, to me, other non-negotiable. They’re the thing that really that creates ease and grace in love when we’re beginning to heal our body.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:38:55] Absolutely. Let’s start with oh, my gosh, those are two big questions. I’m going to quickly unpack, I promise. OK. So cravings so cravings are what I think of as an unmet need. You know, usually cravings are being driven by exhaustion, driven by stress, driven by kind of those, you know, for having an emotional concern or issue. I find that that’s when we start to have cravings. But the mechanism of cravings is when it’s really driven by stress. At the end of the day, you know, cortisol is the hormone that we release because of long term stress, cortisol, a lot of people don’t know, but it’s an insulin regulator. And so when cortisol spikes, which it can do 50 times a day, insulin has to spike because we need glycogen stores from the liver into our muscles just in case we’re being chased by a tiger. And I know we’re not being chased by a tiger, but your body doesn’t. It just doesn’t know.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:39:45] And as women in particular, we’re meant we’re hardwired to make babies. We all know that we’re the we’re the ones who bring life into the world. And your body knows that. Your physiology knows that. And so when we go into that stress mode on accident, cause we get the text message, we’re running late to a meeting or whatever it may be, your cortisol as a survival mechanism goes into the brain and goes into the rational thinking, problem solving part of the brain, the decision part, and that is your prefrontal cortex and it sabotages your prefrontal cortex so that you are craving you are hungry even when you’re not. It is the survival mechanism that kicks in because you received a crazy text message. So with cravings, you know, they’re going to pop out to nowhere, really, unless we kind of get to that root cause, which is managing stress. But in those moments, there’s an oil blend that I absolutely love that literally will win the stare-down contest with the cupcake, especially the cupcake that you have said no to 20 times that day until 4:00 in the afternoon, because that’s when your willpower is being sabotaged at that moment to oil so easy. It could be peppermint and lemon, peppermint and wild orange, a mint and a citrus. Now, peppermint has been studied in the Journal of Neurology to actually reduce cravings. And it can act as an appetite suppressant as well, but reduce cravings by like 90 percent.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:41:10] And then grapefruit has also been shown that as well. And so I have a little roller. It’s about eight drops of each. Top it off with a carrier, oil like Jehova oil, or grape seed oil, whatever you prefer. You roll it over your palms when you feel that craving, when you’re about to walk into the kitchen and open those refrigerator doors and just stare into the refrigerator looking for something, that’s when you want to grab that blend, roll it on your palms. You breathe it in about three to five deep belly breaths and it will literally shut down the craving experience. It’ll literally shut down that prefrontal cortex or the limbic brain that’s kicking in to have you want something and it’ll give you time to just step away from the refrigerator. And I’ve been using this technique with I can’t even tell you tens of thousands of women with such great success. I have that blend with me every day. And what’s so great is it’s knocking out two birds with one stone. So not only are you getting rid of the craving, but peppermint. Grapefruit are also energy boosters and brain function boosters. So it kind of just knocks out multiple birds with one stone.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:42:20] Because usually that’s the reason why we want the thing right. Our brain doesn’t work anymore. And so it just kind of takes care of both of those things at once.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:45:06] Absolutely. I mean, I think anxiety can come on from a lot of different things. You know, again, you know, a piling up of a lot of circumstances in our life can feel anxious. You know, as we move into our mental cycle with the plummeting of estrogen and progesterone, our anxiety will go higher. A lot of women report feeling depressed and anxious. Right before our menstrual cycle, kind of during PMS. And then also, if we’ve got gut issues, you know, that gut brain connection is so important because, what, 90 percent of serotonin is actually created in the gut. And so that could be leading to it as well. And as you can imagine, all three could be playing a role all at once. And so I love oils for managing anxiousness. Now, mind you, meditation and deep belly breaths, there’s a lot of different ways that we can manage anxiousness. I just find that when we pair oils together, like I had a woman reach out to me yesterday and she was telling me that her anxiety had been an all time high last summer and she used kind of my anxiety begun blend with tapping to get her panic attacks under control. And she’s like, that was the power combo. And it could be tapping, it could be breathing, it could be meditation. But I think when you combined oils with it, that you really have a powerful solution at your fingertips.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:46:20] And what makes oils so great is that they are so inexpensive and they’re so easy to use. And I think that’s why I’ve always fall in love with them, is that if I’m feeling anxious, if I’m feeling like I’m rubbing up, my heart’s beating really fast like I had to do. I was in a room yesterday with some big, big players. Jack Canfield was in the room when it was a group of 15 of us. And we were learning how to speak at a really high level. And I had to go up and do a three minute story where I was gonna get reviewed by everyone in the room, including Jack Canfield and some other really big people. And it was nerve wracking. Like, I was really nervous that I was going to fail miserably on my face. So I luckily, I have my oils on me at all times. I had my anxiety blend on me and I started just literally dousing myself in oil. And I’m going to share the blend with you right now. And it was so incredible. I went from a state of like almost panic because I normally don’t get nervous on stage. But this was a group of high level players.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:47:25] These were all massive keynote speakers, huge game changers in the world. And I just felt like you were been in a room where you feel like you don’t belong in that room. Like you like. How did I get in this room? Well, that was our room yesterday. I grabbed this blend and it’s just three oils. And I said, that’s why I love and make it so simple. So in a 10 mile roller and you can get these on Amazon into these anywhere, it was eight drops of lavender, seven drops of cedar wood and five drops of vetiver. Now, if you don’t have vetiver, no worries, it’s kind of going to more and more exotic oils. I would swap out better for bergamot. And that is a that’s a beautiful citrus oil and it’s the oil of self-love and self-acceptance. But I do I this particular blend was lavender, cedar, wood and better. And that trio literally lowers. I mean, it will take away and banish that anxiety in a matter of seconds. They are powerful sedative like oils. I mean, it calms the brain in a matter of seconds. So I just rolled it over my palms. I put it on my wrist, took three to five deep belly breaths and then went up on that stage and did my thing.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:48:35] I did good. I did. You know, the one thing that I didn’t do is for some reason. And usually I’m great at this. I know how to walk on the stage and do all that. But for some reason or not, three minutes, I did not move my feet once.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:49:41] Absolutely. So every oil is initially a plant, right? We think of these plants come from all over the world and we’re just leveraging these powerful secondary metabolites, these chemical constituents, because ultimately that aroma is a chemical. It’s actually a constituent, it’s an organic chemical. And our bodies have been you would think about our relationship with plants and how plants are some of the most powerful healing modalities that we can leverage. And that’s really all we’re leveraging. We’re leveraging the power of these plants. And what we know about these chemical constituents, depending on the plant that you’re using, whether it’s a citrus or it’s a floral or it’s a grounding oil like frankincense. We know that those chemical constituents are going to go into the body systemically. You breathe in those oils, like it or not, they’re gonna go do their magic. And our body is so receptive to that chemistry on it, on a physiological level, on a cellular level, that we actually can break apart those chemical constituents and bind to them. Our own chemistry, whatever it would have if it’s a neurotransmitter or if it is a lie Gand, whatever it may be. Because we think about emotions. Emotions are literally molecules in the body. And these molecules of emotion can actually bind to these essential oil chemical constituents for our own benefit. I mean, the physiology and the chemistry of it, it’s so fascinating to me.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:51:04] Let’s just say we’re breathing in the citrus oils. Let’s just say that unless let’s just take one little chemical constituent, let’s say limonene and we breathe that in. We know that our sense of smell is the most powerful scent that we have or sense because it is directly connected to our sense of survival. It has a no holds barred to our limbic system. And that limbic part of our brain is our survival brain. It’s where we house our amygdala, a hippocampus, our hypothalamus. And that is memory. That is emotion. That is and that is hormones. That’s our hormone master control center. It’s like it’s like NASA, right. That’s where we’re holding it for like the space program. So when we breathe in this oil, it has a profound impact on all of those different structures, on all of those neurons and all of those cells. And it can actually elicit a really powerful neurochemical experience. But also it shifts the way our hormones are working at the hypothalamus and pituitary level so we can elicit changes from the brain to receiving messages into our our endocrine system, our endocrine glands. So that’s why when you breathe in an essential oil for stress, like let’s take lavender and bergamot, my favorite stress combinations, you can literally go from a heightened state of survival mode to a parasympathetic rest and digest mode by simply breathing in those two oils together.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:53:24] Absolutely. So especially for women who are we’re still having our period and we’re still having that menstrual cycle. My top five one is going to be lavender or lavender because it is a jack of all trades. It’s like a Swiss Army knife from sleep to stress to skin issues. And you lavender is such a powerful oil. I just love it. And it’s natural, which is phenomenal for menstrual cramps, for stomach cramps, for muscle cramps. And it also it deals with histamine as well. So it’s a kind of an antihistamine because histamine can really make a sluggish and low energy as well. So I love lavender. Next is peppermint. Peppermint for cravings, for headaches, for digestive, for respiratory, for mitochondrial function, for brain fog. Peppermint is a no brainer. Next would be Clary Sage called Clary Sage the Beyonce of hormone essential oils. Not only is it great for stress and for sleep and for anxiety, but it’s also a natural allergy zick as well. And it has been studied to have to help balance estrogen and progesterone. So I do love Clary Sage in that realm. Number four would be a citrus oil of some kind, whether it’s lemon or orange or tangerine or grapefruit. Citrus oils are powerful detoxifiers and cleansers, citrus oils are great for the liver and for our detox pathways. And citrus oils, as we’ve mentioned here, are great for boosting happy neurotransmitters and. Everyone deserves a little dose of happiness. And then the last one that I would choose is going to be I’m torn between Geranium and Rosemary. I’m going to go a geranium. And I’ll be honest with you Geranium is a very powerful oil that doesn’t always agree with everybody because it has such a powerful scent. But Geranium is great for PCOS, great for endometriosis, it’s great for hormonal acne. So I just I love that clean, essential oil. It’s great for liver support and adrenal support. So she kind of just hits all of the points for women’s hormones. And I incorporate geranium and so many of my hormone blends inside of the book.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:55:45] Well, you think about that five like I can make a sweet blend with that five. I can make a cravings blend with that five I can make an energy blend with that. Five, I can make a PMS and endometriosis blend with that five. And so like you think about all the types of combinations you can do with those five oils. I mean it’s it’s it’s endless really. And as long as you’ve got a good book or a guide that can kind of guide you with those blends, you’re really set with those. Yeah, you don’t need a ton of oils. That’s not to say that I don’t have 100 plus essential oils,.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:56:22] And just one thing I want to say, like be very careful with essential oils if you’re not used to them. Some of them, very few you can put on your skin direct. But most of them you can’t. So you always wanted to them. So just make sure that if you are going to start using essential oils, that you do get a good guidebook and do a little research to how to actually properly use them. So they are they are powerful medicine. They really are. I mean, you know, it’s interesting. They’re kind of a paradox in a lot of ways because in a lot of ways they are safe. They’re definitely safe for the meds.Pharmaceutical grade medicine and over-the-counter medicine. However, they can be as powerful. So it’s something to be really mindful of when you’re using oils

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:56:52] You know, I have two books on oils. My first book was called The Smart Moms Guide to Essential Oils. And it’s not just for moms, it’s just publishing team wanted to niche it down. But I’m not a mom yet, and I use it all the time. And that has a lot of safety guidelines and a lot of usage guidelines even for age groups. In case you wanted to use them on toddlers or children or, you know, whatever age group you wanted to use them. And then clearly the hormone book was really built for women. And, you know, I’m really mindful about dilutions and blending and just, you know, and also just listening to your body and figuring out what’s working right for you, for sure.

Dr Mariza Snyder: [00:57:52] Well, that is such a great, great question. I think really what it comes down to is taking just the thing that I love to tell women all the time is that they are ripe for healing miracles and that they deserve to get well. And that’s the thing is that once we really get to that place where we realize that we deserve it all, we deserve to take care of our bodies. We deserve to put ourselves first so that once we’re able to take care of us, we’re able to really show up in the world in a bigger space. It’s so hard to serve people when we don’t feel good. It’s so hard to serve people when we’re completely burned out. If anything, I would say that when I’ve been burned out, it’s probably been a been my most selfish time because I just didn’t have energy for anything else. So I know it seems so backwards to think do us before we do we take care of others. But that’s really going to be the way that we shine and we show up in the world in such a big way.