MModern life seems designed to keep us from being alone with our thoughts and feelings. Our days are built from the bricks of work and play, cemented by media and intoxicants. It’s understandable: a glimpse behind the curtain can be very uncomfortable. When we pause, too often the mind is drawn to our greatest sources of stress – whether they are problematic relationships or our own critical stories about ourselves.
Scientists have even done that found that quite a few of us would rather give ourselves painful electric shocks than wait 15 minutes in a distraction-free room. Most people agree that we need a break from constant activity every now and then, but we don’t seem to be able to take advantage of our free time; The rumination comes in and spoils what should be a period of respite. Distraction is one option – but why is Netflix now necessary to take time to ‘chill’?
And what if trying to keep yourself busy during those quiet moments would do more harm than good? At this point you might be thinking, “Why not fill my free time with things I enjoy?” The problem is that keeping our brains busy is not an effective form of relief. Instead, feeling the world—the sunlight on your skin, a gurgle in your stomach, the thump of your heartbeat—without falling back into thoughts and judgments is what enriches and restores us. Before you label that emotion that seems to be bubbling up, ask yourself: What does it feel like? Because if we can’t stay with the raw sensations, but instead get stuck in ideas about those sensations, it can actually have disastrous consequences for our mental health.
That’s what we found in it our researchwhich examined how the balance between thinking and feeling influences well-being. Firstly, we evoked uncomfortable feelings in people by having them watch sad videos in an MRI scanner. As expected, those clips activated brain areas used for thinking and judgment, as people engaged in relating each scene to their own experience. Perhaps surprisingly, however, we found that there was no link between the level of this conceptual activity and poor mental health. It is normal to explore and explain emotional experiences in your mind. But a different reaction did predicting problems: In response to sadness, many people shut down activity in sensory areas of the brain, especially in areas used to process the body’s feelings. And it turned out that the greater a participant’s level of sensory disconnection, the higher they scored on measures of depression.
This finding reveals something important about life’s quiet moments. It is not our ability to control internal judgments and stories that determine our happiness. Instead, well-being depends on whether such thoughts are informed by new information, the source of which is the dynamic flow of sensations. We found the same pattern in a second studyone of the largest of its kind. This time we focused on people with a history of depression and contacted them for two years after scanning their brains. People who turned off the sensation in response to sad scenes were 25 times more likely to relapse into depression than their peers who kept the sensation alive.
Why exactly does this happen? It appears that dampening the body’s input can help control the deep-seated sensations that you may want to avoid because of their association with previous unpleasant experiences. But this temporary relief comes at a cost, and it lasts longer. Because there is no changing mix of sensations to shake things up, the certainty of your sadness persists at the cognitive level, like a piece of software you haven’t updated.
So staying in touch with sensations, especially during times of stress, can be a powerful but overlooked resource for mental health. What we call ‘sensory foraging’, Intentionally shifting attention to the sensory world with a willingness to be surprised is one way to practice this, and it’s a skill that almost anyone can develop. When staying busy and distracting ourselves are both largely automatic thinkTo really give ourselves a break – and reduce our risk of becoming depressed – we need to make the switch feela fundamentally different mode that is responsive rather than agenda-driven. By developing sensory ‘muscles’ we become better at absorbing new information, which stimulates new trains of thought. This will relieve worry, potentially helping you get out of the mental rut you’re stuck in.
The search for the senses does what we wrongly expect from distraction: it provides a restorative counterbalance to a tiring focus on interpretation and response. It can be practiced anywhere, anytime, because the sensation is always available: a breeze on your face, the sting of a sweater on your skin, the pressure on your heels as you stand on the ground, or the smell of coffee coming from your body. body rises. mug. It’s less about finding a special state, like completely clearing the mind or searching for the perfect sunset, and more about dropping by to discover what’s already there: a taste, a texture or feeling, and being curious to what comes next.
If you’re feeling down or preoccupied, you can start right now. Look around you and give yourself a “point” for each thing you notice that you would normally ignore; eat popcorn with chopsticks; listen to a genre of music you don’t like and try to hear it as it sounds; Find out what the air feels like on your elbow or little toe. If it’s something you feel like you would normally avoid or ignore, then you’re on the right track.
The effect is to reawaken the neglected sensory areas of the brain, giving you the freedom to deal with life again; a tonic against the insidious, sensory-numbing effects of stress. Science suggests that with practice, feelings of hopelessness and burnout will diminish and be replaced by hope and the newfound potential for discovery and meaning.
Norman Farb is a neuroscientist and Zindel Segal is a clinical psychologist. They are the authors of Better in every way (Yellow Kite).
after newsletter promotion
Read more
Coming to our senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn (Piatkus, £25)
How emotions are made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett (Pan, £10.99)
Consciously: The science and practice of presence. The Groundbreaking Meditation Practice by Daniel J Siegel (TarcherPigee, £18)