Hi all,
I thought I would post a couple of interesting studies I came across a while ago that talk about how smell works with our anxiety.
2012 Study.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0322100317.htm
Smells also evoke powerful emotional responses in humans.
The skin conductance results showed that anxiety also heightened emotional arousal to smell-induced threats.
The authors uncovered amplified communication between the sensory and emotional areas of the brain in response to negative odors, particularly in anxiety. This increased connectivity could be responsible for the heightened arousal to threats.
2013 Study.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0924174150.htm
"After anxiety induction, neutral smells become clearly negative,"
"People experiencing an increase in anxiety show a decrease in the perceived pleasantness of odors. It becomes more negative as anxiety increases."
In the course of the experiment, the Wisconsin team observed that two distinct and typically independent circuits of the brain -- one dedicated to olfactory processing, the other to emotion -- become intimately intertwined under conditions of anxiety.
"In typical odor processing, it is usually just the olfactory system that gets activated," says Li. "But when a person becomes anxious, the emotional system becomes part of the olfactory processing stream."
"We encounter anxiety and as a result we experience the world more negatively. The environment smells bad in the context of anxiety. It can become a vicious cycle, making one more susceptible to a clinical state of anxiety as the effects accumulate. It can potentially lead to a higher level of emotional disturbances with rising ambient sensory stress."
This shows that perhaps we could alter our environment to be less negative. Perhaps we can look towards incorporating more positive smells to reduce susceptibility to triggers? Maybe at least by doing this we prevent adding to our anxiety from negative odours that may typically be there?
So, does this also raise how positive smells work for us? I guess I will have to look for some studies to show that too but I think they do as how often have you felt some relief or uplifted from certain smells?
---------- Post added at 09:46 ---------- Previous post was at 08:19 ----------
Some interesting information on positive smells:
http://www.sirc.org/publik/smell_emotion.html
Its interesting how a mere mention of a positive smell can produce a positive effect. I wonder whether we can somehow use that to our advantage?
I can remember finding sniffing a lavender balm helpful to me when I was quite bad. When I walk about supermarkets, I tend to have a smell of a few of the candles. I like the floral ones and vanilla as I find they seem to give me a slight boost at that point, even if it is a quick emotional feeling that lasts a matter of 5-10 seconds.