Move aside sleeping pills! Smelling your lover’s clothes can help you sleep: Study

Only a person who has trouble falling asleep can understand the pain associated with it. Besides suffering from chronic tiredness, mood swings and headache, lack of sleep is responsible for many physical and emotional ailments. No wonder we resort to many much-promised solutions to help us sleep. From counting sheep to taking sleep-inducing medicines, people suffering from insomnia would do anything to catch some shut-eye.

However, researchers have found a novel way to help people improve their sleep quality. And no, they haven’t formulated a new medicine. According to a study published in the journal Psychological Science, the scent of a romantic partner can help improve a person’s quality of sleep. Which means, if you sleep on a pillow wrapped with a piece of cloth like a t-shirt carrying your lover’s scent, you would sleep better and for a comparatively longer time.

“A growing body of evidence has shown that close relationships are essential to our health and well being. But far less is known about the role of scent in relationships and social support processes. The current study provides new evidence that the mere scent of a romantic partner improves sleep efficiency,” said Frances Chen, the co-author of the study from the University of British Columbia in Canada.

To establish a correlation between sleep quality and the smell of a lover, the researchers carried out an interesting experiment. They asked one partner of each heterosexual couples who were taking part in the experiment, to wear a t-shirt continuously for 24 hours. They had to follow certain rules like not wearing cologne or eating strong smell inducing spicy foods etc. while wearing the t-shirt. After 24 hours, the respective partner of the person who was wearing the t-shirt was given two t-shirts–the one worn by the lover and another t-shirt from a random stranger. He or she then had to sleep on a pillow with the t-shirts as pillow covers. It was later found that the people who slept on a pillow with the lover’s t-shirt wrapped around it, slept for an additional nine minutes as compared to others.

Participants also gave self-reported measures of sleep quality each morning, which increased on nights they thought they were sleeping with their partner’s scent.

“The effect we observed in our study was similar in magnitude to that reported for melatonin supplements–a commonly used sleep aid. The findings suggest that the scent of our loved ones can affect our health in powerful ways,” said study researcher Marlise Hofer.
This research suggests that simple strategies such as taking a partner’s scarf or shirt along when travelling may have measurable effects on our sleep.