Follow The Toggle

When anxiety narrows your focus, the quickest way to open it again is through your senses. In this vivid guided exercise, Martha helps you create a “five senses scenario”, a moment that engages taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight all at once.

By bringing your imagination into sensory detail, you’ll activate the creative part of your brain and shift your body out of anxious tension. Each time you revisit this inner scene, you’ll strengthen your ability to move from worry to calm. One sensory delight at a time.

Transcript

Welcome to Day 5 of the Anxiety Challenge with Martha Beck.

In this challenge,

You'll explore gentle and creative ways to calm your body,

Quiet your thoughts and ease anxious feelings.

Let's jump into today's session.

Hello and welcome back to Day 5 of the Anxiety Challenge here on Insight Timer.

Yesterday,

We lightened things up by turning our anxiety into a goofy little monster.

Today,

We'll lean into delight by creating a vivid five senses scenario.

A scene that engages taste,

Touch,

Smell,

Sound and sight to help anxiety melt away.

Okay,

Let's jump into today's session.

This exercise is designed to help diminish your anxiety and put you in a state of creativity,

Then shift back and forth between the two states.

The value of this is that the next time you become anxious,

You will have the skill of shifting out of anxiety and into creativity.

This requires a piece of paper and a pencil or just your vivid imagination.

It does work better if you write it down,

However,

So you may want to pause the recording to get a pencil and a piece of paper.

When you've got them,

Write down or vividly imagine one thing you love to experience with each of your senses.

Start with one thing you love to taste.

Then one thing you love to touch with your skin.

One thing you love to smell.

Make it something that isn't food.

Then one thing you love to hear.

And finally,

One thing you love to see.

Now,

Imagine experiencing all five of these things simultaneously.

For example,

You might imagine eating a mango while sitting in warm sand,

Smelling the ocean,

Listening to your favorite song,

And watching your children play.

Or,

You might picture sipping a perfect cup of coffee while lying on satin sheets and smelling perfume and hearing laughter and looking at a YouTube of animals you enjoy.

Or,

You might imagine eating a piece of freshly baked bread while getting a foot rub from smelling pine trees,

Hearing the rain,

And watching your favorite sport.

So it's a combination of all five senses being delighted at once.

Let's call it your five senses scenario.

As you really focus on your five senses scenario,

Notice how it affects the inner state of your body and your mood.

If you can hold all five of those sensory images,

You'll find yourself feeling more relaxed,

Open,

And calm.

Your anxiety should drop almost to zero.

Once you've experimented with that,

Try thinking about something you have to do later today or tomorrow,

Something you're not really looking forward to,

Something even that makes you a bit anxious.

And just notice and observe how your inner state changes.

Your mood,

Your body,

And your mind will all get a bit more tense,

Maybe even genuinely miserable.

So notice that.

Now,

Switch back into the five senses scenario.

This is why I asked you to write down the five things you love.

It's difficult for the anxious mind to let go,

But if you can just take a few seconds to drop into that scenario with all five of your senses,

You will see huge benefits.

And if you repeat this exercise,

Those benefits will accrue over time.

Your health,

Your relationships,

And pretty much anything you try to accomplish will benefit enormously from getting out of anxiety and into creativity.

And make no mistake,

Just imagining that five sense scenario is a powerful act of creativity.

You just called up a situation that you may never have seen,

That may never have existed,

And you did it inside your head as an alternative to anxiety.

That's powerful.

And there are two benefits to it.

The first is knowing that you can bring down anxiety by engaging your senses with your imagination.

The other is that because you've imagined this scene and given it focused attention,

You're much more likely to eventually create and experience it in real life.

And knowing that should bring down your anxiety even more.

Thought for today,

Just imagining things that delight my senses can set me free from anxiety and invite my creativity to flourish.

As we close today's session,

Which sensory detail,

Taste,

Touch,

Smell,

Sound,

Or sight brought you the most calm?

Share your favorite detail in the challenge forum.

Tomorrow,

In day six,

We'll discover how being stuck can actually spark creativity and fresh solutions.

I'll see you then.

Reviews

Fascinating activity to effectively reduce stress. I was somewhat sceptical of this, but this was so enjoyable and effective in calming stress 😁

Very helpful. Brilliant.

Amazing tool to lower anxiety

A very powerful way to use visualization to create a safe space that lessens anxiety.

This challenge has been a bless ✨
Thank you so much!

One of the best solutions for current anxiety. Thank you and God bless you.

Great ideas - thank you - I’ll pass them on!

Fun and amazingly powerful

Doing the excersize with pencil and paper helped me to delve deeper than just in my head which may sound counterintuitive.

What a sorted way to creating, Creating my own safe space is wonderful, and it works, so powerful
Taste
Touch
Smell
Sound and
Sight!

Wonderful tools to calm my anxiety and spark creativity! Highly recommend.

You're Amazing!

I love every meditation and exercise you have so generously shared. Thank you.

An interesting and creative way to work with anxiety.