Listening to Your Five Senses to Find More Peace
Paige A. Mitchell
We all live busy lives. Rushing to and from work, participating in extracurricular activities, caring for children and loved ones, all of which can lead to stressand make us feel frazzled by the end of the day.
Our homes should be our sanctuaries, a place of comfort and peace that we can relax and recharge our batteries each night. There are many ways we can help make our house more peaceful, but the best place to start is with the basics. Paying attention to our five senses and responses from them can help create that calming space you have been searching for.
Sight
Many of us stare at computer screens all day for work. Even if you don’t have a technological aspect to your job, your office might have harsh fluorescent lighting. Taking a few minutes each day when you are home to shift your focus can help calm your mind and rest your eyes.
● Put down your phone and turn off the TV. Give your eyes a break from blue lightand pick up a good book instead. No Kindles or tablets either! Just a good, old fashioned book.
● Hang photographs from vacations and happy family memories around the house. Take time every day to focus and reflect on the moments.
● Declutter living spaces starting with the foyer. Your home can feel immediately stressful if the place where you first walk in the door is a mess. Develop a landing area to put away bags, mail and other items that can pile up and cause feelings of stress and anxiety.
● Refresh the paint in your bedroom or other main living area with a calm, soothing color.
Smell
Psychology Today reportsthat our sense of smell is closely tied to our memory. Fill your home with scents that bring back familiar memories, like following grandma’s apple pie recipe that smells—and tastes—exactly like hers. Add some new scents too. Ones that you will associate with your present life and peaceful home.
● Find the recipe for your favorite dinner that your mother made for you as a child, and make it tonight to be transported back to that time.
● Light a subtly scented candle to fill your home with a calming scent. Lavender and jasmine are good options to consider.
● Troubleshoot unpleasant odors in your house. Food that spoils before its expiration date may indicate your refrigerator isn’t operating correctly while a mildew-like smell coming for your ducts may signal a problem with your heating and cooling unit. Fortunately, both of these items are typically covered under home warranties, according to House Method, and they can be fixed by a professional for a discounted price without adding unnecessary stress to your life.
● Cut some fresh flowers and put them on display in your kitchen, then literally take time to stop and smell the roses.
Sound
Sounds can affect and lift our mood almost instantaneously. After a long day being bombarded with outside noise it is important to select the right sounds at home to set a calming, peaceful space.
● Incorporate musicinto your everyday life at home. There are so many options for streaming background music with smart technologies, allowing you to build a custom playlist.
● Find soothing background noise when you sleep, such as a white noise machines or a box fan.
● If you live in a noisy area or shared apartment building, add insulation or lay area rugs to soundproof your home, helping to cancel out distracting noise.
Touch
Many of us don’t experience much touch throughout the day thanks to desk jobs and computer screens. On the other hand, caregivers and full-time parents may be totally “touched out” by the end of the day.
● Have a pair of comfortable clothes to slip into once you get home from work. Soft, comfortable fabrics and fuzzy cozy slippers will help you relax immediately.
● Soft, weighted blanketsrelieve stress and anxiety while you unwind and read a book.
● Draw a hot bath and sink into it. Add some bath bombs for added, relaxing scent.
● Pet your cat or dog. Take time to feel the softness of their fur, and their purr in response to your touch.
● Pay close attention to seemingly small sensations. There can be something really refreshing about walking barefoot through the grass on your way to the mailbox or feeling the warmth of the sunshine on your lunch break.
Taste
In busy lives we often grab breakfast on the way out the door, eat lunch at our desks, and utilize the drive through at fast food restaurants. Some of us skip full meals in order to get more work done. This takes a toll on our health and our mood.
● Plan for at least one meal at home a week. Sit down, turn off phones and television and really enjoy the meal you prepared.
● Try one new recipe a week. Or find a favorite and stick with it, knowing you will have it to look forward to every week.
● Chocolate. Need I say more?
There are many ways you can make your home more relaxing as a space to decompress at the end of a busy day. Tune into your five senses to help make your home a sanctuary that helps you decompress at the end of the day, and allows you to jumpstart your mornings energized and ready to tackle the future.
Teaching the Neurons to Meditate
July 10, 2011 —
Science Daily/Association for Psychological Science
In the late 1990s, Jane Anderson was working as a landscape architect. That meant she didn't work much in the winter, and she struggled with seasonal affective disorder in the dreary Minnesota winter months. She decided to try meditation and noticed a change within a month. "My experience was a sense of calmness, of better ability to regulate my emotions," she says. Her experience inspired a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, which finds changes in brain activity after only five weeks of meditation training.
Previous studies have found that Buddhist monks, who have spent tens of thousands of hours of meditating, have different patterns of brain activity. But Anderson, who did this research as an undergraduate student together with a team of University of Wisconsin-Stout faculty and students, wanted to know if they could see a change in brain activity after a shorter period.
At the beginning of the study, each participant had an EEG, a measurement of the brain's electrical activity. They were told: "Relax with your eyes closed, and focus on the flow of your breath at the tip of your nose; if a random thought arises, acknowledge the thought and then simply let it go by gently bringing your attention back to the flow of your breath."
Then 11 people were invited to take part in meditation training, while the other 10 were told they would be trained later. The 11 were offered two half-hour sessions a week, and encouraged to practice as much as they could between sessions, but there wasn't any particular requirement for how much they should practice.
After five weeks, the researchers did an EEG on each person again. Each person had done, on average, about seven hours of training and practice. But even with that little meditation practice, their brain activity was different from the 10 people who hadn't had training yet. People who had done the meditation training showed a greater proportion of activity in the left frontal region of the brain in response to subsequent attempts to meditate. Other research has found that this pattern of brain activity is associated with positive moods.
The shift in brain activity "was clearly evident even with a small number of subjects," says Christopher Moyer, one of Anderson's coauthors at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. "If someone is thinking about trying meditation and they were thinking, 'It's too big of a commitment, it's going to take too much rigorous training before it has an effect on my mind,' this research suggests that's not the case." For those people, meditation might be worth a try, he says. "It can't hurt and it might do you a lot of good."
"I think this implies that meditation is likely to create a shift in outlook toward life," Anderson says. "It has really worked for me."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110707173321.htm