You’re probably used to jump-starting your day with a mug full of coffee, so the caffeine lying in wait within can provide you with the energy boost you need to become a semi-functioning adult. New research published in the journal Nutrients suggests that you probably don’t even need to take a sip of that coffee to feel some of the benefits. All you need to do is take a big whiff to alter your mood.
Researchers at Showa Pharmaceutical University in Japan sat 20 university students next to 400 milliliters of freshly brewed coffee and made them stare into the middle distance for five minutes without drinking it. It sounds more like a Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, the famous 1970 study about delayed gratification. But no, this was about how the presence of coffee and the delicious smell wafting off it affected a person before they ever took a sip.
The researchers found that a person’s total mood disturbance dropped significantly when they smelled the coffee, with volunteers reportedly feeling less anxious, less fatigued, less confused, and less depressed thanks to the smell alone.
The Smell of Coffee Alone Might Improve Your Mood, According to Science
The mere aroma of coffee did not, however, give anyone a surge of unstoppable power, like they just got a dose of super-soldier serum. All it did was make life a bit more tolerable by turning down the volume on our baseline day-to-day misery and turning up the EEG-derived relaxation index from 0.74 to 0.78. Which sounds like insignificant nonsense, but the researchers say that small increase in the relaxation we felt when we smelled coffee was consistent throughout the experiment.
This wasn’t the most rigorously controlled study, as it lacked a basic control group who, for example, could have sat silently in a neutral or even foul-smelling room for a few minutes to establish a solid baseline of human misery. It also had a very small sample size, and didn’t determine whether volunteers even liked coffee in the first place or whether they regularly drink it.
All that is to say that there are some big gaps here, but the baseline take away that if your brain can be easily tricked into being in an ever so slightly better mood by breathing in one pleasant smell, then don’t question. Just accept it and fill those nostrils with the smell of coffee.
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