What the Smell of Fresh Bread Can Teach Us About Our Brains—and Our Needs

THERE’S A COFFEE place in my neighborhood where I often go to work. I’ve been there many times, hundreds, but one recent visit was memorable.

I stepped in the door and noticed the smell of cinnamon and fresh pastries. My coffee tasted richer and smoother than usual. I appreciated the artwork on the walls and the tastefulness of the little lamps on the tables.

None of these things was new. The smell of cinnamon is always there, and the coffee is always great. The artworks and lamps hadn’t changed. The difference was that I’d been out of town for almost two months—visiting family in the US, and then on a long sailing trip from France to Norway—and after all that time away, my coffee place’s many little charms seemed refreshed, as though I’d been experiencing them through a haze that had suddenly cleared.

In my book The Habit Trap, I talk about a phenomenon I’ve come to think of as the bakery smell effect.

Imagine walking into a bakery. The smell of fresh bread hits you. It’s unmissable, and wonderful. But as you stand in line, waiting to buy your boule or baguette, the smell begins to fade. The longer you stand there, the less you notice it. Within fifteen minutes, even if you really try, you probably won’t be able to smell the bread at all.

Where did the smell go? It’s still there, of course. But as your brain and senses got used to it, they tuned it out.

The technical term for this tuning out is “olfactory fatigue.” It’s a form of habituation, which is the process by which the human brain gradually disregards familiar stimuli unless something new or unexpected appears.

Your brain does this so that you aren’t endlessly absorbed or distracted by the same things. Habituation frees up our attention and other cognitive resources for planning, problem solving, and other important mental work. And it happens with both pleasant and unpleasant stimuli. (If you stood in a room full of dog shit, that smell would gradually fade away too.)

The problem with habituation is that if you spend a lot of time in familiar environments, doing the same things the same ways, you can become increasingly habituated to everything around you. Since there isn’t much to grab and hold your attention—nothing novel or surprising that challenges your mental models of the experience—you can end up spending too much time knocking around in your own head, your thoughts and attention always somewhere else, never here. You become the opposite of mindful.

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I learned all this the hard way.

For years, I was rigid and methodical when it came to my daily routines. I’d absorbed a lot of the self-optimization messaging that promotes strong habits as the surest path to success, and I thought that I needed to be very consistent and deliberate with my time if I wanted to achieve my goals. But as time passed and I grew more habituated to my routines, I also felt increasingly disconnected and unhappy.

I didn’t realize it back then, but habituation is just one of several aspects of our biology that push us to explore new things and to branch out in different directions.

For example, researchers who study the human brain and behavior have discovered a so-called “novelty bonus.” Given the choice between two options—one familiar and the other unfamiliar—we tend to naturally prefer the unfamiliar option. As a team of University College London neuroscientists put it in a 2008 study, “The desire to seek new and unfamiliar experiences is a fundamental behavioral tendency in humans.”

When we ignore or suppress this tendency, we get into trouble. A life drained of its novelty and unplanned exploration leaves us feeling disengaged and desensitized. It numbs us, in other words, and this numbness limits our creativity, narrows our perspective, and walls us off from the forms of self-discovery and inspiration that underlie many of our joys and successes.

There’s that expression: the dose makes the poison. Habits and routines are fine in moderation. They can do a lot of helpful things for us. But like all else in life and health, it’s important to get the balance right.

In the same way the smell of fresh bread fades the longer we linger in a bakery, we can lose touch with life’s wonders and pleasures if we don’t move around enough to renew our appreciation for them.

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