How can essential oil inhalation influence the body and mind
Scent is a personal preference influenced by your memories, cultural background and emotional status, established in your body’s library of stored emotions and memories. It’s like a feedback loop reflecting your physical and psychological state.
That reaction to scent triggers neurophysiological processes that can affect how you feel, think, perform tasks, and even certain behaviours.
Scent can immediately influence your emotional and physical state.
The olfactory receptors turn chemical signals an aroma gives into neural signals. They travel to the brain, where we “experience” an odour and assign our emotion tag based on previously stored memories. This identification process then feeds back to affect behaviour and mood.
This process of smelling a scent and reacting to it happens in a split second without our conscious thought. The sense of smell is unique that way. It is directly connected to the brain area that can trigger memories, emotions and associative learning. A primal sense that evolved to bypass the “thought” processing side of the brain is still very intuitive and visceral.
Calming Lavender?
Lavender can induce a feeling of calm. This is due to its constituents disrupting the brain signals that get excited and make you feel agitated. However, if you dislike lavender’s smell, that relaxed feeling will not happen no matter what.
A scent you perceive as pleasant can reduce emphasis and tension, cheer you up, and open you up to more social interactions, affecting your physical and immune system responses.
Smell the Roses
To most people, the smell of roses is a pleasant scent. One associated with gardens and happy occasions, but to an individual whose first encounter with roses was at a funeral for a loved one, that smell will never be a relaxing or a pleasant one as it attached itself to a distressing event.
A subjective experience can influence the outcome, regardless of how a product is used. Bear that in mind when choosing your oils and blends. Experiment with different combinations to find out which one resonates with you the most.
Sometimes all you need to feel better is a pleasant, familiar aroma
The sense of smell works on both the mind and the body, interacting between the two continuously. Even though other elements work similarly, aromatherapy is so powerful partly because it affects all areas simultaneously.
Pharmacological: Affecting the physical body
The natural chemicals a plant gives off as an essential oil has evolved to either activate or deactivate a process in the body. Their lipophilic (fat-loving) characteristic means they can penetrate cell walls and cross the blood-brain barrier. This can influence brain function as well as various organs around the body. Depending on the amount of essential oil used, this action can have varying degrees of influence on the body.
Psychological: Affecting emotions and general mood
Essential oils can be very subjective and rely heavily on your own context, perception of a scent, and all its associated emotions and memories. The psychological effect is very personal. This makes the initial reaction to an oil or blend very important. If you do not like the aroma, then it does not matter how effective the product is; you will not use it as needed, making it useless
.A scent you perceive as pleasant can reduce emphasis and tension, cheer you up, and open you up to more social interactions, affecting your physical and immune system responses.
