Are you looking for ways to manage stress
or improve your self-care routine?
You've got access to some great coping skills
within your own body using your five senses.
I'm going to show you how to tap into the power
of your senses.
I'm Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist,
and I make mental health education videos.
We have five senses that gather data from our environment
and influence how we experience the world.
The thoughts we have are shaped
by the information we get from our senses.
Just as we can experience stressful situations as negative
based on what we get from our senses,
we can also use our senses to our advantage.
We can selectively give our senses positive input
to create a positive emotional response.
Let's look at each sense
and how you can use them to reduce distress.
Think of each sense as having a receptor
that gathers information and then transmits that information
back to the brain through a circuit of nerves.
That's how it works.
First, there's vision.
Your eyes are the receptors that take in the information
and send that information back to your visual cortex
of your brain, which is located in the back of your brain.
Here are three ways you can use your sight
to reduce anxiety or distress.
The first is doing guided visualization meditations.
Don't let the word meditation scare you
if you're not a meditator.
It's a very easy way to meditate.
You already do it to some degree
when you recall a pleasant experience you had
and imagine in your mind what it was like to be there.
For example, you may remember a fun vacation
you took on the beach.
You can see the beach in your mind
and you may remember some of the things that you did,
but, usually, this kind of recall is brief
and happens in a flash with not very many details.
With guided visualization, you sit or lie quietly
and you listen to an audio or someone speaking to you
as they step you through lots of details
about the experience.
With guided visualizations,
the predominant sense you're using is your visual cortex.
However, the experience is enriched
by including a lot of details
that involve your other senses.
So the beach scene would include imagining the warmth
of the air and hearing the breeze of the wind blowing,
so it kind of becomes a multisensory experience
that you're envisioning in your mind.
The richer the detail,
the more it can feel like you're there.
Another visual exercise is simply watching pleasant videos.
Instead of multitasking during your lunch breaks,
take 10 minutes to watch a pleasant video.
It doesn't have to be a nature scene.
It can be whatever you find relaxing,
and then there is coloring.
Research has shown that coloring complex designs,
like the mandala pattern, is more effective at relaxation
than freestyle coloring, where you get get colored pencils
and a blank canvas and color whatever you want.
That can still be relaxing for some people,
but the therapeutic coloring that I'm referring to
is coloring mandala patterns like this one.
You can also bring in other senses to the experience
by noticing how the pens feel in your hands
and the sound of the coloring strokes.
The next sense is hearing or sound.
Three tools that you can use here are listening to music,
nature sounds, or ASMR videos or audio.
Music is powerful.
You know how sometimes you can hear a certain song
and it can totally change your mood?
There are tracks that can lift your spirits
and others that can make you sad.
Music can also bookmark your memories.
You can hear an old tune and then you're right back there.
You can use this effect that music has to your advantage
by listening to soothing music.
Nature sounds have a similar calming effect to music
and these are environmental sounds created by animals
or other elements of nature, like rivers or trees.
A 2021 study by Buxton and colleagues
concluded that nature sounds improve health,
increase positive affect and lower stress and annoyance.
The researchers found that water sounds
had the greatest positive impact
and bird sounds were better at reducing stress
and annoyance.
Autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR,
is a newly defined sensory phenomenon
that is a reflex response that some people get
from certain auditory or visual cues.
I did a video explaining ASMR
that I'll link in the description of this video
if you want to know more about it.
There are tons of ASMR videos
or audio on YouTube that you can watch.
Many people find them relaxing or soothing,
even if they don't experience the ASMR tingling response.
The next sensation is touch.
Deep touch pressure is stimulation that you get
from being held, stroked, swaddled, or firmly touched.
Your skin has touch receptors that sense pressure,
even at short distances from your skin.
So you can tell if someone is about to touch you
or is very close to you.
The pressure receptors in your skin
feed back to your brain's limbic system,
which processes emotional information about the touch.
So, for example, being touched by someone you care about
will feel more pleasurable than touching a doorknob handle.
Deep touch pressure triggers a relaxation response
through your vagus nerve and also stimulates serotonin
and dopamine in your brain.
Here are ways that you can get
this calming emotional response through deep touch pressure.
You can use weighted blankets, a lap pad,
compression vests or massages.
Weighted blankets and lap pads have materials in them,
like glass beads, that make them very heavy.
For a blanket, you should aim to get one that's 10%
of your body weight.
For a lap pad, you want it to be about 5%
of your body weight.
Lap pads are a good way to get this effect at work
without it being very noticeable.
The next sense is smell.
The receptor organ for smell
is located on the other side of the roof of your mouth,
and it's called the olfactory bulb
and wires back to the temporal lobe,
which is a part of the brain involved in emotion regulation.
This is how odors can have a relaxing
or stimulating effect because of their closeness
to the emotional part of our brain.
For stress reduction purposes,
you can inhale essential oils
that contain plant-based chemicals
that have therapeutic effects.
Examples of oils that produce relaxing response
are lavender, sandalwood, neroli,
chamomile, and ylang ylang.
You can diffuse them in a room,
like you get when you go to a spa,
or you can put some drops onto a cloth
or a cotton wick to produce your own single inhaler.
If you don't have essential oils or don't like them,
you can use other pleasant scents,
like candles, perfumed lotions, or even citrus.
The skin of citrus fruits contains oils that you can inhale.
Speaking of citrus, it's a lead-in to the last sense,
which is taste.
Taste is more limited than the other senses
because you don't want to use food to cope.
But tasting pure citrus juice, like sucking on a lemon
or a lime, has a calming effect.
Some people have sucked on a lemon
to help them calm down from a panic attack.
Sipping chamomile tea is another way to use your sense
of taste for calming.
If you want to learn more about aromatherapy, watch this video
and you can watch this other one on ASMR.
Thanks for watching today.
See you next time.