Lavender incense has been used for centuries for its wide variety of medicinal and therapeutic properties. Today, lavender incense is still one of the most popular incenses for aromatherapy.
Lavender incense can be used for a variety of medicinal purposes, such as improving mood, decreasing anxiety & stress, promoting better sleep, relieving pain, and reducing allergy symptoms. It is also useful in different spiritual and meditative practices that can cleanse the home and the user’s state of mind.
To see how lavender incense can improve your health and daily life, read on!
Uses for Lavender Incense
Medicinal Benefits
Burning lavender incense comes with a wide array of benefits for your health. The smell of lavender can improve mood, decrease anxiety & stress, promote better sleep, relieve pain, and even reduce allergy symptoms!
Lavender incense has been used for its medicinal qualities for over 2000 years, and it is still an aromatherapy staple for a reason. It makes your home smell great, and it’s a great healthy habit to introduce into your day-to-day life!
Repel Bugs
While scents like citronella and peppermint are widely known for their insect-repelling qualities, lavender incense is also a great tool to keep those pesky flying guests away.
Blood-sucking bugs, such as mosquitoes and spiders, find their prey by using their sense of smell. When lavender is scenting the air around you, bugs have a hard time smelling you, since all they can smell is lavender. As a result, they’re far more likely to leave you alone, making you far less likely to get bitten!
If you’re outdoors, the smoke from lavender incenses often gets carried away by the wind, leaving you much more vulnerable to bugs.
Making Your Home Smell Great
If there’s one thing lavender incense does the best, it’s making your space smell fantastic! Lavender has a floral, earthy scent reminiscent of the scents of early spring. Burning lavender in incense form adds a light smokiness to its natural odor, and creates a more powerful smell than many of its other fragranced counterparts, such as candles or diffusers.
Smoke from lavender incense can also easier be wafted around a space as it produces a cloud of thick smoke. This way, the smell of lavender can reach further into other areas of your home, even if the incense is being burned in a completely different area.
Enhancing Meditation
Because the scent of lavender is so good at relaxing muscles and the nervous system, it is a really great addition to any meditation practice or routine. Being in a calmer state can help you focus your mind on being in the present. A calmer state of mind equals a quieter state of mind, thus fewer internal distractions for you to deal with when meditating.
So, if you’re having trouble keeping those negative thoughts away during your meditations, burn some lavender incense and feel the magic happen!
Cleansing Negative Energy
In many ceremonies and rituals throughout the course of human history, lavender incense has been burned to spiritually cleanse the home and rid a place of negative energy.
As one of its main qualities is promoting calm and peace of mind, using lavender incense creates a sense of freshness in a space, making it feel new and pure.
If you feel that your home has lots of stagnant and negative energy, try smudging your home with some lavender incense.
Benefits
Improve Mood
Lavender incense is most known for its ability to improve an individual’s mood. Floral scents have been scientifically proven to improve mood and increase feelings of happiness by three times. Lavender has a distinct floral scent, making it perfect for bettering your state of mind for the day.
Studies have also shown that the scent of lavender increases your mood as well as increases your energy levels. Inhaling lavender increases your positive brain activities that make you feel more fresh, alert, and active.
So, next time you’re feeling a little down or are having trouble finding the energy to get up off the couch, try introducing a little lavender into your day!
Decrease Anxiety & Stress
Not only can lavender improve your mood, but it can also relax it. Inhaling the smell of lavender has been shown to reduce skin temperature, lower heart rate, and decrease blood pressure, leaving you feeling calmer than before.
In fact, some medical practices have been known to use lavender aromatherapy to decrease a patient’s anxiety before being sedated for surgery and other procedures!
In the past year, more than 30% of American adults felt that they were so stressed most days that they could hardly function. While lavender incense won’t get rid of all your stress, it will make your day a bit better.
Promote Better Sleep
With over 50 million Americans struggling with sleep disorders and many more reporting that they struggle to get enough sleep in a night, finding ways to better sleep has never been so relevant.
Lavender incense’s calming properties and brain-activating effects have been proven to help individuals of all ages fall asleep faster and to also stay asleep longer and wake up feeling more refreshed.
This is because the scent of lavender calms your central nervous system and increases your slow-wave brain function, inducing less REM sleep and more deep sleep.
This increase of deep sleep over REM sleep is what helps you wake up feeling more energized and refreshed, making lavender essential oil a great way to finish your day great and start your next day off right.
Pain Relief
The smell of lavender is a powerful anti-inflammatory and pain reliever. It is well-known for being able to help you with reducing headaches, menstrual cramps, joint pain, and general muscle discomfort.
Inhaling lavender via incense can help you with pain and inflammation.
Plus, lavender is much cheaper than most pain medication and has no known adverse effects when paired with other medications!
If that ibuprofen isn’t helping you out much, maybe try lighting some lavender incense to help ease the discomfort!
Reduce Allergy Symptoms
Alongside its incredible anti-inflammatory abilities, lavender is also a powerful natural antihistamine. Both of these can help you reduce inflammation in the sinuses and lungs, as well as any itching, sneezing, running noses, and watering eyes.
Because of this reduction of inflammation, inhaling lavender slows down the build-up of mucus in the lungs, making it much easier for you breathe and a whole heck of a lot easier for you to sleep.
Try using lavender incense next time your seasonal allergies come around–you might just find it helps a lot of your symptoms, and it makes your life smell even better!
What Incense Is and How to Burn It
Before you begin burning incense in your home, it is important to know what exactly it even is and how to burn it for the best results.
What Incense Is
Incense is a mixture of plant-based materials and herbs that have been bound together with a combustible binding, such as sap or resin. This sticky plant concoction is then dried to later be burned in the home.
Unlike a candle, incense does not release its aroma through an active flame. Incense is lit by a flame and then left to smolder, putting forth a thick stream of fragranced smoke.
How To Burn Incense
When lighting your incense, you can use any match or lighter, just as you would light a candle.
Bring the flame to the tip/end of the incense, and let it catch. Once a small flame has grown on the tip/end of the incense, blow it out. And that’s it! The incense should still continue to smolder, releasing that wonderful incense-y scent.
Be careful not to blow too hard, as that could blow out the smolder as well. Just a light gust is all it needs, and your incense will do all of the rest for you.
As incense burns, it turns to a very delicate ash. Once it has finished burning and the material has all turned to ash, it will extinguish itself. This means you don’t have to worry as much about accidentally forgetting to blow out a flame before you leave the home or head to bed!
That being said, incense is still hot, and should be burned with caution. Burn incense on a fire-resistant surface and use an incense stand or holder.
Incense will extinguish itself, but it is ideal that you not leave incense unattended.
Different Kinds of Lavender Incense You Can Use
One of the best parts about lavender incense is that there are so many ways to burn it and bring its benefits into your life!
The most commonly known way to burn incense is via its stick form. However, there are plenty of other forms of incense that vary in aesthetic, burn time, and effects.
Some other common forms of incense include:
- Cones
- Coils
- Pressed Incense
- Satchets
Cones
Incense cones are exactly as they sound like. They are small cones made entirely of incense that are usually about an inch tall. They produce a thick smoke that gets thicker the more the incense burns as the heat meets the wider base of the cone.
This incense is ideal for fragrancing a room quickly. It also can be placed on decorative incense holders, such as this one here, that incorporate the smoke into their design.
Coils
Incense coils are long, flattened spirals of incense that have a longer burning time than most of their smoking counterparts. Because of their long burn time and larger size, they are ideal for fragrancing larger spaces, and even for use outdoors.
There are many different kinds of stands and holders for incense coils, from vertical cages, to clips that suspend the incense in the air, to decorative lidded holders. All are beautiful ways to fragrance your space and add a beautiful piece of decor!
Pressed Incense
Pressed incense, also referred to as In-Koh, is a type of incense that originated in China, where powdered incense that is placed in a decorative holder and formed into intricate shapes with a mold. It is then burned in these shapes to release its aroma.
Sachets
Incense is commonly thought of as the kind that can be burned, but incense also includes flameless methods as well.
If you’d like to introduce the smell of lavender into your home but are wary of smoke or flame, try placing lavender sachets around your space.
To make a sachet, you can place dried lavender buds and leaves into a small, thin cloth sack and place them wherever you’d like things to smell a bit more floral.
Sachets are not nearly as powerful as smoke-producing incenses, but they are incredibly long-lasting.
Try putting sachets of lavender in your clothing drawers to keep them smelling fresh!
Conclusion
All in all, lavender incense is a great way to keep your home smelling fresh, while bettering your state of mind and your body. Light some incense to relax, do some work, get your space in order, or even when you’re just craving that amazing floral scent!
If you’d like to learn more about different ways to introduce lavender into your life aside from its incense form, click here. Or, if you’re interested in more information about incense, you can read our article on incense and repelling bugs, or our article on burn time of incense.
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