Science – 5 Senses Lab

Mind/body fitness requires relief from effort to restore balance—just like building muscle optimally requires relaxing the fibers fully to return to low tension after a contraction.

The higher the stress load we carry, the harder it is for our bodies to balance. It’s a colossal problem that 5 Senses Lab is working to solve.

Feeling stressed is a clue that our body is trying to adapt to a threat or imbalance.

Stress is an adaptive response. Our senses detect threat and send signals to our skin, gut, nerves and fluids. Our five senses equally signal peace and are powerful anti-stress agents helping us adapt (Veiga-Fernandes and Mucida 2016).

The fastest way to balance is sensory.

Our senses keep us balanced.

When we feel tension, it’s a reminder that human cognition is highly controlled by the physical activity of our nerves and fluids (Critchley and Harrison 2013), that our conscious is embodied (Merleau-Ponty 1945), and our senses have evolved to help us navigate and balance.

Threats today tend to linger, like the fear of losing one’s job or family worries, creating stress. When a threat isn’t solved by fighting or fleeing, then energy is being diverted away from maintaining the body to misfiring immune responses. Stresses gets stuck and stacked – tilting us toward anxiety, aging and disease.

Strategically activating each of the five senses can increase positive emotion and decrease negative emotion on a rapid and relatively effortless path (Rodriquez and Kross 2023). Arousing our senses facilitates recall faster than the brain and enhances memory encoding (Critchley and Harrison 2009). Taste, touch, sound, smell and sight signals affect how we feel in our bodies guiding decisions, memory, emotions and motivation (Tsakiris and Critchley 2016).

We are applying this science at 5 Senses Lab to put personalized stress relief in reach for as many people as possible. To this end, we are creating web-based stress-relief-in-15 minutes formats for health and wellness providers.

Personalized sensory remedies & stress antidotes

Relief, like stress, is personal – just like one person will be stressed by something that a second person is not. As a result, stress antidotes must be tailormade.

The 5 Senses Mind/Body Review

All 5 Senses formats feature the Mind/Body Review, a mirror on how well the body is optimizing energy today and offering a sensory remedy for balance. This is a highly practical exercise for noticing of-the-moment cues to trapped stresses (complexion, sleep, digestion, daily relationships, pulse…) and for resetting the balance.

The 5 Senses Mind/Body Review is composed of ten questions derived from a diagnostic technique used in recovery and pain management and validated scientifically by Zeller et al (2024), a German gastroenterologist who adapted a classic Kampo Sho patient narrative-centered diagnostic technique together with Japanese physicians.

The answers indicate a pattern of excess/deficiency (temperature, moisture), strain and energy flow/stagnation. This is not a medical diagnosis. No jargon is utilized.

Sources

5 Senses Lab is sourcing sensory actions from peer-reviewed science (RCTs of stress mitigations and clinical findings of sensory pathways, causes and effects [olfactory/visual/auditory/taste/touch]) and from classic texts of traditional knowledge about restoring balance (Japanese Kampo/Zen, Traditional Chinese Medicine/Qigong, and Ayurveda/Yoga). Exercises like color illumination are included where science has verified their efficacy and from sophrology, known as mindfulness for people who can’t sit still. Across knowledge bases, the connecting line is joy.

Stress & Tech

Tech today is caught in a stress paradox of turning our senses off and not on.

Immobility diminishes our senses and can direct our bodies onto depression pathways (Critchley and Harrison 2009). Diminished senses are part of the problem behind stress-associated changes in eating behaviour.

Anything splitting our mind from our body can register as a threat and build stress and heat like a car running on low oil. That’s the stress paradox of tech.

We will break through tech’s stress paradox by reactivating the power of our senses.