The Science Behind How Lavender Oil Helps Promote Calm & Relaxation*

Whenever you take a whiff of lavender, you're connecting to a long and ongoing history. The plant is thought to be named after washerwomen, or "lavenders" in Middle English because one of its first uses was as a scent for laundry. (And still today, it's a popular fragrance for detergents and cleaning products.) Renaissance royalty also supposedly added the plant to their tubs to bathe in the pleasant aroma (again, still a thing—and not just among royals).

Medieval doctors also used the plant as a botanical approach to help with headaches1, while De materia medica, one of the first known texts on herbal medicine, described it as a chest soother.

With such a storied past, it's no wonder that lavender is one of today's most-studied essential oils. Scientists have pegged many of its therapeutic properties to its high terpene count.* Terpenes are aromatic phytonutrient compounds that give plants, herbs, and trees their signature scent.

In the wild, terpenes help organisms survive and reproduce: Plants use them as defense mechanisms2, flowers churn them out to attract pollinators3, and trees even emit them to warn each other of incoming threats4. Everything down to microscopic bacteria and fungi seems to interact using fragrant terpenes, leading researchers at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology to dub them the world's most widespread communication medium.

And while we aren't always aware of it, these compounds are constantly communicating with us, too. "Even though terpenes come from trees, mushrooms, and herbs that are communicating with one another, our immune system can also decode them," forest medicine researcher Clemens G. Arvay, MSc, previously wrote on mbg. "Like other plants, we respond to terpenes by strengthening our body's defenses."*

While many terpenes have antimicrobial and antifungal properties, lavender's seem to be especially beneficial for the nervous system.* Clinical research shows that they provide mood-stabilizing and calming effects.*

Ali Gorji, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of neurophysiology at the University of Münster in Germany, tells mbg that lavender's linalool has been shown to inhibit excitability in the brain through direct interactions with receptors like NMDA (associated with learning and memory) and GABAA (promotes calm and balance throughout the body).*

As Gorji and others noted in their 2013 literature review on lavender and the nervous system5, there's still more high-quality research that needs to be done before we fully grasp the therapeutic potential of this lovely plant. But we're getting there. A recent study published in Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine6 found lavender to be a useful strategy for stress relief in a small cohort of nine people, and a separate neuroimaging study7 supports that its calming, anxiousness-reducing benefits come from the way it interacts with key brain receptors.* In light of this, some physicians are now experimenting with giving patients a smell of aromatic essential oils like lavender to help them relax while they sit in waiting rooms.*