Being able to navigate the overwhelming nature of distress is complicated by the way it focuses our attention right down to a pinpoint, confining us to a very small parcel of real estate in our mind. In this reduced space our entire field of vision can easily be taken over by the object of our distress – the back pain, the anger, the anxiety. The squeeze of this singular focus only serves to intensify the distress and make it even harder to break out of that constriction.  

A couple of distinguished researchers* from Toronto, however, have discovered a way out. It’s called sensory foraging which involves opening our senses and scavenging around for everything we can possibly see, hear, smell, taste or physically feel right then. This may sound like a standard mindfulness exercise that takes us into the body or senses through breathing and internal focus but there is a much more expansive, elemental, animal quality to sensory foraging, as if we are nosing around for things of interest like a dog might. Or like we have antennae or radar.

There is great value to this. When we engage in the all-consuming experience of sensory foraging, we are literally taking our brains out of the trough of distress because the sensory pathways are in an entirely different area of the brain. While we can’t permanently escape from the distress by moving into the land of our senses and staying there because life must be dealt with, but Dr. Segal and Dr. Farb discovered we are better able to manage our distress when we can take small breaks from it. The sensory foraging strategy, then, is to toggle back and forth between the two. Furthermore, every time we toggle over to the wide-open spaces of our senses, we bring a little of that spaciousness back with us to the tiny confines of our distress. In that way, we can get more perspective and more room to breathe and the distress begins to soften. (Considering how sensory rich it is to be outside, no wonder we often instinctively head outside to clear our minds.)

In the same way sensory foraging takes us out of the area of brain activated by distress, the researchers also discovered it takes us out of our default mode network. The default mode network is a cluster of areas in our brain activated when (among other things) our brain is “passively active.” Our brain is passively active whenever we are doing anything habitual or when we are lost in daydreaming or rumination. Being the brain territory of habit formation, the default mode network often works in our favor, saving us from having to use a GPS every time we head home from the grocery store, for example. But it can also work very much against us by locking us into unhealthy habits or keeping us trapped in negative thought loops or unconscious automatic thought habits like “I’m not good enough,” or “I need to clean my plate.”

Interestingly, people who are depressed are also locked in the default mode network, suggesting that depression may have activated a habit pathway. That would help explain why it is hard to give a flying flip about the beauty of a butterfly when we’re depressed or in a bad mood. You can’t experience beauty when trapped in the default mode network, cut off from your senses! Sensory foraging, then, may be also helpful for those battling depression. (Not that it would be easy to shift, just like it isn’t easy to get ourselves to exercise when we don’t have energy. Therefore, someone who is depressed might need to be taken by the hand and led through sensory foraging experiences.)

Hard days

Sensory foraging is a quietly revolutionary way to work with a day in which the fear or sorrow or grief or despair or shame or regret or rumination or anger or boredom or depression narrow your field of vision down to a pin-sized point, as if you have one pore through which to breathe and see and hear and feel and taste and smell. One pore. But all you have to do is toggle over to sensory foraging mode where all of your pores are open and the sensations wash in, expanding your world, your experience and your ability to dip back in to the distress and work with it from a place of expansion. 

And every day

While Dr. Segal and Dr. Farb bill sensory foraging as an antidote to distress, I think it has broader, everyday utility. I see using it throughout the day as a rest for our technically over-stimulated brain and a way of coming back to our senses, our elemental existence, before toggling back into the world of screens and keyboards. It’s a way of keeping in touch with ourselves, toggling between technology and our nature, in step with the back-and-forth rhythm of life, that essential cadence of day then night, exertion then rest, joy then sorrow. It’s the in breath and the out breath, the elemental rhythm that keeps us alive.

I hope you find the opportunity today to open up every single pore you possess and let the sensory information flow in and help you see and feel things anew.

E

*Neuroscientist Dr. Zindel Segal, Distinguished Professor of Psychology in Mood Disorders at the University of Toronto Scarborough, is cofounder of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. Clinical Psychologist Dr. Norman Farb, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, directs the Regulatory and Affective Dynamics Laboratory. Together they co-authored Better in Every Sense: How the New Science of Sensation Can Help You Reclaim Your Life.