Photo by Fabian Blank
The Ability to Smell Really Matters!
Until now my blogs have primarily focused on neti pots, sinus congestion and allergies. But if I am to write about the nose, I can’t ignore smell. Why do we get so out of whack when our noses are congested? It could be that we have a sinus headache and aren’t sleeping well, but it’s more complicated than that. Our ability to smell informs us of our world in ways you may not realize.
Rachel Herz wrote a book titled the Scent of Desire. She explains smell this way: if two people were to get in a car accident and one person were to go blind and the other person were to lose their sense of smell, the one who would recover to a productive life is the person who went blind.
This shocked me!! As someone who fears losing my sight over any other sense, I couldn’t believe it. As can be expected, our ability to smell is deeply linked to our satisfaction of food and our sexual desire, but I didn’t realize how deeply it is linked to our emotional states. Those individuals that permanently lose their smell (called anosmia) spend a lifetime fighting depression.
Herz explains that no other sense is so closely linked to emotions. Smells move through our limbic brain, which is the center of our emotions. If smell is absent we feel a strange disconnect from the world and may not even realize it. On the most basic level, being able to smell is an assessment of what is good and bad. In other words, we approach that which smells good, and avoid that which smells bad. Imagine biting into a piece of meat that is slightly rancid, and not even knowing it. Or not being able to detect the danger of smoke in your own home. I could create pages of examples like this, but I’m sure you get the idea. The ability to smell really matters!
While being a chronic sinus sufferer isn’t the same as completely losing your ability to smell, you can see it may impact you in ways you didn’t realize. If you feel your world is a little off since you began having sinus problems, you’re not crazy. I suggest reading the Scent of Desire to really understand how smell influences your life.
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