Music, candles, incense and aromatherapy are great mood enhancers and great de-stressors. These are a healthy way to decrease your stress and increase your quality of life. Music is inspiring and uplifting. Listen to music anytime you need a boost. Music increases your hopefulness and creativity. Music makes you feel good. Like exercise, it causes you to release endorphins which are the “feel good” hormone. It helps you forget about your problems at least temporarily.Candles and incense can be used to create a calming mood. You can use candle colors to further facilitate certain moods. Red increases vitality and energy, orange works as an antidepressant to make you feel happy and cheerful, yellow is uplifting, green promotes stability, turquoise eases tension and soothes, blue is for lowering stress and relaxing violet helps with concentration promotes love and self-confidence and magenta raises your self respect and dignity. Magenta is a confidence builder.Essential oils can be used for many things besides just relaxation and stress reduction. Essential oils are a healthy, reasonably priced, simple way to de-stress.  You can use them in a variety of different ways. They can be put into a spray or a diffuser for use in the air and you can also put them onto your body. Most essential oils put on your body need to be mixed in with oil, lotion or water, a few, however, can be used straight out of the bottle on you. The best oils to use for relaxation are:  Nutmeg, Marjoram, Lavender, Sandalwood, Clary-Sage, Geranium, Lemon, Chamomile, Rose and Vetiver.  Since this is just a short quick synopsis to give you some stress reducing ideas, I will deal primarily with Lavender as it is the most important and versatile oils. You can use Lavender oil to make a great room freshener/sanitizer. Take a small spray bottle, put a small amount of rubbing alcohol in the bottom (slightly less than ¼ of the bottle), fill with distilled water leaving just enough room for about 10 drops of Lavender oil, and shake. Use it in the house as an air freshener. There’s no need to buy those unhealthy air sprays at the store ever again!For headaches, you can rub some Lavender oil on straight on your temples and at the base of your skull. If your skin isn’t sensitive you can add a few drops of peppermint oil as well. Peppermint oil is very strong straight on your skin. I use it and I think it’s fine but each person would have to decide for himself if peppermint oil is tolerable.You can put a few drops of Lavender oil on your pillow to help you sleep if you have insomnia. You can also put it in a diffuser in your room to help induce a great night’s sleep. Baths are very relaxing in and of themselves, if you add essential oils ( a great relaxing combo for the bath is:  8 drops of Geranium, 8 drops of Patchouli, 8 drops of Sage and 8 drops of Lavender) and colored candles, you really have a terrific way to lessen the tension of the day.This is only a drop in the bucket. It’s a very slight introduction on the use of essential oils. They are worth exploring much further to enhance many aspects of your life.