Name: Life in Five Senses
Rating: 4.2 (36 reviews)
Author: Gretchen Rubin

What’s in it for me? Unlock your senses

What’s your relationship with your body?

Many people are like dutiful janitors to their bodies – they try to keep themselves in good working order. But what if, instead of pulling shifts as your body’s grumbling janitor, you could experience your body as a temple, and yourself as an ecstatic worshiper?

It’s possible to bring about this radical change in your relationship with yourself. And the key – or perhaps we should say the five keys – lie in learning to awaken and engage your senses.

Are you ready to embark on the profound and joyful process of reconnecting with yourself and your myriad sensory capabilities?

Then let’s begin.

Don’t just see – look

The artist Andy Warhol once observed: “Nobody ever really looks at anything. It’s too hard.”

Now, your first instinct might be to disagree with Warhol. Hang on Andy, you might think, I’m looking at a banana or a teaspoon or – insert whatever you’re looking at here – right now. But are you really looking? Are you paying attention to the brown spots and streaks splashed across the banana’s yellow skin? Or the blurred convex reflection in the teaspoon’s silver bowl?

Most of us use our sight in a utilitarian way much of the time – we use it to negotiate a traffic crossing, weave through a crowd, or scan a supermarket for milk and eggs. We can become so focused on our visual objective that we miss what’s surprising and unexpected – how else did those Game of Thrones producers not notice that infamous Starbucks cup on the table in one of the fantasy drama’s tense final scenes?

Luckily, you can learn to look – really look – instead of contenting yourself with seeing. Here are a few exercises to sharpen your sense of sight:

Give yourself homework. The next time you go for a walk around your neighborhood, set yourself a challenge to notice three hats or find five diamond-shaped things.

Stare into the face of someone you know well. Everything you see is actually filtered from your eyes and through your brain before you register it. Your brain spends a disproportionate amount of processing power on other people’s faces. That’s because faces are a trove of useful information. Notice this person’s expression – the arch of their eyebrows, the shape their mouth is held in. What does it tell you?

Notice color. Did you know different languages label colors differently? For example, Pirahã speakers in the Brazilian Amazon only use “light” or “dark” to describe colors, while in Russian there are two different words for light blue and dark blue. What colors speak to you and how could you describe them? Mushroom gray? Frog-belly green? McDonald’s arches yellow?

Make a point of looking at the same thing twice – or more! Pick a favorite sight – the view from a certain window at a certain time of day, for example – and revisit it over and over. What stays the same? What’s different?

Finally, perhaps there’s something you’d like to spend less time looking at. It might be resting in your pocket or sitting beside you on the table right now. That’s right, I’m talking about your mobile phone. It’s specifically designed to be visually enticing. That’s why it’s so hard to put down. If you change it to grayscale you’ll soon find you spend way less time gazing down at a tiny screen – leaving you with more time to experience the magic of looking around.

Hearing is magic

As with all the senses, there’s a perfectly logical scientific explanation for how and why your sense of hearing works. Basically, the world is full of vibrations. These vibrations are picked up by your ear, based on their frequency and intensity, then sifted through your outer ear, middle ear, and inner ear, until they’re transmitted to your brain where they register as sound.

But just think about the kaleidoscope of ways in which you experience these vibrations: a symphony by Mozart, a child’s laughter, the song of a whale. Magical, right?

Stop and smell the roses

Try eating a strawberry jellybean while you’re holding your nose and you’ll be surprised at how little of that strawberry flavor you actually taste. The tastebuds on your tongue only register the key taste groups, like sour or bitter. With your nose plugged, all you get of that jellybean’s flavor is a big dose of “sweet.” But try again with your nose unplugged and you’ll taste every facet of that red, juicy, sugary strawberry flavor. And that’s what your sense of smell does – it’s a sense that brings everything alive and into sharper focus.

For the Onge people of the Andaman Islands, smell is such an integral part of life that they structure their calendar around what smells are prevalent on the islands at different times. In other cultures, smell is more of an afterthought. But it shouldn’t be! Here are a few tasks that will help hone your sense of smell.

Center yourself through touch

You see with your eyes, hear with your eyes, smell with your nose, and taste with your tongue – but you touch with your whole body. You register touch through the organ of your skin, which covers your whole body.

Touch brings you, quite literally, closer to others. And this desire for proximity seems to be innate to almost everybody. Studies show that babies who experience plenty of skin-to-skin contact with their primary caregivers put on weight more quickly, sleep more, and cry less. Adults, too, benefit from the experience of being touched. Being touched by another has been shown to lower blood pressure, improve sleep, and prompt the body to release natural painkillers. Socially appropriate forms of touching – like a handshake between newly introduced colleagues, or a warm hug between friends – can build feelings of trust and esteem.

Key ideas in Life in Five Senses