Can Chewing Gum Really Reduce Stress

Is relieving stress a simple matter of chewing more gum? A new study reveals that chewing gum has been found to reduce stress and anxiety in people who chew it.

People have been searching for ways to fight stress for years. Most commonly, the ways we use to do this primarily include cigarette smoking and chewing gum. But, until now, even though many of those chewing gum believed that it helped them to reduce stress, there was no scientific evidence to prove that they were right. Now there is.

As well alleviating tenseness and anxiousness, researchers discovered that persons who chew gum also demonstrated an improvement in alertness and in their ability to multitask.

Although, some of the researchers involved in the sturdy were from the Wrigley Science Institute (yes the one formed by Wrigley Chewing Gum manufacturers), this is nevertheless an interesting area of study that surprisingly has been neglected by many researchers. This study was headed by PH.D., Dr. Scholey, a behavioral and brain scientist who teaches at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. His goal was to study how chewing gum affected moods, anxiety, cortisol levels, and stres in the subjects.

Cortisol is produced by the body's adrenal gland. In times of high stress, cortisol levels in the body spike as the body goes into it's "fight or flight" mode. When the body is in a relaxed state, the cortisol levels in the body decrease. This ability to measure cortisol levels in the body makes it the perfect type of marker to use in determining the amount of stress a person is experiencing. Dr. Scholey's research determined that when a person chews gum, at least in the laboratory setting, his cortisol levels decrease.

The study involved only forty people, a relatively small number of participants from which to extrapolate results to the general population. The average age was 22 years old. The testing was done using the Defined Intensity Stressor Simulation (a.k.a. DISS) which, among other things, is a standardized methodology of measuring stress-related physiological responses in a laboratory setting. In the study, the cortisol levels, plus the degree of alertness, were measured before the participants begin to chew gum and again as they were chewing the gum.

So just how much effect did chewing gum have on a person's stress levels? The tests showed that those who chewed gum reduced their levels of anxiety by almost 17 percent when under mild stress and by almost 10 percent when under moderate stress.

The difference in levels of performance was even more dramatic as the gum chewers performed 67% to 109% better than the non-gum chewers.

Past researchers have studied the influence of scents on anxiety and stress. This research study, however, did not focus on the type of gum chewed, therefore it's not known whether flavor of the chewing gum made a difference in the results.

What are the ramifications of this study? One likely ramification is that chewing gum manufacturers will be using the science to convince people to chew more of their gum. From a consumer standpoint, however, we'll have to wait for follow up testing to determine if we all should add chewing gum to our weekly shopping lists.

By: Karen Larsen

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Karen Larsen is the lead writer at anxietyinamerica.com . Please visit her website for more articles on what is anxiety disorder. treatment for depression and anxiety, as well as other anxiety related topics.