Are you a coffee lover? As for me.. I have a hard time falling asleep after drinking a cup of coffee, so I try to avoid drinking it, haha. BUT! I love the coffee aroma. It makes me feel relaxed. Sometimes I love hanging out in the coffee shop nearby my house, drinking tea, and smelling coffee 🙂
Well, not too much of surprise, coffee is used quite a lot in aromatherapy these days. There are even essential oils that smell like coffee for our relaxation (maybe I should get one). It is a good news for those who can’t drink anything with caffeine – we can still enjoy the benefits of coffee aroma without taking a sip. What are the benefits?
How the Studies Show
So there have been a number of studies being conducted regarding the coffee aroma. For example, there’s one experiment conducted by using rats which had not have enough sleep. You can say those rats had a degree of stresses in their brains due to their sleeplessness.
Using medium roasted Colombian coffee beans, the study author and his associates tested how the smell of coffee affected the brains of adult male rats who were “stressed” with sleep restriction and those that were not stressed and compared it to two other groups of stressed and unstressed rats not exposed to coffee bean aroma.
From this study, they found these two facts:
- The coffee-sniffing sleep-deprived rats showed different levels of activity in 17 genes in the brain.
- Levels of some brain proteins also changed in ways that could have a calming effect on stress or have antioxidant function.
Coffee Aroma as a Part of Your Life?
These show that when we feel a level of stresses or anxieties, sniffing coffee may help easing them. Well there’s no 100% reassurance that our brains and bodies will work as those sleepless rats, but I guess it’s worth having the coffee aroma nearby our desk or bed? It would actually be interesting if there’d be any studies that test the effect of scent on human brain one day 🙂
