Tips For Taking a Healing Bath
A healing bath is simple a bath that will allow you to be out of pain. Unlike a traditional bath, you are going to select certain things to add to the bath, whether it is essential oils for aromatherapy, or natural ingredients like salts or apple cider vinegar. Here are some tips for taking a healing bath and some different bath options available for your chronic pain.
Add Essential Oils
The first thing you can do when you want to take a healing bath is turn it into an aromatherapy bath. With aromatherapy, you are getting health benefits through your sense of smell, which is done with essential oils. When applied directly to your skin, essential oils usually need to be diluted with a carrier oils, but when you are taking a bath, no dilution is necessary. You just add a handful of drops to the bath water and enjoy the aroma. Choose some essential oils known to help with chronic pain, like lavender, chamomile, and peppermint. These are all soothing and relaxing, so they will help with stress and insomnia as well as the chronic pain.
Be Careful About Getting in and Out
This is something that might prove to be an issue for you, depending on the type of bathtub you have and what your chronic pain is from. If your main source of pain is in your back or you have arthritis, getting in and out of the bathtub can often be more painful and doesn’t really make a healing bath that effective. In this case, consider installing support bars if you are able to, or use a low bath seat if you have a deep bath. You will still relax in the water, but are a little bit higher off the bottom, so it is easier to get up. The support bars also help to support your body when getting in and out of the bathtub.
Choose the Type of Bath
Finally, let’s go over some different types of healing baths you can take. This will depend on the source of your pain and what healing you are trying to get. For example, if your pain comes from sore muscles or muscle inflammation, then you can try a bath with apple cider vinegar. If you are an athlete and most of your pain is from tight muscles and back pain, then add lavender, marjoram herbs, rosemary, and eucalyptus leaves to a bath with Epsom salts in it. Oatmeal baths are also great, along with adding different combinations of oils or herbs.
Why You Should Try Aromatherapy Healing Bath
For chronic pain sufferers, there are a lot of different natural remedies, from herbs to essential oils. Speaking of essential oils, one of the top ways to use them is with aromatherapy. This is the practice of using the scents of essential oils to help with reducing your pain by stimulating the receptors in your nose, which can pass straight to your brain. Here are some reasons to consider aromatherapy if you suffer from chronic pain.
How Aromatherapy Help
The reason aromatherapy is so beneficial is because your sense of smell is one of the strongest and most important senses. Your response to stimuli is often from smell first, from warning you that there is gas or a fire before you actually see the smoke and flames, to letting you know something might be rotten before you can taste that it is. It is essential that you are able to smell things, both good and bad. So when you have a lot of bad pain, what you smell can make a very large impact. Positive, healing, calming scents go far in helping you to deal with the pain, if not help get rid of it.
For aromatherapy when you have chronic pain, you will typically use essential oils. While you can also get aromatherapy candles that you just need to burn, this can get expensive, and are not always as effective as using pure oils.
Top Essential Oils For Chronic Pain
While you can probably benefit from aromatherapy with any essential oils you want, there are certain ones to start with. The essential oils you want to use are ones that are good for pain management, but also excellent for calming and relaxing both your body and mind. For example, both lavender and chamomile are good for pain because they can relax you, which helps to handle the amount of pain you have. Some other essential oils that tend to help with pain during aromatherapy are peppermint, African marigold, clove, and wintergreen.
Ways to Use Aromatherapy
There are a few different ways you can use aromatherapy and essential oils for chronic pain. Since you want to inhale it, using an essential oil diffuser is a great option. These are easy to use and you don’t have to worry about using carrier oils to diffuse the essential oils. You just put a few drops into the diffuser, and inhale the scent when it begins coming out of the diffuser. Another option is to massage them into your skin, which gives you other benefits aside from the scent. However, you should not put oils directly onto the skin. They need to be diluted first. If you are planning on taking a bath, that is the perfect time to get some aromatherapy in by dropping some essential oils directly into the bathtub.
