How your triggers hold the key to your creative genius ...
... discovering the gift of madness
Reclaiming the Energy of Intensity
What if the parts of yourself you’ve been trying to fix aren’t broken at all?
What if your quick temper, your overwhelming sensitivity, your tendency to feel everything so deeply it threatens to consume you—what if these aren’t flaws to be managed, but raw creative energy waiting to be channeled?
We’ve been sold a story about “madness” that has kept us small. In our culture, intensity gets pathologized. Emotional depth becomes “too much.” The wild, untamed parts of ourselves—the ones that react, that feel, that refuse to be contained—get labeled as problems to be solved, medicated, or suppressed.
But here’s what the research is finally catching up to: there’s a profound connection between psychological intensity and creative genius, though not in the way popular culture has portrayed it. Studies examining the so-called “mad genius” phenomenon reveal something fascinating: it’s not severe mental illness that correlates with creativity, but rather the milder expressions of intensity—hypersensitivity, emotional depth, cognitive flexibility, and what researchers call “cognitive disinhibition.”
In other words, the very traits we’re taught to see as liabilities—feeling things deeply, noticing everything, having thoughts that won’t stay in neat boxes—these are actually the hallmarks of a creative, innovative mind.
The question isn’t whether you have intensity. If you’re reading this, you do. The question is: are you channeling that energy into creation, or are you burning it up in self-judgment?
The Universal Truth About Triggers (That No One Talks About)
Let’s address something important: everyone has triggers. Not just people with trauma histories. Not just those with anxiety disorders or neurodiversity. Every single human being with a functioning nervous system experiences triggers daily.
Why? Because your brain’s threat-detection system—the amygdala—is working exactly as designed. When it perceives something as potentially threatening, it activates your sympathetic nervous system before you even have time to think about it. Your heart races. Your muscles tense. Stress hormones flood your bloodstream. This happens automatically, involuntarily, and to everyone.
The stress response is universal because it not only kept our ancestors alive, but also keeps us alive today. The problem is that this ancient survival mechanism can’t distinguish between a charging predator and an ambiguous text message from your partner, a critical comment from your boss, or the sound of your neighbor’s music bleeding through the walls at 11 PM.
Your nervous system is doing its job. You’re not broken. You’re human.
But here’s where it gets interesting—and where your creative genius comes in: the brain determines what counts as threatening. This is highly individual. What triggers your nervous system might leave someone else completely unbothered, and vice versa. Your triggers are actually providing you with incredibly valuable information about your own unique inner landscape.
The Cycle That Keeps You Stuck
Here’s what happens for most people:
Trigger → Automatic Reaction → Self-Judgment → Shame → Suppression → Repeat
You get triggered. Maybe someone interrupts you in a meeting and you snap at them. Maybe you see a friend’s social media post and suddenly you’re spiraling into comparison and inadequacy. Maybe your partner forgets something important and you shut down completely, going cold and distant.
The reaction happens so fast—faster than thought. And then, almost immediately, the second arrow hits: “Why did I do that? What’s wrong with me? I’m such a mess. I should be over this by now. Everyone else has it together.”
You beat yourself up. Maybe you apologize profusely and self-deprecate publicly, trying to preemptively manage others’ perceptions of you. You vow to “do better,” to “control yourself,” to finally fix this broken part of you.
But here’s the truth: self-judgment doesn’t create change—it creates suffering. And worse, it keeps you trapped in reactivity because it prevents you from accessing the one thing that could actually help: observation.
When you move immediately from trigger to reaction to judgment, you bypass the most important step: becoming curious about what just happened. You miss the gift your trigger was trying to give you.
The Observer Perspective: Where Choice Lives
There’s a space between stimulus and response. Viktor Frankl said it best: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
But here’s what most people don’t realize: you can’t access that space from your thinking mind alone.
When you’re triggered, your prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain responsible for rational thinking, planning, and impulse control—goes offline. Blood flow shifts away from executive function and toward survival circuitry. You literally cannot “think your way out” of a triggered state.
This is where the body’s wisdom becomes essential. Your body knows things before your mind does. It’s constantly sending you signals—tensions, sensations, gut feelings, the quality of your breath. These aren’t random; they’re your internal guidance system.
But most of us have been so trained to live in our heads—analyzing, strategizing, problem-solving—that we’ve lost touch with this deeper intelligence. We’re disconnected from our own interoceptive awareness, that crucial ability to sense what’s happening inside our bodies.
This disconnection keeps us reactive. When a trigger hits, we have no ground to stand on, no anchor to come back to. We’re at the mercy of our automatic patterns.
This is where genuine essential oils become profound allies.
Nature’s Bridge to Conscious Response
Plants have something to teach us about adaptation and resilience. A tree can’t run away from drought, storm, or poor soil. It must make the best of its conditions, extracting nutrients from what’s available, growing toward the light, producing compounds that help it survive and even thrive in challenging circumstances.
Essential oils are concentrated expressions of a plant’s adaptive intelligence—the volatile compounds plants produce to protect themselves, attract pollinators, and communicate with their environment. When we use these oils, we’re not just inhaling pleasant aromas; we’re interfacing with sophisticated molecular messengers that our bodies recognize and respond to.
Here’s what the research shows: specific essential oil constituents interact directly with your nervous system in ways that support your ability to move from reaction to response.
Essential oils work through multiple pathways:
First, through the olfactory system itself. When you inhale essential oils, aromatic molecules travel through the nasal cavity to the olfactory bulb, which has direct connections to the limbic system—including the amygdala (your threat-detection center), the hippocampus (memory and learning), and the prefrontal cortex (executive function and conscious choice). This isn’t some woo-woo concept; it’s neuroanatomy.
Second, the chemical constituents in essential oils—compounds like linalool, beta-caryophyllene, pinenes, and geraniol—exert direct pharmacological effects on neurotransmitter systems and receptor sites throughout your body and brain.
Studies show that specific compounds like linalool and linalyl acetate activate the parasympathetic nervous system, increasing vagal tone and creating what researchers call “parasympathetic dominance”—essentially, they help shift you out of fight-or-flight and into a state where conscious response becomes possible.
Beta-caryophyllene, found in oils like black pepper, copaiba, helichrysum and clove, activates cannabinoid CB2 receptors, reducing neuroinflammation and supporting emotional regulation without any psychoactive effects. Alpha and beta-pinene modulate GABA activity and reduce excessive arousal, helping to quiet the “noisy mind” that keeps you stuck in analytical loops.
Perhaps most importantly, research using EEG and brain imaging has shown that essential oils like lemon activate the prefrontal cortex—the exact brain regions involved in working memory, attention, and executive function. In other words, essential oils can help bring your thinking brain back online when stress has shut it down.
When you create a personalized practice with genuine essential oils—not synthetic fragrances, which only trigger limbic responses without offering systemic support—you’re giving your nervous system the biochemical support it needs to shift from automatic reaction to conscious observation.
You’re creating space. The space where choice lives.
Extracting Essence: The Plant Medicine of Perspective
When you can observe a trigger without immediately judging it—when you can notice the sensation in your chest, the tightening in your jaw, the quality of your breath, without making it mean something is wrong with you—something extraordinary becomes available.
You start to see the gift.
Every trigger carries information. It’s showing you where you’re still holding fear, where you haven’t fully accepted yourself, where you’re protecting something vulnerable. Your triggers are breadcrumbs leading you back to wholeness.
The person who interrupts you in the meeting? The trigger reveals your fear of not being heard, your need to matter, perhaps old wounds around being dismissed.
The friend’s social media post that sends you spiraling? It’s pointing to where you’ve abandoned your own values in favor of external validation, where you’re not honoring your unique path.
Your partner forgetting something important? It’s illuminating your attachment to being remembered, to mattering, to not being alone in your needs.
None of this means the other person was right to interrupt, that your feelings aren’t valid, or that your needs don’t matter. But it means that your reaction—that surge of energy, that intensity—is about you. It’s yours. It’s information. It’s power.
When you can be with the trigger as an observer, you can extract the essence—the lesson, the growth edge, the invitation to come home to yourself more fully. Just like a plant extracting nutrients from challenging soil, you can metabolize any experience and use it to become more of who you are.
This is the higher perspective. This is how everything happens for a reason—not because some cosmic force is orchestrating your suffering, but because every moment, every trigger, every uncomfortable feeling is an opportunity to know yourself more deeply and choose your response more consciously.
Everything happens for a reason because WE say so. We create the meaning of our lives. When we ‘value’ our moments, we are loving our life.
From Madness to Mastery: Channeling Creative Genius
Here’s what happens when you stop fighting your intensity and start working with it:
The energy that was burning up in self-judgment becomes available for creation.
Think about it. All that mental and emotional energy you’ve been using to beat yourself up, to try to fix yourself, to manage how others perceive you, to suppress the wild, intense, deeply feeling parts of yourself—that’s creative life force. That’s the same energy that artists, innovators, and visionaries use to bring new things into the world.
The research on creativity and psychological intensity reveals something profound: creative people often display “cognitive disinhibition”—a reduced ability to filter out seemingly irrelevant stimuli. They notice more, feel more, make more unexpected connections. This is exhausting, yes. It can feel overwhelming, even maddening.
But this is also the source of innovation, of original thinking, of seeing possibilities others miss.
When you’re constantly triggered, you have access to tremendous energy. The question is only: where does it go?
In the reactive cycle, it goes into drama, conflict, shame, and exhaustion. But when you can develop the capacity to observe your triggers—to feel them fully without being consumed by them—that same energy can be directed into:
Creative expression that’s authentic and alive
Problem-solving that draws on intuition as well as logic
Innovation that emerges from seeing things others don’t notice
Relationships that are real rather than performed
Work that matters to you, not just work that looks good
This is what it means to channel madness into genius. You’re not getting rid of your intensity. You’re not becoming calm, balanced, or “normal” (whatever that means). You’re becoming skilled at directing your life force consciously rather than letting it leak out in reactivity and self-judgment.
Your Daily Practice: Becoming the Conscious Channel
Integration doesn’t happen through understanding alone. It happens through practice—daily, embodied practice that helps you build new neural pathways and new relationships with your own intensity.
Here’s what this can look like:
Morning Grounding Ritual
Before the demands of the day pull you into your head, take five minutes and establish a connection with your body. Choose an essential oil or blend that supports your nervous system—perhaps frankincense for gentle grounding, frankincense for centered presence, or a blend with pinene-rich oils like galbanum or black spruce for clarity without overstimulation.
Place a drop in your palms, rub them together, cup them over your nose, and breathe slowly. As you inhale, notice what you feel in your body. Not what you think—what you feel. The sensation of your feet on the floor. The quality of your breath. Any tension or ease in your chest, shoulders, or belly.
This simple practice begins training your nervous system to drop into interoceptive awareness rather than defaulting to analytical thinking.
Trigger Awareness Practice
When you notice yourself getting triggered during the day—and you will—pause if possible. Even three conscious breaths can create space. If you have your essential oil with you, use it as an anchor: inhale, feel your body, and observe the sensation without the story.
Ask yourself: “Where is the ease underneath the story?” Not why you’re feeling it, not whether it’s justified—just what the actual sensation is. Tightness? Heat? Contraction? Emptiness? Feeling all naturally ease up—no force.
The practice isn’t to make the feeling go away. It’s to become friendly with it, curious about it. This is how you move from being at the mercy of your triggers to being informed by them.
Evening Integration
Before sleep, spend a few minutes reflecting: What were some gifts in today’s moments?
Not to judge yourself, but to extract the essence. To gather the nutrients from your experiences. To acknowledge that you’re growing, learning, becoming more conscious.
Use an oil that supports deep rest and integration—perhaps myrrh, vetiver, copaiba, or a personalized blend chosen for your unique biochemistry and nervous system needs.
The Invitation: Wholeness Over Perfection
There are no mistakes. There is no “right” way to be human. There is only you—with your unique sensitivities, your specific triggers, your particular intensity—learning to be fully expressed rather than constantly suppressed.
Your triggers aren’t evidence that you’re broken. They’re evidence that you’re alive, that you care, that you’re still growing. The fact that you react, that you feel deeply, that things get to you—this isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s energy to be channeled.
The path to your creative genius doesn’t run around your triggers; it runs straight through them. Every trigger you can learn to observe rather than judge is energy reclaimed. Every reaction you can witness with compassion rather than shame is power returned to you.
You don’t need to become someone else. You don’t need to fix the intense, sensitive, deeply feeling parts of yourself. You need to become skilled at working with your intensity rather than against it.
This is what essential oils support at the deepest level—not masking or suppressing your responses, but creating the neurological conditions for conscious choice. They help you access the observer perspective where you can see the gift in every trigger, extract the essence from every challenge, and direct your tremendous life force toward what you came here to create.
The world doesn’t need more people who are calm, controlled, and perfectly managed. It needs people who are fully alive—who feel deeply, notice keenly, and channel their intensity into authentic expression and creative contribution.
It needs your particular madness, transformed through awareness into genius.
Are you ready to reclaim the energy you’ve been using to judge yourself and channel it into becoming who you really are?
Your triggers are waiting to teach you. Your body is ready to guide you. The plants are here as allies.
And your creative genius—that wild, intense, deeply feeling essence of who you are—is ready to come home.
Ready to discover your personalized essential oil support? The journey from reaction to response begins with understanding your unique biochemistry and nervous system patterns. Consider a neuroaromatherapy consultation to help develop a routine that is tailored to your specific needs, triggers, and creative expression.