Can scents affect your mood? Let’s find out!
You might or might not notice this but sometimes, scents could instantly remind you back to your past memories. Yeap! Our sense of smell is the strongest among the five senses and surely is the most tied to our emotion and memories. Impressively, it does not stop there as from all of these processes, scents could also affect your mood.
Image source: http://www.timsr.ca/happiness-myth/
How scents could affect our brain?
There is a part of our brain that is called the hippocampus that holds a responsibility in learning and storing memories.
Magically, the hippocampus is also responsible to process our smelling reaction and most of the time, these two processes are intertwined. This explains why you are often brought back to certain memories- weather it is the smell of your childhood home, mother or maybe your first hostel- when you smell something.
Can scents could actually affect your mood?
Interestingly, 75% of our daily emotions are built from the scents that we smelled. There is a study shown that scents could recall better memories than images. Scent has the ability to have an effect on mood, concentration, memory recall and emotion.
Memories and emotions are often linked to each other. Therefore, when our brain stores the scent that we smelled and triggers our memories, the moods and emotions will automatically change as a response to the situation.
Scents not only bring positive memories as it could also trigger some negative past. It is the reason how having to stay in a bad odor room could spoil your mood. However, there is a study suggesting that the results may vary as happiness, disgust and anxiety are easily stimulated by the scents while sadness and anger might not be as good.
Image source: https://www.keckmedicine.org/what-can-cause-a-loss-of-taste-and-smell/
Use scents to enhance your mood
The existence of science is none other than to improve our lives. Knowing how scents could actually affect our mood is actually an advantage to us. Other than the ability to utilize different scents to trigger different memories, scents make us able to feel certain emotions whenever we want.
Caffeine for example has been famous for keeping you awake but surprisingly, scents of citrus also have the same ability to make you more energetic and productive. Hence, it is suitable to be your boost whenever you are tight on the deadline.
The case is similar to the lavender scent that is famous in altering your mood to be more calm and relax especially during bed time. Many have said how lavender has aided them with sleeping trouble to have more quality sleep with better deep sleep and less rapid eye movement. So the next time you choose a car freshener, lavender is a big no! Phew!
Knowing how easy it is to stimulate our senses and memories through scents allows us to utilize it at the workplace, home or at many other occasions. Be it your body mist, perfume, air freshener, car freshener or even choices of scented candles, it is fun to play and experiments with scents especially in altering our mood.
If you would love to try and have some fun experimenting how scents could affect your mood, always start with our Candle Meltz. The affordable price allows you to try different scents within your budget and at the same time gives you the idea of which scents that would have a better impact to evoke and alter your moods.
Let the smell ‘scent you some help’ whenever you want to feel the certain way!