Life in Five Senses review by Gretchen Rubin [Book Summary & Takeaways]

Life in five senses review by Gretchen Rubin summary> subtitled: How exploring the senses got me out of my head and into the world by Gretchen Rubin. A Five Senses Jump-Start—Key Notes Summary.

The more we notice, the more we can enjoy. —Gretchen Rubin, Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World

Her recent book, Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World, take us on a journey of self-experimentation, depth and connection. Let’s discover together the mysteries of the five senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, with Gretchen Rubin.

Please enjoy> Gretchen’s life in five senses— how exploring her senses got her out of her head and into the world; with more vitality, creativity, and love.

Seeing

• Look for what’s overlooked. (e.g., TV advertisements, logos, drugstore shelves, the houses on your street…what do you notice when you really look closely? (for Gretchen, she’d finally noticed the arrow on Fedex trucks.)
• Choose a place for a daily visit. (Gretchen’s place is the Met or The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.)
• Indulge in a splurge of color. Find an inexpensive, easy way to add a beautiful spot of color—wear a bright, fun color, paint the walls, buy a set of colored pencils; paint your nails.
• Make your smartphone screen less appealing by switching it to “grayscale.” For a day or a week, set your phone to display in black, white, and gray to see how the lack of color affects your usage.
• Eliminate an eyesore. Look around your home and office. Can you spot any areas that are cluttered, crowded, or dirty, or otherwise hurt your eyes? Figure out a plan to make improvement.
• Find new ways to see. To sharpen your sense of sight. Choose an object and try to see it in many ways: Look at it in the mirror, suint at it, block part of it with your hand, look at it from far away and close up.

Hearing

• Make a list of songs you love, for whatever state of mind you’d like to cultivate. Find out whether you’re a song lover or a music lover. Maybe you’d like a playlist that puts you in a happy, high-energy mood; or perhaps you’d like songs that invoke a calm, reflective spirit or a melancholy mood. Find out. Music can be a terrific way to give ourselves a treat.
• Download a birdsong-identification app and identify the birds around you.
• Pay attention to your listening. Write your own manifesto for listening, to remind yourself of your own listening challenges–and how you might listen better.
• Listen to music to create your own personal soundtrack as you move through your day. Notice how music can influence your mood.
• Turn down the noise. Just as you might clear clutter, find ways to clear clatter. Protect your ears: Turn off your phone notifications, invest in noise-canceling earbuds or headphones, turn off the TV if you’re not watching it, and avoid noisy places.

Smelling

• Explore your sense of smell with some home experiments: —Plug your nose and put a jellybean in your mouth, then unplug your nose and note how the flavor changes. —Try a board game like Follow Your Nose or team up with others to try to identify mystery scents. —Notice how even a strong smell fades out of awareness after a few minutes. —Compare how each nostril registers a slightly different smell.
• Sharpen your sense of smell by increasing blood flow to your nose—run up and down stairs or do some jumping jacks.
• Go out of your way to have interesting smell experiences. Smell items such as smelling salts, scratch-and-sniffs, and unfamiliar fruits.
• Add fragrance. Look for ways to add a beautiful scent to your environment: scented candles, sachets, fresh flowers, perfume, incense sticks. etc.
• Eliminate odor. Find ways to fix something smelly. (e.g., the fridge, the space under the kitchen sink, a trash bin, a dank basement, a carpet subjected to lots of pet accidents.) Pay attention to the smells of places you visit. Remember, the familiar is easy to ignore.
• To feel more present in a particular place and time, pause to notice all the smells you can detect.

Tasting

• Explore your sense of taste with some home experiments: —Use an orange to experience the difference between sour and bitter. The segments taste sour and the rind taste bitter. —Try the miracle fruit that makes sour things taste sweet. —cook with spices you haven’t used before.
• Pull out a bottle of ketchup and pay close attention as you put a few drops on your tongue. Notice its taste and also its color and shine, its smell, its texture.
• Deprive yourself of a common taste for a day, a week, a month, indefinitely. Deprivation can help remind us of the pleasure that we get from a taste by temporarily giving it up. Deprivation may also show us that we’re happier when we five up a taste altogether.
• Educate your tongue. Take a tasting class, in person or online, to learn about some taste that interest you, such as wine, beer, cheese, chocolate, or coffee.
• Hold a taste party. Invite people to compare tastes of different brands or varieties of familiar items, such as fruits, vinegars, olives, teas, pickles, and energy bars; to identify mystery tastes, or ingredient that’s taken for granted.
• Share taste memories. our sense of taste offers us a great way to connect with others—their childhoods, their cultures, their memories.
• Seek an experience that will give you some boredom. Boredom can stimulate our imaginations, because when we’re bored, we reach inward to find stimulation.

Touching

• Use your sense of touch to engage with books that have a touch element, such as “touch and feel” books, pop-up books, and lift-the-flap books.
• Visit a store where you can touch the merchandise. Feel the plushy folds of bath towels, the smooth surface of glass mixing bowls, the cold weight of carpentry tools.
• As you move through your day, touch as many textures as possible and notice how your entire experience changes when you use your hands.
• Give a loving touch. Within appropriate bounds, of course, look for opportunities for affectionate hugs, fist bumps, squeezes, hand-holding, or quick touches. Find ways to connect with the people you love through a warm touch.
• Pet animals, and really notice the texture of their fur and bodies.
• Hold a calming prop, such as a mug, a pen, a clipboard, or a stone. some touch items are specifically designed to help boost calm and focus, so consider trying a weighted blanket, therapy dough, a popping fidget toy, or a fidget spinner.
• On a visit to a museum, buy a few postcards of artwork on display, then visit them to compare the actual artwork to the postcard version. Notice how looking at the postcard changes your view of the real piece.

Life in Five Senses review

• For more delight, Gretchen advices us: to notice and appreciate your five senses. keep a Five-Senses journal where each day, you note the sense-highlights you experience. Delight others by playing a lighthearted prank or giving a gift that confounds the senses. If you’re not yet twenty-five years old, expose yourself to as many new sensations as possible; if we haven’t had a positive experience with something like a new food or new form of music by that age, we probably won’t embrace it.
• For more love Gretchen says: To draw closer to someone you love, create a Five-Senses Portrait, (similar to the one presented above) to push yourself to notice small details of that person’s physical presence. You might also use this exercise to help you remember and celebrate a person who has died, or to hang on to memories of a place, a season of the year, or a particular experience.
• For more energy and calm, she writes: Depending on what works for you, turn sensations up or down to refresh your mind.
• For more imagination: To give yourself some unstructured time to play, schedule time for recess. Visit a place that sells materials and tools for creative endeavors: a hardware store, department store, gardening center, cooking-supply store, art store, or craft store.
• For more memories Gretchen reminds us that: One day, now will be a long time ago, so to sharpen your experience of the present, and to create memories for the future,create an Album of Now by making a photo album of your ordinary life.
• For more self-knowledge, Gretchen mentions to: Visit a place that fills you with awe and open your senses to experience it.

For more about Gretchen Rubin, visit her website, gretchenrubin.com, where she posts regularly about her happiness adventures, good habits, and human nature. And as Gretchen would say, “onward and upward.

List of objects mentioned:

• Panel with the Nativity. Ca. 1440. Pot metal, white glass, vitreous paint, silver stain. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
• Finger Pressing Computer Keyboard.
• Coffee roasters on unsplash
• Winstead’s triple burger
• Calm water by Yoann Boyer on Unsplash
• Gretchen’s portrait