An all-natural anti-fatigue antidote: Why essential oils are the secret to getting your energy back

The fruit that we get bergamot essential oil from has been described as a cross between an orange and a grapefruit in the shape of a pear. Used heavily in aromatherapy, its aroma is as stimulating as it is soothing, giving you feelings of calmness as it wakes you up and prepares you for anything.

Bergamot oil has antidepressant properties and is rich in compounds like alpha pinene and limonene. These compounds increase our blood circulation, in turn stimulating our energy levels and boosting feelings of joy and freshness. It’s an amazing choice to make a part of your essential oil blends for energy.

With active constituents like β-pinene, α-pinene, camphene, limonene and sabinene, lemon essential oil is cleansing, invigorating and purifying. Among its many healing benefits is the fact that it’s anti-inflammatory, analgesic, astringent, energising and stimulatory.

Sometimes referred to as ‘liquid sunshine’, this lively citrus oil is among the most effective of all energising oils. Its bold, piquant notes are balanced by its fruity, sweet tone that will clear your mind, improve your mood and boost your overall levels of focus and energy.

Grapefruit essential oil works as a natural energy booster. When inhaled, its stimulatory effects make it a brilliant remedy for reducing headaches and sleepiness. It’s also effective for eliminating brain fog and mental fatigue and may even help you kiss your bad mood goodbye. Grapefruit oil may also be beneficial for addressing symptoms of adrenal fatigue like aches, low motivation and sluggishness.

What’s more, grapefruit oil can help you kick your sugar addiction by reducing your cravings. Limonene, one of its primary components, balances our blood sugar levels and reduces appetite in general.

Constituents like menthol and menthone are behind the naturally energising, invigorating and stimulating properties of peppermint essential oil. It’s one of nature’s natural energy boosters, and it has a cooling, brisk aroma that relaxes our bodies and recentres our minds. Plus, it's excellent at soothing senses that have become overactive due to stress.

If you regularly suffer from fatigue induced by exercise, peppermint oil can be very helpful for increasing alertness and boosting mental clarity. It also decreases our perception of physical workloads, making it possible for us to do more.

With its herbal, woodsy scent, rosemary essential oil is high in cineole and widely held to be one of the powerful natural energy boosters of the essential oil world. When you have a particularly busy day on the horizon or one where you’ll be tasked with completing a series of tedious tasks, rosemary oil is the perfect essential oil for fatigue and can help to promote concentration and increase your focus.

Widely used today to alleviate fatigue and regulate stress, rosemary oil has been used to combat fatigue and mental strain in folk medicine for hundreds of years.

Adding a couple of drops of sweet orange essential oil to your aromatherapy diffuser will release its invigorating scent and may make you feel more energised and in a better mood. Its uplifting properties will help you handle worries more easily, and it's as calming as it is uplifting so if you’re too tired to sleep, this oil is a fantastic option. Sweet orange is the ideal essential oil for energy and will balance out your body and mind.

Breathe

Are you too wound up to get anything done? Nervous energy is not the one we want to evoke in our bodies, and Volant’s Organic Breathe Blend can help you relax and breathe.

The wild orange essential oil it contains will uplift and energise you, and the copaiba it contains works as a natural anti-inflammatory to keep your body healthy. Lavender has anti-depressant qualities, and the magnolia essential oil will help calm you down. If you’re feeling healthy, happy and relaxed and can take a minute to breathe, you’ll feel less fatigued overall. And less fatigue means more energy!

Being in nature is always a good idea when we need to be restored, but it’s not something we can all do whenever the mood strikes. In cases like these, Volant’s Organic Cabin Blend comes to the rescue!

Add a few drops to your diffuser and turn your surroundings into the great outdoors. It contains white fir, well known as an energising oil, along with cedarwood, sandalwood and spruce, all answers to the question of what essential oil is good for energy. You will feel rejuvenated by bringing the great outdoors inside as these oils all work together to make you feel like you’ve had a mini-getaway in a gorgeous woodland cabin. What better way to get a bit of your spark back?

It’s all in the name with this one! With amyris, bergamot, grapefruit and lime essential oils, Volant's Organic Energy Blend boosts your energy levels while combatting your fatigue. This blend will ensure you have everything you need to get through the day or night (or both!).

The amyris found in the Energy Blend has a powerful woody scent that wakes you up. Bergamot also has stimulating properties, and bergamot, lime and grapefruit offer a burst of ctrusy zing to put a pep in your step, warding off the weight of the world on your shoulders.

Volant’s Organic Focus Blend contains cinnamon essential oil, which will stimulate you mentally while simultaneously addressing symptoms of fatigue and irritability. This oil blends beautifully with the clementine, rosemary and vanilla bean oils that make up the rest of the recipe.

Clementine oil has a wildly refreshing scent, rosemary is commonly used to alleviate fatigue and mental strain, and vanilla bean lowers blood pressure, making it easier to focus on pouring your energy into your tasks to feel accomplished at the end of the day.

The sweet orange essential oil in our Pick Me Up Blend helps boost your energy levels while improving your overall mood. Its benefits amplify those offered by the lemongrass and ylang ylang oil also found in this curated blend designed to combat fatigue and help you perk up when you’ve hit that slump.

Indirect inhalation is the most popular method of integrating essential oils into your daily life, and all you need is a high-quality diffuser to enjoy all the benefits. Add a few drops of your chosen essential oil for energy to the diffuser and then let it do its work dispersing the water and essential oil mist throughout the room it’s been placed in.

Probably the simplest method, directly inhale an essential oil by simply opening the bottle and taking a few whiffs. Just be very careful not to let the concentrated oil come into contact with your skin; it’s potent and you could end up with irritated skin.

You may choose to create your own mist with essential oils to use on your linen or furniture, to perfume an entire room, or even to spritz on your face or body as a natural energy booster. Alternatively, quality ready-made mists are readily available too.

Proper dilution is very important for the topical application of essential oils. But once you’ve got that down, simply rub your essential oil/carrier oil mixture into whatever area you want to focus on to help provide the relief you need. This approach is excellent if you’ve got a particular group of tired muscles, such as in your lower back or legs.

Essential oils make great additions to your massage oils. An aromatherapy massage can help you relax, relieve tired muscles, relieve anxiety or re-energise you for the rest of the day. Following proper dilution principles, make big batches of your aromatherapy massage oil mixture if you plan to use the same oil for a while, or stick to making smaller amounts as you select an essential oil to treat a particular area of your body or specific mental or physical fatigue.

In this experiment, peppermint essential oil was found to drastically improve the exercise performance of male students. The researchers suggest the peppermint may have opened up the lungs and increased brain oxygen levels, among other effects.

Note that this study administered the peppermint oil orally, which we do not recommend. However, it is exciting to learn more about exactly how peppermint exerts its beneficial effects on our bodies to boost energy levels and relieve fatigue.

The conclusion of a 2016 study was that inhaling spearmint and sweet orange essential oils enhanced lung function and breathing while running and actually improved running times. How amazing to think that we can run or work out better just by smelling essential oils?!

Mice were exposed to oils extracted from rosemary and spearmint in this 2016 study. It was found that these essential oils may help reduce brain fatigue and boost our ability to focus, learn and remember, making them helpful in terms of essential oil blends for energy.

The results of this study on rats revealed that inhaling a mixture of essential oils like clove, peppermint, rosemary and sweet orange powerfully relieved the tiredness brought on by exercise. This demonstrates their abilities to reduce fatigue and boost energy levels for that much-needed second wind.

When inhaled over two weeks, a blend of clove bud, frankincense, orange and thyme essential oils improved the energy levels of female patients in post-COVID-19 recovery in a 2022 study.