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If being around new people gives you anxiety, then you might want to steer clear of this new type of therapy being developed by scientists in Sweden.
This new treatment claims that smelling other people's body odour might be helpful as a therapy for social anxiety.
Researchers have been conducting tests with volunteers, having them smell armpit sweat to prove their theory.
Their hunch is that the smell might activate pathways in the brain linked to emotion, which might have a calming effect.
The researchers suggest that human body odour might communicate our emotional states i.e., whether someone is happy or anxious, and that this might even elicit a similar response in those who smell the odour.
They asked volunteers to donate armpit sweat for the research project, collected when they were either watching a happy movie or a scary one.
Then they asked 48 women with social anxiety to sniff to some of these samples. The women were also provided with a more conventional form of therapy called mindfulness.
Mindfulness encourages people to be present in the now and here of situations, instead of focusing on or replaying negative thoughts.
The women were split into two groups, with one given body odour to smell, while the other was given clean air and acted as the control group.
The researchers observed that the group that was given the body odour to smell tended to perform better during mindfulness therapy.
The researchers will present some of their early findings at a medical conference in Paris this week.
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