This week we are talking about stress management and our topic is “self-soothe through your 5 senses.” Stress is an inevitable part of life; being prepared to effectively cope as stress arises is extremely important. When you are already stressed out, thinking about how to help yourself is much more difficult. Therefore, it is important to have skills to pull from when you encounter stress.
One helpful skill to put in your toolbox is self-soothe.
Self-soothe is essentially doing things to calm and relax yourself through your 5 senses. Self-soothing helps us relax physically and mentally by providing physical relaxation, self-compassion, and distraction from rumination thoughts. When you experience stress, your body usually gets worked up. This physical reaction sends reinforcing signals to your brain that there is something wrong. Calming down your physical sensations removes the physical reaction, making it much easier to manage the stress.
Think how your body reacts to stress. Ask yourself “how can managing the physical sensations of stress to help me better manage the stress?” Write this down and use it to help motivate you to utilize self-soothe as a way to handle stress.
Often when an intense emotion hits or one is feeling stressed, there is an urge to engage in an impulsive behavior. These are called crisis urges. Generally, crisis urges will ultimately do more harm than good. They provide immediate relief but may be physically harmful to ourselves, make us feel worse afterwards, and exacerbate the problem. Some examples of crisis urges are hitting someone, using substances, and emotional eating. In this case, it is important to do things that give you a break from the situation and help you calm down so that you no longer have the crisis urge or can at least better fight it. Self-soothe is one way to do this. By taking time to do a self-soothing activity, you remove yourself from the situation for a little, while also actively doing something to calm down from the stress. This will allow you to have a better perspective on the situation so that you can proceed more effectively
How to self-soothe through your five senses:
You soothe yourself through your 5 senses by mindfully looking at, listening to, smelling, tasting, or touching things that you find calming and enjoyable. Here are some examples:
- Vision: artwork, nature, a dance performance
- Hearing: Listen to music or sing to yourself, pay attention to the natural sounds around you
- Smell: Shampoo, flowers, candles
- Taste: eat or drink foods you like, have some candy
- Touch: take a hot bath or shower, pet your dog or cat, cuddle up in a soft blanket.
It is important to observe and describe what you are experiencing through your senses. Really pay attention and put words to what you are seeing, physically feeling, touching, tasting, and/or smelling. Think about what sensory experiences you generally find soothing and calming. Evaluate, how much you generally pay attention to you body sensations and try to regulate them when feeling stressed.
As a way to actively start utilizing self-soothe, today, take some time to think how you can best engage in the self-soothing technique.
Try some activities that soothe each of your senses and assess what that experience was like. Use this to create a list of self-soothe activities you can turn to when experiencing stress.
Alyssa Mairanz, LMHC, DBTC
Alyssa Mairanz provides counseling and therapy services for life transitions, relationship issues, self esteem, depression, anxiety, and DBT and Psychodynamic therapy in a NYC group practice in the Flatiron District near Madison Square Park. She also serves the Village, Chelsea, Union Square, the Financial District and the surrounding areas.
Empower Your Mind Therapy’s mission is to helps our clients build the life they want and find more happiness and satisfaction.
