Continuing on from last week’s post –Building Up New Habits (Self soothing) using the senses Part 1 Vision – we move on to incorporating hearing as part of our self-care routine.  Healthy self-soothing/habits are an important part of any human’s self-care routine and incorporating all the senses is vital to stimulate all our mind, body and spiritual needs. So with that in mind, why don’t you, incorporate at least one of these into your new self-care routine this week. You could try picking out one that you could try this week, adding to last weeks one, until you find a few you can use in an emergency situation to remain calm, distressed or re-centre yourself. Or at least add to your self-care basics on regular basis. You are trying to build up a few new habits that you can use every day and week that helps you feel more calm and relaxed. Remember, you need to schedule this into your diary and that scheduling time for you is not selfish it’s a healthy practice for good mental, spiritual and physical health.

As I’ve said before building up an arsenal of good habits that help calm or de-stress you are brilliant to have. We use the term self-soothing as this reflects what the technique does for the body and mind when we are stressed, anxious or depressed. As children, we picked up self-soothing techniques that may have worked in stressful or anxiety-filled situations to help calm and soothe ourselves as a child but are no longer appropriate as adults, such as when we got frightened of the dark or witnessed something that distressed us. Sometimes we developed techniques that we carry on today or have built up others such as smoking, eating or drinking in excess. These are habits and all habits can be exchanged for some new and more appropriate ones.

I already explained that the use of our senses helps in two ways, it distracts us from what is going on in our minds and body by concentrating on the sense and two, if we are trying to change a bad habit for a good one it gives us something to do other than what we have gotten used to doing. These techniques can be of better use if we do some meditation, as this allows us to start recognising what it is that we need to address and is causing our stress in the first place. Meditation allows us to think before we act and it is in that way we can begin to see if there is any pattern to our thoughts and behaviours that are causing our stress and anxiety.

New Habits To Try Using Our Hearing To Self-Soothe.

1. Listening to soothing music.
2. Close your eyes and listen to the sounds of nature around you.
3. Sing along to your favourite songs.
4. Learn to play an instrument.
5. Be mindful of any sounds that come your way, let them go in one ear and out the other.
6. Close your eyes and listen to a book on tape.
7. Listen to others talk, just allow them to be heard.
8. Listen to children or others laugh.
9. Go to a concert, close your eyes and listen.
10. Talk to someone on the phone.
11. Tell yourself “I love you”.
12. Tell yourself “Well done great job” Say it out loud.

Self-soothing Using the senses: Vision part 1

Self-soothing Using the senses: Smell part 3