Your brain is dulling your senses to save energy,
And in the process,
It's closing you off to feelings of gratitude and awe.
Here's why this happens and how to counteract it with mindfulness.
Do you know the feeling of how something is never as good as it was the first time?
For me,
I think about this a lot with food,
How I'll go somewhere and try a new dish and it's the best thing I've ever eaten.
But then when I go back a second time,
The novelty has worn off.
This is part of the rush that we get when we travel.
We have this sense of vibrancy as our senses are heightened.
We slow down and savor each moment.
Every part of us comes online to perceive,
Receive,
And make sense of the world around us.
If you were to ask someone to describe the feeling,
They might use the phrase childlike wonder.
I was researching this for my newsletter recently,
And I learned that there's actually a scientifically backed explanation for why we lose this sense of discovery and conscious attunement as we get older.
Our bodies are always sensing our environment and attuning our organs,
Muscles,
And nerves to respond.
For example,
If you smell something unpleasant in your environment,
Your hand may instinctively find its way to your nose to cover it.
You didn't consciously tell your hand to go to your nose.
That's just the intelligence of life within your body responding to care for you.
And this happens for a good reason.
If you were consciously aware of everything that your body has to do to keep you alive,
You'd probably be so overwhelmed that you'd never leave the house.
Already the brain requires a disproportionate amount of energy compared to the rest of the body to function.
On average,
The adult human brain is about 2% of our total body mass,
But it consumes 20% of our energy.
And that's on Eco mode.
The brain makes energy use more efficient through predictive processing.
What that means is that it doesn't need to actually notice every detail to assess every situation and determine how to act.
Instead,
It can look for a pattern based on past circumstances and send those same signals to the body so that it can conserve energy for something that actually requires conscious decision making.
The problem is that sometimes we'd actually benefit from observing and noticing the details around us.
The brain doesn't always make the prediction correctly.
In the book,
How Emotions Are Made,
Dr.
Lisa Feldman Barrett shares her research on why children are better problem solvers than adults.
Children have no life experience on which to predict outcomes.
Give them a problem to solve,
And they're going to try every possibility.
While adults only try the ones that make sense.
Her research found that children's lack of discrimination means that they arrive at the solution faster than adults.
But it also means that when you're getting them ready for school in the morning,
They're going to get distracted,
Not because they're being intentionally difficult.
Well,
Okay,
Sometimes they are.
But because their nervous systems are literally overloaded with sensory information.
You're single-mindedly focused on the task.
Breakfast,
Brush teeth,
Get dressed,
Get out the door.
Meanwhile,
They're discovering that they don't really like the texture of the cereal when it sits in the milk for too long and getting used to the sensory feeling of the brush going back and forth in their mouth.
Enjoying the sound of velcro as it rips and connects.
Getting ready for the day is exploratory and playful for children.
But for you,
It's a chore.
You're annoyed with them,
But shouldn't they be annoyed with you?
You're the one living life on autopilot and calling it responsibility.
There's a balance,
Of course,
That we must find in order to function in the modern world and at the unfortunate pace that life moves.
Our brains are genuinely helping us to complete tasks without unnecessary effort when they choose dullness.
The problem is that life itself starts to feel like a task.
Mindfulness can help us to bring some of this sensefulness into our daily lives.
Mindfulness describes a quality of being in the present moment without judgment or reactivity to what arises.
Sensefulness is the practice of bringing conscious awareness to our senses in order to cultivate mindfulness.
More specifically,
We're aligning the consciousness of the mind with the consciousness that exists at the cellular level of our bodies.
Here's a foundational mindfulness practice that I like to teach my students in my somatic meditation course.
You can use it as a way to cultivate more sensefulness.
And those feelings of gratitude and awe that come with it in daily life.
I invite you to take a breath with me in and out.
Now let your gaze wander the space that you are in.
And see if you can notice a detail that you've never noticed before.
It can be something small.
For me,
I am noticing the texture of the lampshade.
Once you've found that detail and noticed it.
Take a breath in and out with it.
And then draw your attention inward.
And see if you can sense something inside of you that you've never noticed before.
Or something that is calling for your attention today.
Nothing comes immediately.
You can guide your attention from the base of your feet to the top of your head.
Slowly and back down again if you need to.
Let this process of sensing your internal environment take as long as it needs.
You can continue this after the video is over.
I'll invite you to bring your attention back into the room with me.
If you use this as a simple daily mindfulness practice,
Sensing your external environment,
Sensing your internal environment.
You might be surprised at how you'll strengthen this muscle in your daily life.
You might even notice the next time you go out to eat a new flavor in a dish that you've had a million times before.
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I hope to practice with you again soon.
