The Nuance
Can Essential Oils Ease Anxiety?
Especially when it comes to lavender, the research is encouraging
Every week, the Nuance will go beyond the basics, offering a deep and researched look at the latest science and expert insights on a buzzed-about health topic.
Among the established senses, smell is likely the most ancient. Our amoebic, pre-human ancestors smelled the world long before they could hear or see it.
There’s also evidence that, unlike your other senses, your sense of smell is intimately intertwined with the brain structures that manage emotion — notably the amygdala and hippocampus. A 2013 study from the University of Wisconsin found that, when a person experiences anxiety, some of the associated brain structures display “heightened connectivity” with the brain regions that light up in response to smell. The study also found that the scents people identified as “neutral” became “unpleasant” when they were stressed.
If feeling anxious can change your perception of certain smells, as the University of Wisconsin study found, it makes some sense that certain smells could amplify or mollify your feelings of anxiety. A lot of the recent research on “embodied cognition” has shown that sensory experiences can influence emotion, thought processes, and other…
