Coping with Congestion Stress during Eid Backflow
Traffic jams are one of the obstacles that travelers face to get to and from work. No wonder many drivers and passengers feel stressed while traveling. Drivers and passengers feel uncomfortable during their journey. The stress of driving while traveling can affect the physical and mental health of the rider.
To create a new atmosphere on a trip with your favorite car, of course, the aroma of the cabin is one of the things that support it. Using car perfume is one of the different ways to provide a pleasant feeling of relaxation. However, not all car perfumes are good and healthy. Car perfumes are made of chemicals. Sometimes skin reactions occur due to repeated exposure to the chemicals in the perfume. It's good to replace the smell with something natural. Nowadays, there are many essential oils or aromatherapy that can be used to improve the performance of car cabin fragrances.
Spices are some kitchen ingredients that are used to give different dishes different flavors and aromas. For example, vanilla can give bread a sweet flavor and unique aroma. But with its unique aroma, kitchen ingredients like vanilla can be utilized more widely. Some of them can be used as car fragrances. As we all know, if the car cabin smells bad due to the ingress of garbage or food, the comfort will be greatly reduced. Well, this problem can be solved in two ways. Buy car perfumes that are widely available in the market or cabin fragrances with aromatherapy from natural ingredients.
The connection between our sense of smell and our brain is remarkable. Certain types of odors have different effects on the body and stress on the body. Some scents that are known as aromatherapy are vanilla scents. Vanilla is often used in fragrance powders or food flavorings. The sweet scent of vanilla is able to relax the body and make us feel comfortable.
A study published in the Journal Chemical Senses titled Effects of Fragrance on Emotions: Moods and Physiology found that vanilla is a pleasant scent that can evoke mood and happiness. Researchers showed that those who smelled vanilla had feelings of pleasure and relaxation, which can increase our sense of relaxation, so we can't experience stress and depression.
Smelling a delicious scent can be a very pleasurable experience, but can it be scientifically measured? For the past 20 years International Flavors & Fragrances Inc. (IFF) has been working to perfect its methods of measuring the subjective and physiological effects of aromas and fragrances on emotions. They have developed a self-report method called Mood Mapping that reliably measures mood associations to a scent, both simple ingredients and final fragrances in consumer products. Mood Mapping gives a choice of eight mood categories to panelists, who are asked to smell a sample scent and 'vote for the mood category that best matches the sample scent'. They found that this direct voting technique resulted in clearer and more reliable scent differentiation than a technique that required respondents to rate each mood for each sample evaluated. The resulting mood profile of each scent can be mapped by multidimensional scaling or principal component analysis. This study compared the scent of clementine with vanilla. Both were equally pleasant, but the former was more stimulating and the latter more calming.
One of their main interests was to find out if fragrances could be used as stress-relieving agents in consumer products. Stress is a global affliction, a fact not only recognized anecdotally, but also documented by global consumer surveys. In both developed and developing countries, stress is a problem that reduces the quality of life of a large proportion of the world's population as reported by the World Health Organization (2001). In addition, there is ample evidence that stress can exacerbate various diseases directly or indirectly and that stress reduction has both short-term and long-term health benefits. They were interested to find out if the most calming fragrances in the Consumer Fragrance Thesaurus were potent enough to reduce physiologically measured laboratory-induced stress responses. To determine whether fragrances can have physiological effects, further testing was conducted on these subjectively 'calming' fragrances using psychophysiological methods (heart rate, blood pressure, skin resistance, muscle tension, etc.) to ascertain whether they can actually reduce stress. We used a standard laboratory stressor, the Stroop test, in a series of studies of different calming fragrances identified by Mood Mapping. They obtained an electromyogram (EMG) of the trapezius muscle (back of the shoulder), which showed an increase during the Stroop test. This measurement is used because shoulder and neck tension is universal and is an easy measure of stress for consumers to understand.
During this testing, they found that certain calming fragrances were able to reduce stress-induced muscle tension measured in the shoulder area. They found that a specific type of relaxing fragrance had a muscle relaxing effect: it significantly reduced the EMG trapezius stress response. These studies reveal that fragrances are indeed quite powerful for counteracting stress in a performance task. This new fragrance technology is applied to products that require convincing evidence that fragrance can physically calm or relieve stress. Aromatherapy products represent a large and growing market area and this type of research can strengthen the basis for making stress relief claims on such products.
Warrenburg, S. 2005. Effects of Fragrance on Emotions: Moods and Physiology. Chemical Senses 30(1): 248–249. DOI: 10.1093/chemse/bjh208
