A Sensory Enrichment Diet: A NeuroSomatic practice for every day stress

Your brain gets all its information through your senses. The way this information is integrated, analyzed and predicted determines how your brain organizes its response to your environment. Think about it: when you feel stressed or anxious, this is your brain organizing a response to a perceived stressor, threat or aggression. Whether that stressor, threat or aggression is real or imagined - past, present or future - does not matter to your brain. This Neurosomatic practice helps reduce every day stress.

Reducing your stress or anxiety requires changing how your brain perceives its environment and giving it the ability to organize better (more adapted, more useful) responses. This NeuroSomatic practice is a tool to help you do just that.

Your brain analyses all information from all senses continuously to organize a response

This exercise requires your attention and something to journal with. It can be repeated at will, daily.

1. Pick one of your senses: vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch, but also vestibular (balance and orientation in space), social connection, and internal sensation (also known as interoception). Connecting to the less traditional senses (vestibular, internal and social) may require a little more effort at first. Here are some examples of guiding questions:

   
   

   • Vestibular: how is the weight of your head carried on your spine? Are your feet firmly planted on the floor? When you walk, do you bounce or sway?

   • Interoception: is your belly feeling tight or expanded? Are you hungry or disgesting? Is there pain anywhere? What is your tongue doing?

   • Social: is this interaction giving me stress? Is there a way to bring more presence to this relationship? Am i feeling listened to, or am I listening?

     
     

2. During the day, pay special attention to this sense. For example, note what information your sense of smell provides you about your environment, and what this information triggers as an internal state. Notice your temperature, your heartbeat, your alertness. You may set reminders to take a pause and notice. Everything is meaningful, even the absence of a reaction!

   
   

   

   Giving positive attention to pleasant sensory information helps you rewire your brain towards better outcomes

   
   

3. Next, make an effort to identify at least 3 moments where this sense gives you pleasure: for example, a beautiful voice or a soothing light. Immerse yourself in these moments, savour them to the fullest, stop and enjoy them. Those are called sensory "glimmers": Moments where you reconnect to the pleasure of being in your body, in safety. If possible, write it down or take a picture so you anchor it and you can come back to it.

   
   

4. The next day, change sense and repeat the experiment. Giving more attention (the currency of the brain!) to pleasant information helps you rewire your brain away from the stress and anxiety and towards a deeper sense of self-connection and well-being. Over time, you may notice trends: things you particularly enjoy (or don't), things you notice more, a sense you are more connected to, and so on.

   
   

5. Soon, you'll be able to cultivate the things that give you pleasure - we call it a sensory diet.