On writing & rosemary: how scent can help you reach a deep flow state
Plus, a recipe for a simple Focus Oil (and why it works)
Quite a few of us on here (Substack) are writers. We write for a living, or we write to live. If you’re not, you may identify as a musician, or gardener, or indulge in some other activity in which you feel full and present. That heightened feeling you get when you’re fully immersed is called a ‘deep flow state’. For writers, it’s when the words just come and everything else ceases to matter.
According to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, reaching a state of deep flow regularly is the key to happiness. He’s known as the ‘father of flow’ for his work on this hyper-focused mental state. He says:
“The best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times, the best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile’.
If this is true, shouldn’t we try everything we can to get ‘there’ as often as we can?
I think of his words when I watch my six-year-old daughter make a robot out of junk. She’s so in the moment and then pleased with herself afterwards, carrying her toilet roll trophy with her for the rest of the day. As adults, many of us are just searching for time and space to summon that childlike focus in an onslaught of daily distractions and obligations.
So what tools help us focus?
I’ve listened to the same classical music (Phillip Glass if you’re interested) to help me write for over a decade. I now know the tracks so well that I’ve stopped hearing it at all. The opening bars just signal: ‘time to write, time to work’.
Others work better with background noise. Think of the archetypal image of the writer: Patti Smith in New York in the corner of a cafe, scribbling on a napkin. But whether you need silence, the din of a coffee machine, or a sad piano tune, we all have an opinion.
But what about smells? Have you ever thought about what scents help you focus?
The aroma of freshly brewed coffee might sharpen your synapses for a moment, but mostly we don’t think about it all. In Mandy Aftel’s seminal book Essence and Alchemy on natural perfume, she says: “To inspire, after all, is literally ‘to breathe in’.
The origin of the word ‘inspire ’ in Latin is ‘to breathe’. So, surely, to breathe in an essential oil that helps you feel inspired is a productivity tool worth trialling. And if there’s one oil that does this, it's rosemary.
Rosemary is often present at war memorials and ancient rituals to honour the dead. Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet says: ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.” And it’s not just an old tradition, studies show that rosemary boosts your long-term memory.
Aromatherapy is often defined by folk wisdom rather than scientific evaluation. I like both.
In this study, the evidence shows that inhaling rosemary improves the overall function of the brain. The participants who inhaled the humble herb concentrated better, did the task faster and were more accurate than those who had the control inhalation. And the stronger the rosemary solution, the more their scores improved. Rosemary is so potent that adding an extract to drinking water can boost our brains according to this study.
When the witches and whitecoats align, we need to listen.
I grew up on the Welsh coast where the evergreen bush clings to the wind-whipped shore, and it’s not just in Wales that rosemary can be found in abundance, it grows easily in gardens across the whole of the UK. We are an Island after all. Perhaps that’s because in Latin, ‘ros’ and ‘marinus’ come from the words, ‘dew’ and ‘sea’, this dew-of-the-sea is happiest by water.
I learnt this fact from the documentary Juliette of the Herbs, about cult herbalist Juliette de Bairacli Levy. At the start of the film, she tells us that she always plants rosemary wherever she makes a garden. That’s advice we should all follow, even if it’s in a pot on a sunny windowsill.
Rosemary is the scent track to our family life.
We have an impressive rosemary bush outside our window. If I balance on the edge of the sofa and lean out, I can grab a waxy handful without having to leave the house. Although I always do leave the house, especially at this time of year, escaping into the inky darkness to grab a few stems for a white bean stew bubbling on the stove. Those stolen seconds can feel like a minibreak on the evenings when everyone's home, and the pre-dinner, post-work/school chaos is careering towards the finale.
The bittersweet scent of rosemary wraps around the moment as I watch them in the stage-lit kitchen, and reminds me that however hard it feels at times, it’s the everyday moments like these I’ll miss the most when they’re over.
And it’s not just the scent I love: I like how they look, and add long stems to a supermarket bouquet. There’s something prehistoric about the spiky stalks that’s softened by the papery lilac-blue flowers. It’s easy to blink and miss them. The tiny blooms show themselves at the end of spring reminding us to add a few stalks for medicinal depth to the Easter lamb.
When I host perfume workshops, we ‘blind' test things. Most people mistake rosemary for exotic eucalyptus and are pleasantly surprised that something so ‘everyday’ smells so multifaceted to their unsuspecting nose, and has the power to move them.
In the early days of spring 2020, as a way of using up some oils I had bought for a workshop, I ran an Aromatherapy Window Shop from our apartment in Berlin.
I wanted to share with others how scent could help you change your mindset and physical space during lockdown.
I did interviews on just this, (here and here), and set up the “Window Shop”. I sold small batches of WFH Focus Oil, Anti-Anxiety Hand Sanitizer and a balm for hands that were chapped from washing and wringing.
I made appointments online and opened for a few hours a day on weekends. I lit incense and my daughters put on dressing-up clothes.
Many of my customers at the time, lived alone or with just one other person. (And what might seem wild to a Londoner reading this) Berlin rent was affordable enough that even if you didn’t earn a lot, you could close the door onto your own whitewashed Altbau apartment, with wooden floors and 3.5m ceilings. To afford to live alone might have felt like a luxury before the lockdown, but suddenly those customers felt isolated. The window shop became a lifeline: a reason to dress up, have somewhere to walk to and someone to talk with, in an otherwise very lonely 24 hours.
Even though hand sanitiser was in short supply, the sellout success was the WFH Focus Spray. It’s ‘off-menu’ now, but I still smuggle a few bottles whenever I travel back to Berlin for the customers who got hooked on it during lockdown and have incorporated it into their daily ritual ever since.
The WFH Focus Oil was the starting point for The Thinker, the perfume in our line that inspires and motivates. It was through playing with ho-wood, bergamot and Virginian cedarwood, in a makeshift studio in the corner of my living room that the ghost of this fine fragrance was born.
If you are curious about trialling rosemary in your routine, try this very paired-down version of the original WFH Focus oil recipe:
A RECIPE FOR FOCUS OIL
What you need (for a 10ml bottle )
🌿 5 drops of bergamot essential oil (or another citrus like pink grapefruit or blood orange)
🌿 5 drops of rosemary essential oil
🌿 5 drops of a woodsy essential oil like sandalwood (cedarwood or ho-wood would work too)
🌿 9 ml of carrier oil like jojoba or sweet almond oil
Directions:
Fill a rollerball bottle with around 9mls of the carrier oil, or 90% of the way by eye if you don’t have scales, measuring jugs or pipettes.
Go for sweet almond oil, or jojoba oil as the carrier as these two oils are scent-free. Something like coconut oil smells wonderful but would compete with the blend.
Add five drops of rosemary, this is the active ingredient and integral to the mix. It can smell quite astringent on its own. The carrier oil will diffuse it, like Ribena in water, and make it instantly more palatable.
To frame the rosemary, I’ve chosen bergamot as it gives you energy and sandalwood because it’s grounding.
Add one drop of the woody oil to the rosemary and carrier oil, and sniff, then add one drop of the citrus.
Keep doing this drop-by-drop. Don’t rush it, see how they are tempering the rosemary and adding depth.
Think of a mozzarella, basil and tomato salad: separately each ingredient is not that exciting, but together, they're delicious.
Making perfume is like cooking: you need to learn what oils complement each other, and how to balance quantities depending on their strength (you wouldn’t have equal weight of basil and mozzarella, for example). Everything after that is down to personal taste.
As you add the other oils, the rosemary will start to move from a ‘health food store’ scent to a ‘chic hotel candle’ aroma.
Bergamot (that sophisticated note in Earl Grey tea) is universally popular. It’s the social lubricant of essential oils, sliding in with everything, making everything better. Think of it like a spritz of lemon on fish, or a salad. Citrus in a perfume makes the other scents ‘pop’.
For the base note: I’ve suggested sandalwood. It seems to work with most herbs. Every sandalwood is different depending on where it was grown, and the quality of the oil. This is a very simplified recipe to get you blending. On its own, sandalwood is leather and musk, in a mix it turns to milky magic.
Keep dosing one drop of the citrus, and one of the wood. Then stop, and smell. Is it enough? One drop might be enough for you, or you might throw the whole thing out and discover you love bergamot on its own.
Every time you add a drop of anything, shake the bottle, dab on your arm, and inhale. If you feel safer with an exact recipe go for equal parts of each essential oil. If you’re more instinctive, and don’t get annoyed when a TV chef says, ‘Throw in a few gulgs,’ add a drop at a time, and let your nose lead you.
How to use your Focus Oil:
So you’ve made your first functional fragrance oil, well done you! Now leave it to macerate in a dark, cool place for 48 hours. When it’s ready, roll the oil on your wrists, or the back of your hand, and inhale it every time you need a blast of inspiration.
DM me if you want directions to my budget-friendly, industry-standard natural perfume and aromatherapy suppliers.
SAFETY NOTES:
Essential oils are strong, even diluted. Follow the guidelines on the bottle from the individual suppliers.
When buying bergamot oil to use on the skin, try and get one that’s bergaptene-free, it’s had the part that causes photosensitivity reduced so you can use it more freely.
If you are sensitive to beauty products or perfume, just use this recipe as an inhalation and don’t put it on your skin.
If you have asthma or other respiratory issues, read up on aromatherapy and your condition before use.
Don’t use aromatherapy if you are pregnant.
Keep all aromatherapy oils you buy, or make out of the way of children and animals.
Go to Apothekeperfume.com here for more