Gladly,
@Elmez.
So, I carry mints everywhere now, because it ridiculously improves my PTSD. I find it very grounding and very calming. It's also something you can do in most social situations or appointments - "would you like a mint?" Is much diff to lighting up a smoke or similar.
For those interested in the science....
I have a background as an EEG tech and have just started neurofeedback, as well as being super interested in seeing PTSD as a brain condition rather than a wholly psychological one - because it isn't, it actually changes the physical structure of your brain.
Chewing relieves the amygdala - It's a way of sending it "we're safe" signals. The amygdala is the part of the brain at the back that we share with pretty much everything from the prehistoric age - lizards included. You don't pull a sandwich out of your pocket while you're being attacked by a sabretooth tiger, so chewing and taste stimuli calm that bit of your brain down.
Secondly, smell/taste is the sense most strongly linked to memory. One of the things PTSD, particularly CPTSD, does to your brain, is it shrinks your hippocampus. The hippocampus is in the middle of the brain, and controls the "where/when" function. The sense circuits for smell are located closest to the hippocampus. Why PTSD brains have such trouble with triggers, and dissociation, is because this part of the brain goes offline and doesn't do it's job of telling us where/when we are.
Thirdly, you can train your brain to respond in a particular way to a particular stimuli, kind of like a reverse trigger. If I chew mints when I do my breathing exercises, when I'm out in public and need that state of chill, I chew a mint, which tells my body I'm safe and returns my breathing to normal.
I kinda started before I bothered to think about 'why' though, mainly for dissociation rather than calming panic/anxiety, but it works really well for me.
