How Smell Signals Safety

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Your sense of smell relays both danger and safety signals to your brain.

Uniquely, your sense of smell plays a critical role in survival, relaying both danger and safety signals to your brain.

Smell alerts you to dangers (like predators and fire), helps track food and water, and even aids in locating certain plants for medicine. Research estimates your sense of smell to be ten thousand times more acute than your other senses.

Smell, unlike your other four senses—sound, sight, taste, and touch—travels more quickly to the brain. It has direct access to the emotional control center of the brain, known as the amygdala in your limbic system. Other senses travel to different regions of the brain first before reaching the limbic system.

This makes the sense of smell one of the most powerful avenues for signaling both danger and safety cues:

Danger-signaling scents keep you safe by stimulating an instinctive fear response that enables you to mobilize energy and resources quickly to survive the threat of danger. Research elaborates that an “intact sense of smell is critical for evaluating the safety of ingestible substances, assessing impending danger, and recognizing social relationships.”

Safety-signaling scents have been found to override this fear response, according to promising research. Nobel Prize-winning researcher Linda Buck explored how different odors trigger different reactions in your brain. For example, Buck found that rose essential oil can counteract your brain’s fear response to predator odor. Her research found that smelling rose essential oil in the presence of predator odors (or other fear stimuli) can suppress your brain’s stress responses and hormonal signals. More specifically, the research found that “rose oil can block stress hormone responses to a predator odor; it is also conceivable that some transmit signals that suppress rather than activate hormonal responses associated with fear.”

This research gives some insight into how essential oils can be used to send safety signals to the body and influence chemical responses to trauma and fear-based stimuli by either suppressing or activating the brain’s hormonal responses to specific odors.

How Smell Accesses the Brain

Your sense of smell, part of the olfactory system, is one of the most potent channels into the brain. Your olfactory system is unique among the sensory systems because it has direct anatomical and functional access to the brain’s limbic lobe, a region responsible for emotions, memories, and arousal, which is physically located near the olfactory bulb.

This allows inhaled essential oils to quickly access areas of the brain that help shift your physical health and mood.

And it happens quickly!

Research shows that the entire process, from the initial inhalation of an essential oil to a corresponding response in the body, can happen in a matter of seconds. Your sense of smell is thought to be 10,000 times more acute than your other senses. Once registered, scent stimuli, which are the molecules that carry the smell, travel more quickly to the brain than sight or sound.

It’s interesting to note that your sense of smell is the first of all senses to develop. Even before birth, your sense of smell is fully formed and functioning to help support your safety and survival.

Research shows that smell is the most sensitive of the senses. People can remember smells with 65% accuracy after a year, while visual recall is about 50% after three months. Interestingly, a woman’s sense of smell is much stronger than a man’s and is heightened even more during the first half of the menstrual cycle and pregnancy.

READ THIS NEXT: How Inhalation of Essential Oils Influence Brain Functioning

How Smell Triggers Safety Signals

Aromas have a modulating effect on your psychophysiological activity and arousal. This is because your sense of smell connects directly to the part of your brain that regulates the release of several major hormones that help you feel safe.

Olfactory sensory neurons relay information to specific brain regions. Research demonstrates that “smell has the ability to transfer and regulate emotional conditions”. More specifically, research on The Power of Odor Persuasion “reported a reduction of anxiety symptoms in subjects exposed to pleasant smells combined with a relaxation technique.” The research elaborated that “pleasant scents induced a perceived state of relaxation and perceived reduction of depressive symptoms.” Exposure to natural, pleasant scents also reduces heart-rate frequencies, blood pressure, and negative affect.

As noted above, your sense of smell has direct anatomical and functional access to the amygdala in the brain’s limbic lobe, which is physically located near the olfactory bulb.

In fact, on a physical level, only two synapses separate your amygdala from your olfactory nerve. No other sensory system has this direct and intense contact with the neural substrates of your brain’s emotional control center.

Smell travels through your olfactory system to your hypothalamus, a region of your brain that acts as your hormonal control center, and through your amygdala in your limbic system. When you smell an essential oil for the hypothalamus, it stimulates your hypothalamus to release hormones that trigger a rapid emotional response. (More HERE).

Noting the “myriad of studies that link smell-induced memories to mood improvement and stress reduction”, Harvard Medicine Magazine details how safety or danger “signals make a quick stop in the olfactory bulb before traveling to key areas of the brain involved in learning, emotion, and memory: the olfactory, or piriform cortex, which identifies smells; the amygdala, which is engaged in generating emotion; and the hippocampus, which stores and organizes memories. If the hippocampus deems the smell necessary—if it were connected with a particularly emotional moment, for example—it can file the information and store it indefinitely. Even decades later, the same scent can bring the memory and emotional salience of the moment flooding back.

Sights, sounds, and other sensory information must travel through the brain’s thalamus before reaching the amygdala and hippocampus. In contrast, the olfactory system is positioned right next to them, appearing to have essentially evolved to hardwire information to these memory and emotion centers. This could explain why studies have found that compared with memories triggered by other senses, odor-evoked memories tend to be more emotional and more likely to extend back earlier in one’s life.

Your brain’s response to scent stimulates the release of hormones and neurochemicals that alter your physiology and emotional response. Your hypothalamus produces excitatory hormones, stimulating brain activity, and inhibitory hormones that have a calming effect.

In collaboration with your pituitary gland, these brain hormones control all hormonal messages for your endocrine, stress, and digestive systems, which, in turn, affect and protect every aspect of your health, including your emotional state. Your sense of smell is so sensitive that virtually any odor will elicit a brain response registering some clinically demonstrable physical or behavioral reaction.

It is this direct channel between smell and your hypothalamus by which essential oils help combat stress and emotional trauma and stimulate the production of hormones to help you feel safe and calm. This is the mechanism when you emotionally respond to an odor-evoked memory.

The ability of odors to cue vivid and emotionally intense memories is well-known, according to research. Olfaction is unique among the sensory modalities in its relationship to memory. Physiologically, olfaction is the closest to the amygdala and hippocampus (Herz and Engen 1996), which may well explain the ability of odors to induce intense emotional memories (Chu and Downes 2000; Herz 1997). This research aims to explore our pre-existing associations with odors and their ability to influence behavior.

Odors can act as environmental cues to memory, where odors are presented alongside the stimuli to be remembered, rather than the extent to which pre-existing associations between odor and odor-related stimuli might influence memory.

For those seeking to signal safety cues, a treatment known as ”hypnotherapeutic olfactory conditioning” offers a promising solution. This treatment combines hypnosis with the inhalation of pleasant scents to create a sense of security and personal control. It has been delivering positive results for clients working through trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This technique builds on research that found that odor perception can prompt “flooding back” recollection of remote autobiographical memories more vividly than other sensorial modalities.

READ THIS NEXT: How Smell Stimulates Your Brain

Essential Oils and Safety Cues

Inhaling essential oils is the fastest and most efficient way to create physiological or psychological balance in your limbic system. The smell can directly stimulate the positive input of the amygdala, sidestepping a thalamic relay and allowing you to send powerful safety signals to the brain’s emotional center. These safety signals are like a green light for your brain, indicating that there is no immediate threat, which in turn helps to calm your mind and body.

It’s intriguing to note that the limbic system, which we now understand as a crucial part of our emotional regulation, was initially referred to as the rhinencephalon, or the ‘smell brain’. This historical perspective connects us to the roots of our understanding of this complex system and its primary association with the sense of smell.

Given olfaction’s emotion and memory-related features, its use can help reduce the perception of threat and enhance the perception of safety.

Olfactory stimulation with essential oils can reset the volume of threat perception and help calm the over-firing of your limbic system. Over-firing of the limbic system refers to a state where the system is hyperactive, constantly perceiving threats even when they are not present. This can lead to heightened anxiety and stress. Essential oils can help regulate this hyperactivity, promoting a sense of calm and safety.

Limbic Reset™ contains a proprietary blend of essential oils designed to calm threat arousal and send safety cues to help reset your limbic system and support healthy emotional regulation. Limbic Reset™ was formulated explicitly with Helichrysum sandalwood and Melissa oils, which are touted for brain function and known to cross the blood-brain barrier and assist in carrying oxygen to the limbic system to help rewire neural circuits in your limbic system and calm an overactive stress response.

Shifting your focus by engaging your senses—such as your sense of smell—also helps distract you from an internal state of distress, thereby lessening its intensity and the intensity of your responses to others. This allows you to feel safe and access more possibilities and options.

MORE HERE : Reset Your Limbic System