How to truly connect with your senses

Our senses are our superpower – learn how to truly connect with them and in turn, connect with the people you love here.

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in The Guardian

When we tune into our senses, we are more present in the moment and we also feel more connected to our memories. We feel calmer yet more energetic. We have more moments of fun, delight and awe. And, best of all, our senses can help us connect with those we love.

Here’s how to fully tap into your senses and bring your body back to life.

Tasting

Enjoying our sense of taste with other people is one of the oldest human customs. What we eat, with whom we eat and how we eat are choices that tie us to our identity, our memories and our culture.

To tap into your sense of taste:

 Write a “tastes timeline” of your life. What food and drink do you associate with different periods? Revisit a family recipe, a restaurant or an ingredient that holds memories.

 Invent an ice-cream, a sandwich, a pizza, a casserole or another dish.

Smell and taste combine to give us an item’s ‘flavour’. Without smell, we experience only the basic tastes. Test this phenomenon: plug your nose, put a jellybean in your mouth and taste plain ‘sweet’, then unplug your nose to get a complex hit of cherry, coconut or whatever it might be.

Seeing

To tap into your sense of sight:

Look for what is overlooked: pharmacy shelves, book jackets, houses in your area. What details do you notice when you look closely?

To make it easier to put down your smartphone, switch your display to greyscale, so it appears in black, white and grey. Research shows this can make social media feeds and mobile games less appealing.

Find an inexpensive way to add a splash of colour: use a pen with an interesting shade; wear a bright colour; paint a cabinet; add a paperweight to your desk.

Hearing

To tap into your sense of sound:

Research – and experience – show that listening to a favourite upbeat song is an easy, quick way to change your mood, so create an ‘audio apothecary’. To cure the blues, for example, make a playlist of your favourite high-energy songs.

Attend a concert or try a sound bath. While it is wonderful to have so much recorded sound available to us, nothing can replace a live performance.

Improve your smartphone sounds. Choose a more pleasant alarm tone, assign a custom tone to people who are important to you, turn off unnecessary notifications.

Smelling

With a beautiful scent, we can’t bookmark it, rewind it, stockpile it or save it for later. Because of odour fatigue – by which a smell begins to fade as soon as we have processed it – we can’t experience a smell for more than a few moments.

So, through the power of smell, we have the sense of being exactly where we are, at that moment, in our body.

To tap into your sense of smell:

With one nostril plugged, then the other, take a sniff of a strong smell and compare how each nostril registers a slightly different impression.

Notice that, because of odour fatigue, you can’t smell your home the way a guest would smell it.

Grab a jar from your spice collection, open it and, without checking the label, give the contents a sniff. Can you identify it?

Touching

Our sense of touch plays a special role in our relationship with other people. Touch helps to lower stress, blood pressure and pain; boosts our immune system and mood; and helps us to sleep better.

We benefit from many kinds of touch: a hug from a friend, a handshake from a colleague, a massage, or holding a cat or a dog.

To tap into your sense of touch:

Search out interesting textures, such as tinfoil, sandpaper, sheepskin, sisal or cacti.

Visit a shop where you can touch the merchandise. Feel the solid heft of a hammer, or the smooth, light cotton of dishtowels.

Spark creativity by visiting a place that lets you get your hands on materials for creative, touch-based work: a farmers market, a hardware shop, a gardening centre, a flea market or an art-supply shop.