As a part 4 of Japanese People’s Depression series, let’s move on to aromatherapy. Aromatherapy is one of the most effective measures to maintain our autonomic nerves.

I’ve explained how extreme fatigue of your body or mind makes you sleepless and sometimes drive you into depression. According to a survey by the Ministry of Health and Labor, more than 60% of all the Japanese are feeling fatigued and 37% have felt chronic fatigue for more than six months. How much fatigue you have is hard to be reflected in the figures of health checkups since it is invisible. This is considered to be causing oversights of depression.

Although some companies give detailed questionnaires in a checkup, the workers tend to choose “right” answers on purpose from the fear of getting dismissed or relegated. Among all the surveys, the most difficult themes are measuring disorder of autonomic nerves and sympathetic nerves. For example, to relieve fatigue, you need to:

1. get enough hours of sleep,

2. have well-regulated balanced diet,

3. get appropriate exercise based on your physical condition,

4. keep regular hours and daily rhythm,

and so on. However, hours of sleep go out of order if autonomic nerves are out of order. Autonomic disorder destroys your daily rhythm making you sleep late and get up late, unless you have an extremely strong will.

People are trying various ways to get over depression now. Whether consciously or unconsciously, they are trying animal therapy, massage, watching comedies, hot spring, bath power, aromatherapy. Or, some of them are trying bad habits: online chat, drinking, smoking, listening to music with a Walkman, and addiction to impulse buying.

These bad habits are partly healing for sure, but also addictive. They include alcohol, tobacco, drugs, energy drinks, supplements, shopping, pachinko, horse racing and keirin. Quite a lot number of women keep shopping too much without knowing they are addicted to it. For men, there is a cabaret addiction.

Now, lets think about aromatherapy in detail. Aromatherapy can condition autonomic nerves and relax people whose sympathetic nerves are too tense at the same time. It also has certain effects on people who have lost energy because of their parasympathetic nerves working too much.

All you have to do is changing kinds of oil or aroma based on your condition to get healed. “Get healed” is a passive expression by the way. We can sense the people’s wish to “be done” something by somebody else rather than “doing” something by themselves to get healed.

For example, oil massage is a catchy business lately. Oil massage and aromatherapy massage are passive actions. You can get massaged and treatment from professional massager. In fact, we are healing our loneliness and fulfilling our desire to get healed by somebody here. Then, aromatherapy is expected to have an effect on depression as much as going to the doctor.

Aromatherapy is a health management method using essential oil to make its essences penetrate through skin, get into capillary vessels and lymphatic vessels, circulate all with blood to be absorbed into the body. And at the same time, it smoothen blood flow and activates metabolism by massage.

When doing self-massage, you need to do a skin patch test, and make sure to use the oil called “carrier oil” to thin down the essential oil, because essential oil is too thick to use by itself.

Thin down the essential oil with the carrier oil by 0.5% to 1%, mix thoroughly, take up an appropriate amount on the palm and massage. One drop of essential oil is about 0.05 ml. You can add 10 drops of essential oil to 50 ml of carrier oil to make 1%. It is best to give a massage after bath, when the muscles are most flexed, on your legs, arms and face to make the oil penetrate well.

You can have somebody in your family do aromatherapy massage if it is too expensive for you to get a professional massage. You can buy hohoba oil or olive oil on the Web as carrier oil. By getting a gentle massage from a family member, your mind can be relaxed. It can your loneliness and sadness fade away. It’s worth a try.