How to reduce nose blindness

There are a few ways you can try to reduce nose blindness and get a better sense of what your home smells like. Let’s look at four strategies that may help.

Leave the area

The simplest way to reduce nose blindness in your home or another area where you spend a lot of time is to leave for a period of time and then return.

If you’ve ever been out of your home for a period of time and then upon returning notice that it smells different than it did before you left, you’ve already experienced this.

To detect odors in your home, the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission recommends leaving your house for a few minutes and then reentering.

Exercise

It may seem strange, but breaking a sweat could help out your sense of smell. In fact, a 2014 study found that older adults who exercised regularly had a lower risk of developing an impaired sense of smell.

How exactly exercise affects your sense of smell isn’t known. However, vigorous exercise, like cardio, definitely increases blood flow throughout your body, including in your nose. This may help you pick up on scents.

Coffee

Coffee has been anecdotally reported as a potential palate cleanser for the nose. One hypothesis is that some odorants found in coffee may have properties that displace other odorants from scent-detecting nerve cells.

However, a 2011 study didn’t support this. Study participants smelled several specific scents multiple times, leading to nose blindness. They then sniffed coffee, lemon, or plain air and were asked to identify a scent afterward.

According to the study, people who’d inhaled coffee didn’t perform any better at scent identification than those that had inhaled lemon or plain air.

Be aware of it

While we don’t recommend stressing out too much over your home’s scent, being aware of it may help reduce nose blindness.

The reason for this is that when you consciously make an effort to think about something, your brain focuses more attention on it. This, in turn, may make you more sensitive to odors that you may have ignored before.