One of the reasons I fell in love with my husband is his great coffee. He makes the best coffee ever. Further more, he serves it to me in the morning, every morning as I am still foggy from the night’s slumber. Before we were married, this marvelous man would sneak into my home on his way to work and fix my coffee, so that I would stumble down to the kitchen and find a fresh brewed cup waiting for me!
I limit myself to one or two cups of coffee, most days. That is a miracle, considering my heritage. You see, my mother always repeated that we were weaned from the breast by cups of coffee. (Remember that our truths are filtered by the words we hear from birth to age 8, so she was setting me up to have a love affair with the seductress coffee.) I believe I have vague memories of my mother wandering the house hooked up to an IV with a coffee drip. (OK, maybe that was just a fantasy my mother often spoke of.) Coffee ice cream was a treat reserved for something special, like living through the day, maybe? Iced coffee was a staple in the summer.
I have passed this legacy on to my first born. Every Monday, I write him a note in a funny card and include something like an article or a comic I thought he would enjoy, a crisp $20 bill or a gift card to Starbucks. His favorite find is the Starbucks card. My youngest son does not have the same love of coffee and I am wondering if maybe he was switched at birth because of that, but I will save that for another day.
Why all this information about coffee, especially in a hypnosis blog? Well, partly because of the power of suggestion. I just read an article pertaining to coffee and current brain research. Also, anything to do with brain research is guaranteed to interest me and I love to share the news. So, here is the scoop:
Studies in the past have shown that drinking coffee can relieve stress as well as reduce depression, but scientist attributed these effects to the caffeine in the coffee, not to the smell. Scientists have found that the mere smell of coffee has an effect on the brain.
Korean researchers conducted experiments with rats to study the effects of coffee’s smell on the brain. Stressed, sleep-deprived rats and rats that were not stressed were exposed to the aroma of coffee. The activity of the brain of these two groups were compared to two other groups of rats. One group was stressed and sleep deprived, the second group was unstressed, neither were exposed to the smell of coffee.
The researchers found that when the rats were exposed to the smell of coffee, thirteen genes in the brain that control anxiety were stimulated at different levels of activity. The result was a reduction in stress of the sleep-deprived rats.
According to the Korean researchers, for the first time, their experiment provides “clues to the potential antioxidant or stress-relaxation activities of the coffee bean aroma. These experiments indirectly explain why so many people use coffee for staying up all night. The stress caused by sleep loss via caffeine may be alleviated through smelling the coffee aroma.”
P.S. Honey you now know one of the 180 reasons I listed, only 179 to go!
