Quote:
Your use of cinnamon is not crazy at all. I am not clinically depressed, but I have been very very anxious lately due to a legal situation. I have been sniffing cinnamon, also, and there is actually a good reason for why this works. (You can sniff anything that is a pleasant smell for you, and it should work.)Originally Posted by blue fairy
My second thing I do to calm my self down is to sniff an herb bag that I made. I sewed a little bag filled with rice and herbs that I like the scent of. It is small enough to keep in my pocket so I pull it out whenever I need it. My scent is cinnamon ... I know not to conventional but hey some times the crazy stuff works.
The sense of smell is the only one associated directly with our "reptile" brain, the brain that rules our "fight-or-flight" response if it thinks we're in danger. Daily life creates lots of anxiety, so this "fight-or-flight" response only adds to it.
If we can fool our reptile brain into thinking everything is fine and calm, our anxiety can go way down. One way to do this is to smell things (like cinnamon) that are pleasant for us. As the sense of smell is controlled by our primitive brain, it is the one way we can communicate with it directly. So smelling something nice makes it believe that all is okay so it can relax (and thus so can we).
