Stressed out? Here’s how to engage your five senses to beat work worries

For years, Laura Rhodes-Levin, a licensed marriage and family therapist, has tried to get the message out that engaging your five senses can help you reduce your work stress. “I always tell my patients, ‘Come to your senses,'” she said.

As the founder of the Missing Peace Center for Anxiety in Agoura Hills, California, she wishes mindfulness was called “bodyness.”

“It’s about getting into your body, and your five senses are the best way to do that,” Rhodes-Levin said. “The last thing our stress needs is to think about ourselves.”

Dr. Heather Stevenson, a licensed clinical psychologist in New York City, explained that you can use your five senses to help relay the sensory input your body receives, which activates your nervous system, telling your body that it is safe to relax and slow down. This is the body’s physiological way of responding to stress and positive stimuli.

“When your body is stressed, it’s like your internal system goes off with alarm bells that set off an alarm that starts to affect how your brain and body react by increasing cortisol,” Stevenson said. “The practice of using your five senses to help reduce stress and regulate your nervous system is part of mindfulness exercises and somatic therapy.”

Having learned and practiced many of these techniques for herself, she now teaches them to clients as part of her therapy practice.

But, you’re a confused New Yorker and always teased. How can you touch your body shape and escape from a period of great work stress? Ahead, therapy professionals share simple techniques to beat work stress through your five senses.

To smell or taste something pleasantly spicy

For the past few months, my husband has had something called a “boom.boom nose stick” on his work table (well, the dining room table, but correcting the tight spaces of WFH in NYC is a story for a next day).
He removes the cap of his mint, winter or tropical aromatherapy inhaler, places it under each nostril and inhales deeply for a few seconds.

Research from Toho University in Japan seems to indicate that Stevenson and my husband are onto something. That’s because “reducing stress by engaging your five senses is about changing your internal state and activating your autonomic and parasympathetic nervous systems in different ways to make your body slow down and regulate,” says Stevenson.

With scent, for example, Stevenson said that sniffing a citrus fruit, like orange or grapefruit, or an essential oil like peppermint, rosemary, or lavender for a few seconds at a time has been shown to reduce stress, lower cortisol, and can even lowers blood pressure.

Drinking peppermint or ginger tea, carefully inhaling a mint or peeling and eating an orange or clementine slowly and consciously are all similar practices you can try to get your sense of taste to work.

Touch something soothing

The same calming process can be repeated with the sense of touch. Stevenson recommends spending one to several minutes touching a soft or textured fabric, such as a soft blanket or silk pillow.

“Another way is with deep pressure, like you’d get from using a weighted blanket or a close hug,” she said, noting that this sends signals to your brain to help you relax and to relax.

If you have a casual office dress code, check out the Weighted Therahoodie, a weighted plush sweatshirt with premium micro-glass beads so you can “wrap yourself in cool” throughout the workday. At home, try the Therarobe signature for similar soothing effects based on deep touch pressure stimulation.

Hear storms, ocean waves and the sound of rainfall

And let’s turn on the sounds of crackling fires, chirping country crickets and babbling brooks, too.

“Do you have Alexa, Google or Siri gathering dust on a shelf somewhere in your home? It’s very easy to ask them to play nature sounds for you, and these nature sounds have been scientifically proven to reduce stress,” said Dr . Solara Calderon, a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice in Encinitas, California.

Ask the smart speaker of your choice to play nature sounds (or search YouTube or Spotify) and feel the stress and anxiety begin to melt away, Calderon said.

Whenever you’re feeling particularly overwhelmed by work, the NYC native recommends spending some time sitting quietly, listening intently, and imagining yourself transported somewhere else as you carve out a few minutes to reframe yourself. (Pro tip: Falling asleep to the sounds of nature is also beautiful.)

Try a five-sense visualization

One of Stevenson’s favorite ways to help clients reduce stress is to guide them through a visualization exercise that engages all five senses. You can do the same thing in your office (or on a piece of the dining room table) yourself by following Stevenson’s instructions:

Create a mental image of being somewhere pleasant, usually outside in nature; then describe what you see, feel, hear, smell and taste, being as descriptive as possible. “This helps clients fully immerse themselves in the photo as if they were there in the moment, and can be a great exercise to practice mental breaks and de-stress,” Stevenson said.

Look at something in nature

“The reason people love places like Hawaii or go to the mountains is because your senses are overwhelmed,” Rhodes-Levin said. “You don’t care about your taxes in Hawaii because it looks nice. It smells delicious. Sounds soothing. Feels good on your skin, tastes great. Your senses are your way out of your stress.”

But you’re not going to Hawaii on a reset in the middle of the workday. Instead, head to a nearby park and make it your mission to see and label five to 10 examples of wildlife, plants and trees before returning to your desk.

On a particularly stressful Friday in late summer the other week, I walked over to the lake near Bethesda Terrace in Central Park and spied the turtles for a few minutes. I can’t say that all my work problems were solved, but by the time I got home, I had already forgotten what was stressing me out in the first place.