Follow your nose

On self-trust and coming back to ourselves

Photo by Catia Climovich on Unsplash

During a brief bout with COVID in December, I noticed my sense of smell waning. Alarm bells first went off one evening while I was sautéing garlic and ginger for carrot-ginger soup.

Standing crouched over the stove, as a matter of habit, I craned my neck forward, awaiting the plush scent of the aromatics. It’s a ritual. Whenever I cook, I lean in toward the steam, my pores awakening to the rich lather of spices, herbs, roots, bulbs.

Usually, one hint of warm ginger in a hot pan is enough to confer some psychosomatic healing to whatever ails me. But as I stood there, eager for the savory cloud to light up the pleasure center in my brain, there was nothing.

I shoved my face closer and closer to the pot, huffing and sniffing, my cheeks burning from the gas flame inches away. Still nada. Panic set in.

My thoughts went to the worst-case scenario—what if I could never smell again? Without a sense of smell, what would life be?

I thought of all my favorite scents and how important they were to my most cherished memories: The calming mix of wood-pine and desert sand at the top of the San Jacinto mountains. The smack of brine and agave from the Adriatic sea. The deep leather roast of my morning coffee. The voluptuous, piquant crush of garlic cooking in oil, floating out of windows in Lisbon, Venice, San Juan, Los Angeles, New York, South Philly—the clarion cry that rings out across the world telling me: Good food found here.

Wherever I go on this Earth, I follow my nose.

And smell is not only a crucial component of specific memories; it is the most potent conjurer of broad sense-memories too. We smell autumn before the leaves fall. We smell spring before the weather changes. And each time it brings forth, not necessarily a particular scene or moment, but an amalgam of every autumn or spring past—a swooning general feeling that encapsulates the entire season: A lifetime of autumns in a fleeting whiff of cracked leaf and crisp air. Every single spring in an inhale.

Our nose tells us where we’ve been and where we’re going; it holds our entire life story. And that triggers a scary thought: If we lose that sense, we lose ourselves. Yes, metaphorically of course. But perhaps also literally. Because what about survival?

We don’t merely sniff out pleasure and nourishment. We follow our nose to safety. We smell smoke and know to run away from the fire. We sense the pungent rot of past-due produce and steer clear, avoiding food poisoning. Our nose is an essential component of our internal navigation system, steering us towards what’s good for us, helping us discern what’s dangerous, and alerting us to our surroundings. It keeps us alive.

It’s no wonder that in English, we use the expression of having a “nose” for something as a metonym for being uniquely attuned, alert, or wise. An investigator has a “nose” for deception, honed from years of figuring out when somebody’s lying. A reporter has a “nose” for a good story, honed from experience figuring out what’s newsworthy. If something passes the “smell test,” it means it is trustworthy as assessed by our best available judgment.

Our nose is a stand-in for good sense, awareness, perception, and cumulative expertise. It’s the sum of our parts, carrying the legacy of everything we’ve ever learned, loved, feared, or experienced.

So you can see why I was freaking out.

Faced with the prospect of losing my smell, I rushed to find a solution, to ensure my most powerful tool for making sense of the world would not be lost forever.

Thankfully, frantic googling turned up many helpful insights from a variety of healthcare and medical research sources. I learned that there are three types of smell loss, anosmia (total loss), hyposmia (total loss), and parosmia (distorted sense of smell). And the good news is that the solution is the same for all three: The way to reverse smell-loss is through a process called olfactory training or smell retaining therapy. It consists of choosing two or three essential oils—like peppermint, eucalyptus, or cinnamon—and devoting ten full seconds to smelling each of them at least twice a day.

Dr. Timothy Smith, who has spent his career helping patients regain their sense of smell, takes it a step further. He advises fortifying the brain-to-nose connection through the power of thought: “I’d smell cinnamon and think or say to myself, ‘This is what cinnamon smells like,’ just to try to get all of those connections working again.”

This struck a chord with me—the meditative nature of taking a pause and explicitly reinforcing the truth of my perception with language: This is cinnamon. This is eucalyptus. This is peppermint. (As somebody who is working tirelessly on building self-trust in therapy, this is when a window into the power of this exercise beyond medical necessity first opened in my mind.)

Desperate to reverse my smell loss, I took to the practice with furious devotion. I sniffed eucalyptus oil first, saying to myself, you know what this smells like, you can trust your body, you can trust your nose. Reassuring myself. The smell was faint but as I repeated the incantation “this is eucalyptus,” I could feel an awakening in my synapses.

The same with peppermint. There was almost no scent at first, but slowly, a prickle in my follicles, my hair standing at attention, yes, this is peppermint, I remember.

But the most powerful conduit to my nose was cinnamon sticks from my spice cupboard. Whereas I had to strain to grasp the scent profile of eucalyptus and peppermint, cinnamon permeated my dulled senses instantly, penetrating my brain with sharp, warm precision where no other smell could.

Cinnamon was my savior. The soaring relief of being able to really smell something in its full vibrancy pinged some deep emotional wound, surprising me. I got choked up. It was about more than a fear of losing my smell; I was afraid of losing my selfhood entirely.

Over the course of a few days, I began to delight in the practice of smell retraining. Eucalyptus and peppermint were my warm-up scents, a bit of a slog—the pall of homework. And cinnamon would be my dessert smell, my reward.

I would cup the tiny jar of cinnamon sticks in my hands like a mug of hot chocolate and breathe in its heady, woodsy bouquet flecked with cocoa-vanilla accents. And I’d perform a meditation: Inhale, exhale, this is cinnamon. Inhale, exhale, this is cinnamon.

Each recitation was an exercise in building self-trust: My nose knows how to navigate the world. My body is capable of repair. My mind is elastic and resilient. My perception is attuned and my senses are accurate.

It worked faster than expected. Within a week or so of doing my olfactory training religiously, my smell had returned to its full strength. It was a self-reinforcing exercise: The more I trusted my body and brain, the faster my recovery, and the more heightened and powerful my senses became. And as I performed the smell therapy, it continued to be surprisingly emotional.

Something about dedicating time to my own senses, to my ability to orienteer in a chaotic world, free from outside influence, taking the time to come back to myself and receiving the immediate feedback—a tangible reward of my smell strengthening each day—it was healing a wound during a time of great personal upheaval. It was an awakening. And it was right on time.

In the final months of last year, I underwent a profound transformation in my political and social orientation and reassessed and reconnected to my values.

I’ve emerged a center-left normie liberal and have since shed any association with the political Left or so-called Progressivism. And I’m not ashamed. Sneering lefties have all but turned the word “liberal” into a slur in recent history and I used to capitulate to their framing of liberals as weak or impure, not wanting to be seen as unworthy of approval. But not anymore. I’m proud to reject the zealotry and extremism of both the Right and the Left. I disavow radicalism and embrace practical, incremental solutions to real-world problems. Now, I wear the badge of liberalism happily.

And I’m no longer interested in insular groups or movements. I have fewer allegiances and no masters. I’ve learned I should take each issue, belief, and person as they come, sizing them up on their own merits, each having to pass their own smell test on a case-by-case basis.

These were hard lessons. And I had to face some uncomfortable truths. I realized, in my quest for a more just and fair world, I had inadvertently lost my own “nose” for what’s right and what’s true.

I’m grateful to

Elissa Altman

’s quoting this line from Mary Oliver in a recent newsletter: “You must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.” This is exactly what I’d been doing. I’d become lazy, complacent. Shirking my responsibility. Letting online randos sniff out the truth for me and accepting their assessment instead of putting my face to the fire and finding out for myself.

I’d been outsourcing my moral code to so-called “progressive” strangers on the internet who trade in groupthink, communal narcissism, bias, authoritarianism, and coercive control, and who commandeer a massive misinformation system disseminated through pastel Instagram posts, academic psychobabble, and outrage-tweets. And I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten until I watched leftists cheering terrorism, rape, and torture in October. The jolt I felt then was the same exact spark as cinnamon sticks electrifying the dead battery in my olfactories. The message from my neurons was as vivid as the luxe, salty smell of buttered popcorn: This is wrong. And also, there was the dank, sulfuric sniff of warning: Danger, run. These people are not safe.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. I ran.

Sure, I had always been aware of murderous sloganeering and tantruming on the Right. But now I saw it clearly, that the people on what I used to think of as “my side” were just as bad—(as

Noah Smith

put it: Leftists Have Lost the Plot). I had so wanted to be “good” and “moral”—and to be seen as such by the in-group—that for many years I had suppressed my own judgement and was no longer thinking for myself. My nose was asleep at the wheel.

This is how polarization works. We succumb to tribalism, surrendering our identity to the mob, not realizing how much we’ve dulled our senses. But we can get them back.

In my internet research about smell retraining, I learned “The longer someone experiences smell loss or distortion, the more challenging it can be to reverse.” Challenging, but not impossible. It’s never too late. It wasn’t for me.

No matter how far gone, whether we’ve lost our nose for our values entirely, only partially, or they’ve been distorted by a desire to belong in a scary world and an overwhelming information ecosystem, the solution is the same. We train in self-trust. We practice coming back to ourselves. We heed the signals and the warnings. We remember who we are. We parse our beliefs, identifying each one, sniffing them out dutifully. The more we do it, the stronger we get.

It all starts with an inhale, exhale, I know myself. Inhale, exhale, I trust my heart to show me what’s right and what’s wrong. Inhale, exhale, I believe in my own moral calibration. Inhale, exhale, and follow your nose.