Happiness Break: Finding Presence Through Your Senses, with Dacher Keltner

The Science of Happiness

PRX and Greater Good Science Center

Science, Social Sciences

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 December 2022

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sight, smell, touch, sound, and taste: all of our five senses provide unique pathways to presence and happiness. We spend a few minutes being mindful of each one.

How to Do This Practice:

Find a comfortable place where you feel safe. Close your eyes or soften your gaze. Take a few deep breths, noticing the sensation of the air as it moves through your nose, into your lungs, and back out again.

Sound: For a few breaths, pay attention to the sounds around you. Notice where they are in space.
Touch: Put one hand on top of the other. Notice the sensations you feel in your hand as your fingers’ knuckles touch the other, like temperature and texture.. Shift your attention to your cheeks, noticing temperature and the feel of the air.
Taste: Now, pay attention to the taste you are experiencing on your tongue. There may be no taste or the taste of saliva.
Smell: Move your focus to the smell around you as you take a breath. See how many odors you can identify.
**Sight: Finally, focus your gaze on a point eight inches in front of you for a few seconds and see what colors, forms, light, and shadow you notice there.
Take a few more deep breaths here and notice if any of your senses feel heightened.

More resources from The Greater Good Science Center:

Listen to our Happiness Break on body scan meditation: https://tinyurl.com/bd6x8ba5
How to Focus Under Pressure (podcast) https://tinyurl.com/mxpd6mtd
Coming to Our Senses: https://tinyurl.com/3d4jkprr
Hands-On Research: The Science of Touch: https://tinyurl.com/y79vpbre
10 Steps to Savoring the Good Things in Life: https://tinyurl.com/2zwb5y8v

We love hearing from you! Tell us about your experience with the five senses meditation. Email us at [email protected] or use the hashtag #happinesspod.

Find us on Apple Podcast: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap

Help us share Happiness Break!

Leave us a 5-star review and copy and share this link: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap

We're living through a mental health crisis. Between the stress, anxiety, depression, loneliness, burnout — we all could use a break to feel better. That's where Happiness Break comes in. In each biweekly podcast episode, instructors guide you through research-backed practices and meditations that you can do in real-time. These relaxing and uplifting practices have been shown in a lab to help you cultivate calm, compassion, connection, mindfulness, and more — what the latest science says will directly support your well-being. All in less than ten minutes. A little break in your day.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm Dacker Keltner. Welcome to Happiness Break, a series by the Science of Happiness where
0:08.2	we take a little break to take care of ourselves. Today we're going to focus on our different
0:13.5	senses, sight, touch, sound, smell, and taste. The simple idea is to gain some awareness
0:21.7	and control of our attention. The philosopher William James said that attention, what we
0:27.7	think about and what we are conscious of is our character. In some sense, this practice
0:34.3	gives us a sense of freedom in what we attend to and who we might be in the fast moving
0:39.6	stream of consciousness that is our world today. And what the science shows is that these
0:45.8	ways of gaining some agency and control over our attention are actually really beneficial
0:51.4	to our health. They enable the prefrontal cortex to gain a little control over the amygdala
0:57.7	the threat-related region of the brain. So I'm going to call this practice the five senses
1:04.3	meditation. And we're going to slowly move into a pattern of breathing and then shift
1:09.9	our attention around to the different senses. So let's get started.
1:14.6	So what I'd like you to do is to find a comfortable place, preferably that's quiet, where
1:27.8	you feel safe, if you can find a place outdoors that offers a lot. And I'd like you to sit
1:34.5	down and close your eyes or soften your gaze. Take a belly-expanding deep breath in. And
1:47.0	as you breathe out, follow the air through your lungs and your nose. Take another nice deep
1:56.8	breath in. And as you breathe out, notice the sense of your body, how this breathing activating
2:08.5	the vagus nerve hopefully calms the body down a bit. And now as we breathe in, focus your
2:18.6	attention on what you hear around you. Breathing out, notice the sounds, their location and space.
2:33.0	Continuing our breath, notice just the pattern of sounds where you are. If you're outdoors,
3:02.1	you may notice all kinds of sounds interacting together. As you breathe in, I'd like to turn
3:16.1	to touch and I'd like to invite you to put one hand on top of the other the knuckles of the
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from PRX and Greater Good Science Center, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of PRX and Greater Good Science Center and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.