Effects of Scents on Emotions

Scents are closely intertwined with emotions, moods, memories, and perceptions. They have a great ability to influence both positive as well as negative emotions and may alter your moods either by enhancing or hindering them in certain circumstances.

Therefore, it is one of the many rational reasons why natural perfumes are such a good investment for you and your home. You can fragrance your body and surroundings with your favorite natural fragrance and control your moods and emotions easily.

Let’s have a look at the effects of scents on emotions and moods in a little bit of a scientific manner.

Effects of scents on emotions and moods
How scents affect your emotions
How scents affect your moods
Mood enhancing scents
Final words

Effects of scents on emotions and moods

To understand the link between emotions and scents, we will first need to understand how scents affect the human brain and its psychological functions.

When we sniff a scent, the air that contains scent molecules is pulled inside the nose through the olfactory cleft. The scent molecules then dissolve and penetrate through the olfactory epithelium, the mucous membrane inside the nose.

Then the receptor cells receive the newly dissolved scent molecules and create an impulse and send it to the olfactory bulb in the brain through olfactory nerves as a signal. The signal is then further processed in the olfactory bulb and passed on to other areas of the brain. This way our brain can detect a scent.

There is a crucial part of our brain known as the hippocampus which is considered the most important part of the limbic system. The limbic system is the brain region responsible for our emotional and behavioral responses.

The hippocampus plays a vital role in smell processing and storing memories: emotion and smell are both stored in the hippocampus as one memory, which means that the brain processes emotions and smells at the same time and recalls associated memories without differentiation.

How scents affect your emotions

Memories have the capacity to trigger emotions. For instance, when you recollect your childhood school vacation, you immediately remember your childhood friends you often played with. This happens in our brain rapidly and subconsciously since memories are closely associated with emotions.

Therefore, when a person gets a scent that is stored in his or her memory, his or her brain automatically tends to correlate that scent with certain reminiscence and the emotions associated with them. For this reason, when you smell a vanilla scent, you often get emotional by recalling your childhood Christmas cakes of vanilla flavors.

How scents affect your mood

As we discussed above, scents may affect moods in both positive as well as negative ways. In essence, scents may either enhance your moods or hinder your moods. Scents may alter both short-term as well as long-term moods.

Creating a good atmosphere with pleasant scents may reduce anxiety, tension, stress, and evoke positive emotions, and may produce a vivid impact on our moods.

Therefore, certain scents have been found highly beneficial for treating stress, headaches, and depression and on the other hand, for enhancing relaxation, sleep quality, and physical and cognitive performance.

For this reason, aromatherapy has been found increasingly popular for treating a wide range of physical and emotional conditions over recent years.

Mood enhancing scents

Even though olfactory sensitivity usually declines with age, the therapeutic usages of pleasant scents have been found to have beneficial effects on mood regardless of age group, which is why certain natural perfumes and essential oils are widely used by aromatherapists for enhancing moods and treating mood-related disorders.

Some of the most popular mood-enhancing scents may include:

Vanilla

Vanilla has calming and relaxing properties. Its relaxing actions can produce positive effects on your mood and can evoke happiness in your mind. Besides, the pleasing scent of vanilla has an incredible power to replace the pleasure of eating sweets, cakes, ice creams, and candy bars that contain vanilla flavors and thus, can favor weight loss by regulating the craving for these high-calorie foods.

Here you can see our natural Vanilla

Lavender

Lavender has long been used in aromatherapy and psychotherapy for its proven anti-anxiety, calming, sedative, and nerve regenerating properties. It helps relieve emotional stress, ease worries, calm the mind, and lighten moods, making it highly useful for improving sleep issues, work stress, and brain fog. Many celebrity actors and public speakers also use lavender to control their stage fear.

Here you can see our natural Lavender

Jasmine

Jasmine doesn’t emanate its bewitching scent during the daytime, which is why it is known as the “Queen of the night”. It has a miraculous power to stimulate the part of the brain responsible for producing enkephalin, a neurotransmitter that can foster happiness and wellbeing.

Jasmine helps reduce tension and fear related to sexuality and enhances energy levels, making it highly popular as a scent for romance and sensuality. It can increase brain waves associated with mood and relaxation and can help improve a variety of nervous and psychological conditions including depression, anxiety, and restlessness.

There are majorly two types of jasmine – Jasminum sambac and Jasminum grandiflorum. Both have been found to have similar beneficial effects on mood and emotions.

Here you can see our Jasminum sambac

Here you can see our Jasminum grandiflorum

Final words

Scents have a noticeable ability to impact memories and emotions as well as mood and performance. Natural perfumes or scents have been found to be more beneficial than synthetic ones.

Besides, pleasant scents of certain natural essential oils show tremendous healing properties and have long been used in aromatherapy and psychotherapy for treating a wide range of conditions related to emotions and moods. They may include vanilla, lavender, and jasmine to name a few.

So, before you consider buying your scents next time, make sure you buy only natural scents that are produced using pure and natural ingredients and may have a positive effect on your mood and emotion.