The big idea: how to use your senses to help beat depression

Modern life seems designed to stop 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: glimpses behind the curtain can be deeply uncomfortable. When we pause for a second, the mind too often gravitates towards our greatest sources of stress – be they troubled relationships or our own critical stories about ourselves.

Scientists have even found that quite a few of us would rather give ourselves painful electrical shocks than wait in a distraction-free room for 15 minutes. Most people would agree that we need an occasional break from constant activity, but we seem unable to take advantage of our time off; rumination rushes in, spoiling what should be a period of respite. Distraction is one option – but why does taking time to “chill” now require Netflix?

And what if trying to busy yourself during those quiet moments did more harm than good? At this point, you may be thinking “Why not fill up my spare time with things I enjoy?” The problem is that keeping our brains busy isn’t an effective form of relief. Instead, sensing the world – the sunlight on your skin, a gurgle in your belly, the thump of your heartbeat – without rushing back into thought and judgment, is what enriches and restores us. Before you label that emotion that seems to be bubbling up, ask: what does it feel like? Because when we are unable to stay with raw sensation, defaulting instead to ideas about those sensations, it can actually have disastrous consequences for our mental health.

That’s what we’ve found in our research, which explored how the balance between thinking and sensing impacts wellbeing. First, we provoked uncomfortable feelings in people by having them view sad film clips while in an MRI scanner. As expected, those clips activated brain regions used for thinking and judging, as people busied themselves relating 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’s natural to explore and explain emotional experiences in your head. But another reaction did predict problems: in response to sadness many people shut down activity in sensory brain regions, particularly areas used for processing feelings from the body. And it turned out that the greater the level of sensory shutdown in a participant, the higher they scored on measures of depression.

This finding reveals something important about life’s quiet moments. It isn’t our ability to control internal judgments and narratives that determines our happiness. Instead, wellbeing depends on whether such thoughts are informed by new information, the source of which is the dynamic flow of sensation. We found this same pattern in a second study, one 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 shut down sensation in response to sad scenes were 25 times more likely to fall back into depression than their peers who kept sensation alive.

Why does this happen, exactly? It seems that muting input from the body can keep the lid on visceral sensations that you may want to avoid because of their association with previous unpleasant experiences. But there’s a cost to this temporary relief, and it’s feeling bad for longer. With no changing mix of sensations to shake things up, the certainty of your sadness persists on the cognitive level, like a piece of software you haven’t updated.

So keeping in touch with sensation, particularly in times of stress, may be a potent but overlooked resource for mental health. What we call “sense foraging”, purposely shifting attention to the sensory world with a willingness to be surprised, is one way of practising doing this, and it’s a skill that almost anyone can develop. If staying busy and distracting ourselves are both modes of largely automatic thinking, to truly give ourselves a break – and reduce the risk of becoming depressed – we need to switch into sensing, a fundamentally different mode that is receptive rather than agenda driven. By developing sensory “muscles”, we get better at taking in new information, which stimulates new trains of thought. This provides relief from rumination, potentially bouncing you out of the mental rut you’re stuck in.

Sense foraging does what we mistakenly expect distraction to do: it provides a restorative counterweight to a wearying focus on interpretation and reaction. It can be practised anywhere, anytime, because sensation is always available: a breeze on your face, the prickliness of a sweater on your skin, the pressure in your heels as you stand on the ground, or the smell of coffee wafting up from your mug. It’s less about finding some special state, like fully emptying the mind or seeking out the perfect sunset, and more about dropping in to find what is already there – a taste, a texture or feeling, and being curious about what comes next.

If you are feeling low or preoccupied, you can start right now. 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 just as it sounds; get to know what the air feels like on your elbow or little toe. If it is something you can sense that you’d ordinarily avoid or ignore, you are on the right track.

The effect is to reawaken those neglected sensory regions of the brain, which can free you up to re-engage with life; a tonic to the insidious, sense-blunting effects of stress. With practice, the science suggests, feelings of hopelessness and burnout will abate, replaced by hopefulness and the recovered 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).

Further reading

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)

Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence. The Groundbreaking Meditation Practice by Daniel J Siegel (TarcherPerigee, £18)