Follow Your Nose
Smells can spark such powerful emotions! Our brains are wired so that our olfactory system is directly connected to our emotions and memory (one theory for why loss of smell from COVID has left many people grappling with depression).
Lift a low mood, give a focus for meditation practice, or just find inspiration to sit down and relax. Breathe your favorite "ahhh!" smells with a good scents practice!
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More information: specifics of smell training, a researcher talks about the mystery of smells, read a fascinating study about odor-invoked memories.
Transcript:
You know how a smell can make you swoon, bring back a vivid memory, or zap you to your happy place? You can do that on purpose!" “How to Make Good Sense of Good Scents” Lift your mood, calm your anxiety, or just give yourself an oasis of sweetness. Get a whiff of olfaction into your coping toolkit!
!mage: Diagram of the brain, focusing on the scent traveling through the nose, to the olfactory bulb, to the amygdala (emotions) and hippocampus (memory). Text: A smell can bring on vivid emotions and memories because the olfactory system is part of the limbic system, where we process emotion and memory.
You can tap into this powerful system by deliberately choosing and inhaling scents that make you go “ahhh”. First, pick out about four ajjj scents. Try for a range! Spicy (cinnamon, cloves), fruity (lemon, pineapple), floral (rose, jasmine), fresh (eucalyptus, mint).
Essential oils are a great source of scents, sold in holistic medicine shops, bougie grocery stores, or online, Sniff directly from the bottle or put a few drops oil in some water. Or you might use a candle, soap, spices, tea leaves, etc!
Note: our perceptions of smells are influenced by our experiences and cultures, so everyone’s smell preferences and emotional associations are different. A wet dog that smells like home might be better than bathroom freshener lavender! What smells ahhh to you? tiger balm? picke juice? blue cheese? play-doh?
Now, make sense of your good scents!
1. Sit down with your scents. Relax. Close your eyes. Take a slow, deep breath,
2. Inhale your scents one at a time, slowly and mindfully, for 4 breaths each, or det a timer for 45 seconds each, Enjoy!
3. After your last scent, take one more slow, deep breath, and open your eyes.
4. You could add a good scents practice to your daily routine, or keep it as an occasional mood reboot coping tool. Modify and make it yours! More/fewer deep breaths of each. A regular sequence. Random sequences, More scents, Before meditation, For a strict program, search “olfactory training”.
Ahhh!
