Core exercise · 7 of 12
5 Senses
Yes / no, once a day
"The 5 Senses Collection"
Coming back from the kitchen with a coffee in my hand, I had backed myself into a corner and was roughing myself up with "You HAVE to get this job now!" The job interview I was about to walk into in three minutes was a matter of life and death, both financially and emotionally, and that had drenched every nerve ending in my body in a downpour of anxiety. I got to the computer, put my coffee cup on the desk, pulled the chair aside and was about to sit down when some movement over by the window caught my eye. A magpie had landed on the very top of the tree and, despite the branch bending and swaying left and right in the wind, was calmly watching its surroundings, every now and then looking over towards me, right into my eyes. My eyes were locked on that black-and-white body, which looked as soft as a plush toy. We stared at each other a while longer, then it took off, and as it disappeared from view I watched those mesmerising green and navy-blue feathers go. The smell of the coffee brought me back to my desk. I sat down gently, held the cup, felt its warmth. I closed my eyes and listened to what was around me; a courier's moped buzzed past and faded away. In my mouth was the bitter but friendly taste of coffee. That heavy chain of anxiety, which I had been swinging around wildly inside my brain like a lasso, damaging the walls of my mind, had snapped. I had existed in that moment as nothing more than a living thing, a body. The dense gloom of the job interview had given way to a comparatively lighter whisper of "Ah well, what will be will be...". This "before and after" shift in my mind and spirit affected me so much that from that day on, every day, at least once a day, I started focusing on my 5 senses, collecting short snapshots from the day and adding them to my collection. Sometimes it was the cream-coloured texture of a bare wall; sometimes a faint ache in my lower back. Whatever the sensation, whatever the feeling, I saw it and dropped it in my piggy bank. Noticing that these savings somehow regulated me and lifted the fog from my mind is what gave birth to my "5 Senses" exercises.
PS: I didn't get the job.
Research
Research: 5 Senses
Present-moment attention, what a magpie does for a tired mind, and savouring as a skill.
These notes are a starting point for the author's own reading; nothing here is medical advice.
The exercise is a form of what researchers call present-moment attention, and of grounding. Paying attention to what is happening now, rather than to the story in your head, is the core of the mindfulness scale that Brown and Ryan (2003) built; people who score higher on it report better mood and less anxiety. The magpie is not incidental: attention restoration theory holds that natural scenes draw a "soft" kind of attention that lets the effortful kind recover (Kaplan 1995), and an experiment found that a walk in a park, or even looking at photographs of nature, improved performance on attention tests more than a walk through city streets (Berman, Jonides and Kaplan 2008). Collecting good moments on purpose is what the savouring literature studies; Bryant and Veroff (2007) describe noticing and holding on to pleasant sensory experience as a skill that can be practised.
References
- Brown, K. W., and Ryan, R. M. (2003). The benefits of being present: Mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology.
- Berman, M. G., Jonides, J., and Kaplan, S. (2008). The cognitive benefits of interacting with nature. Psychological Science.
- Bryant, F. B., and Veroff, J. (2007). Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Notes last touched October 16, 2026