Smells like fatigue
Have you been feeling tired lately? or suffer from chest pain, back pains? Here’s something interesting… ScienceDaily has an interesting article about smells and how they can have physical effects. Researches of the University of Nottingham
investigated how stress, intense odours and personality combined to explain everyday physical symptoms:
They studied 194 individuals, who completed a structured diary twice a day for eight days, recording their experiences of common physical symptoms, odours, sounds and stress. Seventy different odours were reported with hot food, paint, smoke/fire, coffee, and chemicals the most frequently mentioned.
Symptoms were reported to worsen at the same time as the intensity of odour, and levels of stress, increased. However, only the intensity of odour, not stress, predicted future symptom reporting over a short half-day interval.
Professor Eamonn Ferguson said: “These results highlight the importance of everyday odour with respect to the experience of common physical symptom, showing that common environmental experiences, rather than stress, predict symptoms over short intervals. It may be that people come to associate particular odours with symptoms and the experience of the odour ‘triggers’ the experience of symptoms.”