Your 5 senses—sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing—are all, in their own way, and to varying degrees of importance, components of navigating through your daily life and making sense of and enjoying the world around you.
The sooner you begin to actively strive to protect and preserve the quality and condition of your senses, the better, and with this in mind, here’s how to take care of all five of your senses for the long term.
1. Your Hearing
Taking care of your hearing is far more complicated than simply ensuring that, when you’re out partying with friends, that your group don’t stand too close to the speakers, or when you’re listening to music with headphones, that you avoid turning the volume up to the maximum.
There is a myriad of ways that you can give yourself the best possible chances of preserving your hearing, including the following tips:
- Keeping the volume on the TV at a lower level.
- Reducing the volume of the radio in your car.
- Avoiding using ear candles or cotton buds to clean your ears.
- Booking yourself annual ear health checkups.
- Trying and keep your levels of stress and anxiety to a minimum.
2. Your Sense of Smell
There are many medical and environmental factors that can impact a person’s sense of smell, for example, if they had to undergo an operation on their sinuses (which can also negatively impact their sense of taste, too).
However, aside from these external factors, you may well be surprised to learn that there are several ways of striving to maintain a strong sense of smell, including stopping smoking, as cigarettes can kill the specific brain cells which interpret scent.
Seasonal allergies and even asthma can also reduce your ability to detect different smells, so make sure you always carry your inhaler.Issues relating to your oral health, such as poor oral hygiene, gum disease, and gingivitis also need to be kept at bay.
3. Your Eyesight
Perhaps the most important of all five of your senses (although it’s truly amazing how your other senses can adapt and evolve should your eyesight be permanently negatively affected), your eyes require specific vitamins and nutrients to ensure that they’re as healthy as possible.
Make sure that you not only attend annual eye appointments with a medical professional, but that you avoid smoking, drink plenty of water every day, and avoid using old makeup around your eye area, as all three of these have negative effects.
Furthermore, if you’ve been considering freeing yourself from having to wear glasses and/or contact lenses, then don’t hesitate to find out your Laser eye surgery suitability and find out about the impressive benefits of such a decision.
4. Your Skin
Touch is as important to a fully-grown adult as a small baby, as touching and feeling are two of the primary ways that human beings explore the world around them.
Logically, then, you should always be looking for ways to preserving the quality of your skin, not only on your hands and fingertips but also your whole body, so make sure that you always drink plenty of water, protect your skin from the sun’s harmful UV rays, and eat plenty of oily fish and leafy greens.
5. Your Taste
The fifth sense is perhaps the one which, if you had to, you could maybe live without if a medical issue caused you to no longer be able to distinguish between, for example, a sherbet lemon and a rhubarb and custard sweet.
However, when you’re suddenly unable to taste your food, this may well lead to a lack of interest at mealtimes and could, therefore, seriously impact your physical health over time.
Make sure you stay away from consuming high amounts of processed foods and foodstuffs containing high levels of sugar and salt, limit the number of dairy products you consume within an average week, and reduce the number of cups of coffee you drink.
