The smell of anxiety

It’s a stressful world in many ways…if you choose to see it that way. The kids want your attention, work is demanding, your clothes seem to be shrinking, governments worldwide seem to be operating outside the system of logic, and infomercials dominate the small screen. In face of all this a little bit of anxiety is a normal response. When that anxiety becomes prolonged and removed from any specific cause however, it becomes a physical and mental problem even to the extent of changing how the world smells to you.

This effect of anxiety on your sense of smell has been shown in a new study that had people rate a series of smells as either pleasant, neutral, or negative. The subjects then entered an MRI machine to measure brain activity and were exposed to a series of anxiety-provoking images including car crashes and war footage. After watching those scenes the subjects were then asked to again rate smells that they had previously judged as neutral while still having their brains scanned for activity by the MRI.

The anxiety of the imagery viewed resulted in the subjects rating smells previously judged as neutral as being negative. The researchers also noted that two circuits in the brain, one involved with processing smells and the other in processing emotions, became intimately intertwined in terms of activity. This is interesting because those two parts of the brain usually operate independently but under the impact of anxiety they functionally link up.

All of this means that when you are anxious the world smells bad to you and this creates a negative feedback loop that you might call a “putrid cycle”. You feel anxious and so you perceive neutral things as smelling bad which indicates negative things making you feel more anxious and so the cycle goes. It points to the need to find ways to break the perceptual circuit that underlies anxiety and highlights why people can get locked into a spiral of anxiety. In other words, anxiety stinks.