mThe cute 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, mortared by media and intoxicants. It’s understandable: peeks behind the curtain can be very uncomfortable. When we stop for a second, the mind too often gravitates to our biggest sources of stress – whether it’s difficult relationships or our own critical stories about ourselves.
Scientists even have found that quite a few of us would rather give ourselves painful electric shocks than wait for 15 minutes in a distraction-free room. Most people would agree that we need a break from constant activity once in a while, but we seem unable to utilize our down time; ruminating storms in, spoiling what should be a period of rest. Distraction is one option – but why does it now require Netflix to “chill” time?
And what if trying to occupy yourself during those quiet moments has done more harm than good? At this point you may be thinking “Why not fill my free time with things I enjoy?” The problem is that keeping our brain busy is not an effective form of relief. Instead, sensing the world – the sunlight on your skin, a gurgling in your stomach, the beating of your heartbeat – without rushing back to thoughts and judgments is what enriches and restores us. Before naming that emotion that seems to be bubbling up, ask: how does it feel? Because when we are unable to stay with raw sensation, but instead fail to think about those sensations, it can actually have disastrous consequences for our mental health.
This is what we found our researchwho investigated how the balance between thinking and feeling affects well-being. First, we induced uncomfortable feelings in people by having them watch sad film clips while in an MRI scanner. As expected, those clips activated brain regions used for thinking and judgment, as people were busy bringing each scene back to their own experience. Perhaps surprisingly, however, we found that there was no relationship between the level of this conceptual activity and poor mental health. It is natural to explore and explain emotional experiences in your head. But another response did predicts problems: in response to grief, many people shut down activity in sensory brain regions, especially areas used to process feelings of the body. And it turned out that the greater the level of sensory closure in a participant, 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 narratives that determines our happiness. Instead, well-being depends on whether such thoughts are informed by new information, the source of which is the dynamic flow of sensation. 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 checked in with them for two years after scanning their brains. People who turned off sensation in response to sad scenes were 25 times more likely to relapse into depression than their counterparts who kept sensation alive.
Why does this happen, exactly? It turns out that dampening input from the body can keep a lid on visceral sensations you might want to avoid because of their association with past unpleasant experiences. But there is a cost to this temporary relief, and it feels bad for longer. With no changing mix of sensations to shake things up, the certainty of your grief remains at the cognitive level, like a piece of software you haven’t updated.
So staying in touch with sensation, especially in times of stress, can be a powerful but overlooked resource for mental health. What we call “seeking input”, deliberately shifting attention to the sensory world with a willingness to be surprised is one way to practice it, and it’s a skill almost anyone can develop. As for keeping busy and distracting ourselves, both modes are largely automatic thinkto really give ourselves a break – and reduce the risk of becoming depressed – we need to switch to feela fundamentally different mode that is receptive rather than agenda driven. By developing sensory “muscles”, we become better at taking in new information, which stimulates new ways of thinking. It provides relief from ruminations, which may bounce you out of the mental rut you’ve been stuck in.
Meaning search does what we mistakenly expect inference to do: it provides a restorative counterweight to a tiresome focus on interpretation and response. It can be practiced anywhere and anytime, because sensation is always available: a breeze on your face, the prickliness of a sweater on your skin, the pressure in your heels while standing on the ground, or the smell of coffee what from your cup It’s less about finding some special state, like completely emptying the mind or looking for the perfect sunset, and more about peering in to find what’s already there – a taste,’ a texture or feeling, and to be curious about what comes next.
If you’re feeling down or overwhelmed, you can start right away. Look around 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 exactly as it sounds; learn how the air feels on your elbow or little toe. If it’s something you can sense that you’d normally avoid or ignore, you’re on the right track.
The effect is to reawaken those neglected sensory regions of the brain, which can free you to re-engage with life; a tonic for the insidious, sensory effects of stress. With practice, science suggests, feelings of hopelessness and burnout will diminish, replaced by hopefulness and the regained 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 sense (Yellow Kite).
to newsletter promotion
Further reading
Come 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)
Conscious: The Science and Practice of Presence. The Groundbreaking Meditation Practice by Daniel J Siegel (TarcherPerigee, £18)
