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The Power of Scent

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There is great power in a scent. A scent can bring you back to a cherished memory, energize you and spur you into action or put your mind at ease. Truly, a scent can work wonders in many ways. You may have heard that scent is closely linked to memory, but did you also know that that certain aromas can work to your benefit by inducing positive reactions and feelings?

In 2009, Psychology Today published an article entitled “The Smell is Right – Using Scents to Enhance Life,” which outlined how particular scents can boost your mood, improving both your physical and psychological health.

Grapefruit and citrus scents, for example, can help reduce anxiety and lift a low mood. In 1995, the Journal of Psychopharmacology published a study about the application of citrus scents to alleviate depression. It was discovered that citrus scents helped induce calm behavior and restore the immune system, which becomes suppressed due to stress during depression.

While citrus scents can help lift your spirits, peppermint can improve your athletic performance. When exercising, you might want to consider slathering on some peppermint body lotion, suggested Psychology Today. Smelling this pleasant scent will make you feel better when you are working out and that you are not exerting yourself to such a great extent. In turn, peppermint propels you to perform with more vigor.

Also, taking in peppermint and lavender scents can help alleviate vomiting and nausea. In a 2013 study published in the Journal of Natural Sciences Research, pregnant women who were suffering from nausea and morning sickness during the early stages of their pregnancy were asked to inhale both peppermint and lavender essential oils every day for three days. Inhaling these essential oils resulted in a decrease in nausea and vomiting episodes. These women also reported feeling more energy and were less prone to tiredness and fatigue.

Moreover, floral scents like rose and honeysuckle can also make you feel good - like really, really good. Flower power was put to the test a number of years ago in an experiment led by Jeannette Haviland-Jones, a Professor at Rutgers University. For the test, researchers sprayed one room with a floral scent, and another room with either a classic perfume, baby powder or nothing at all.

In this study, researchers asked the students to write about three distinct life events – one recent, one distance and one event that might possibly be happening in the future. Afterwards, these writings were coded for both positive and negative words. In the second part of the experiment, participants were told to enter yet another room with a mime in it. Participants were asked to instruct him to act out one of their childhood memories. It turns out that study participants who were in the floral scented room felt far more positive than participants who entered the other rooms – they were more likely to come up to the mime and touch him while giving instructions (74 percent compared to only 15 percent who came from the unscented room, for example), and they were also three times more likely to use happiness-related words in the passages that they wrote.

“It [the floral smell] actually is a mood manipulator,” study researcher Patricia Wilson, Associate Professor at La Salle University told Live Science in 2011. “So your mood is better, and given that your mood is better, you are looking for things in your memory bank that match that mood.”

So, if you ever need a pick-me-up just reach for a scent that you fancy and let it work its aromatic magic ;)