Author | Rachelle
Editor丨Dina Dong
In today's society, in high-intensity cities, people's work pressure is increasing day by day. At the same time, sleep problems have troubled for many people. There are many solutions to this problem, such as exercising moderately before going to bed, creating a good sleep environment, taking medication when necessary, and so on. A new study now offers a new opportunity to improve sleep problems – aromatherapy.
Aromatherapy is a natural treatment that can be performed with aromatherapy massage, heat compresses or inhalation. It can help the body to be in a balanced state and help improve the mental state.[1]Breathing in pleasant scents during sleep may give a low-effort way to improve brain health and help deter dementia potentially.
Olfaction, which is the oldest phylogenetic sensation, is characterized by a unique intimacy with the emotion system.[2] The olfactory pathway has been clarified in some studies.(Figure2) Scientific knowledge with the keywords, “olfaction”, “stress”, and “brain” has been accumulated, some scents cause anxiety and others suppress it. Smell perception may be strongly related to functions of amygdala and hippocampus.
After some human and animal studies, smell may be modulated by experience and physical states, and some odors may induce emotional recall.
It is pointed out in the article Evaluating the effect of aromatherapy on a stress marker in healthy subjects that aromatherapy with lavender and grapefruit oils can reduce stress by acting on the immune and autonomic nervous systems in healthy volunteers.
Neuroscientists found that inhaling odorants while asleep seemed to dramatically enhance a person’s memory over the course of six months in a small experiment involving 23 older adults aged 60 to 85 without memory impairment. In this experiment, participants were divided into two groups. Those in the olfactory enrichment group were provided with an odorant diffuser and seven essential oil odorants (rose, orange, eucalyptus, lemon, peppermint, rosemary, and lavender). In the control group, individuals were also provided with an odorant diffuser , but they were provided with bottles that contained distilled water with an undetectable trace amount of odorant added.
During the project, they were asked turn on the odorant diffuser. The scent was released into the air during the night for two hours when they first went to sleep.
The scientists gave the participants cognitive tests six months before and six months later. The results showed that those who received aromatherapy had a 226% increase in cognitive performance before and after the experiment.
“We found that, compared to controls, ‘enriched’ participants improved in their performance on word-list recall, a key test of verbal learning and memory,”wrote the study authors.[4] Although this investigation was small in size, a professor of neurology and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia Jay Gottfried said, the results align with other scientific findings demonstrating a connection between smell and cognition.[4]
Study author Dr. Michael Leon, professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California, Irvine, said: "When people are endowed with olfactory (related to smell) enrichment, their memory area becomes larger and more functional." "Conversely, when the sense of smell is impaired, the brain's memory centers begin to degenerate."[4]
Leon and his colleagues also performed brain imaging and found that in the brains of those who used aromatherapy, the integrity of a brain pathway known as the left hook leaf bundle was better. This pathway connecting the medial temporal lobe necessary for memory and the prefrontal cortex for decision-making becomes less robust with age.
The Sleep Foundation notes that while there appears to be no significant difference in sleep quality between the inhaled and control groups, inhaling the scent during sleep may contribute to better rest, which is essential for long-term memory formation and storage.[4] Study authors say they hope the findings will lead to more research into olfactory treatments for memory impairment, and they intend to next examine the impact of inhaling aromas during sleep on people with diagnosed cognitive loss.
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