Smelling the right stuff, boots your mood!

When we’re spending more time inside our home can start to smell stuffy, particularly if we can’t open the windows because it seems hot or cold outside—and stuffiness is bad for our wellbeing, mood, and cognitive performance.

So, adding very faint, light amounts of air scents can seem like a good idea. But which ones are best?

Science has clearly established the effects different scents can have on what goes on in our head:

• Smelling pleasant scents boosts our mood, which is also great for how we get along with others and how effectively our minds work, for example—if you’ll have lots of guests, it’s handy to know that around the world floral scents are consistently positively rated.
• The scents of oranges, jasmine, hyacinth, or vanilla can help us feel less anxious.
• Getting a whiff of lemon, mango, or lavender is relaxing.
• Our memories work better when we can smell rosemary, sage, or peppermint.
• Lavender can help alleviate sleep issues.When we smell it we also are more trusting, which can be good or bad.
• We feel more alert when smelling rosemary or peppermint.
• We’re likely to feel more energized when smelling grapefruit, tangerine, peppermint, or eucalyptus.
• The smell of peppermint helps with the performance of tedious, monotonous mental tasks as well as physical activities such as exercising.
• Smelling lemon boosts performance on cognitive/mental tasks. So, does the smell of coffee.
• The scent of cinnamon-vanilla ups our creativity.

• We sleep better (more deeply) if we smell jasmine as we sleep, which does great things for our cognitive performance after we wake up.

• We also feel thinner when we smell lemon and heavier when we smell vanilla.
• We tend to eat fewer calories when we smell a warm scent (like cedarwood) than when we smell a cool one, such as eucalyptus.
• The scent of green apple can make a space seem larger.
• We behave better in areas that smell clean to us—which can be handy in areas where people may need to be encouraged to clean up after themselves. The scents of cleaning products are generally felt to smell “clean.” The same goes for citrus smells, we associate them with cleanliness.