A brief conversational clip where Vishen Lakhiani asks how using the five senses can reduce anxiety. The other speaker describes a grounding meditation that scans sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, and emphasizes focusing on a single sense—especially touch—by holding an object (e.g., a mug or a stone) to feel grounded.
Chapters
How does embracing all five senses help us ease the pains of anxiety?
So generally this is just like taking a moment if you're feeling very anxious and thinking, I'm just going to take a minute and I'm just going to dial into my body and my five senses. And people do this as a meditation technique where they go through their five senses and they think, what am I seeing? What am I hearing? Smelling, tasting, touching? And so that itself can be very grounding. I think it's actually more interesting and more helpful to zero in on a particular sense. For instance, touch. One thing that many people have told me, you know, we think of like fidget spinners. Often people find something to hold and that will ground them. So for instance, teachers often say, well, I will hold a mug of coffee. A teacher who was very anxious during COVID said she would hold a stone. There's something about just having something in your hand. There's something very grounding.