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Have a bad day? Light a candle with lavender and evacuate all your stress. So immerse in a lavender cloud can Actually help reduce anxiety, according to new research released earlier this week.
Scientists at Kagoshima University in Japan have examined what happened when mice sniffed linalool, a scented chemical that helps give lavender its distinctive scent. In stressful situations, mice relaxed and behaved in the same way on linalool as on anti-anxiety medications such as Valium and Xanax. The results were published this week in Frontiers in Neuroscience Behavioral Neuroscience.
Hideki Kashiwadani, the main author of the new paper, explains that he had the idea of the experience when he noticed that the mice seemed to relax by smelling linalool. He wanted to know if the effect was real.
To examine this, Kashiwadani and his colleagues performed a series of standard anxiety tests in mice. In light, black boxes and high labyrinths, environments designed to stress rodents, mice pre-exposed to vaporized linalool explored their environment much more than mice without aromatherapy. The willingness to explore an animal is an indicator of its easing. The more worried they are, the less likely they are to move. The curiosity of mice sniffing linalool mirrored that of mice taking diazepam, an anti-anxiety medication. Linalool has done all this without impairing motor skills, unlike some drugs that can slow you down.
Mice deprived of their sense of smell and then exposed to linalool showed no positive effect. This shows that the impact comes from the ability to smell the chemical, rather than breathing it and absorbing it into the bloodstream of the lungs, Kashiwadani said.
Linalool also did not work when mice took flumazenil, a drug that blocks the effects of benzodiazepines, the active ingredient in tranquillizers such as Valium. This suggests that linalool activates the same neuroreceptors as drugs for anxiety, says Kashiwadani.
Kashiwadani warns that this study looked at linalool, not specifically the smell of lavender. While linalool plays a crucial role in the scent of lavender, it scents many plants, including mint, herbs, cinnamon and citrus. The mixture of odorous compounds changes "the olfactory image," says Kashiwadani. Thus, lavender linalool may not have the same effect when mixed with other compounds that contribute to the plant's characteristic odor.
"Imagine the smell of curry and spice soup," he writes in an e-mail to Popular science. "In many cases, we could not identify the smell of each spice." So, even though it's tempting to say that this study proves what we already knew about the restorative power of the lavender bubble bath, it does not go that far.
Then, Kashiwadani wants to see how linalool affects humans. Even if the same relaxing property is preserved, it might not be as universal in our species. People react differently to different smells, which is why many doctors avoid aromatherapy, he says. He wants to see how differently people react to the same smells. He is also curious about the effects of lavender itself, as well as the effects of other well-known smells.
In the meantime, bring candles, soaps, essential oils, potpourri. It could do us good. And if not, well, it still feels good.
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