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Sense & Sense-abilities
Our five senses are perhaps our greatest gifts from nature. We cherish our sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch to whatever degree they function for us to enjoy. I’ll skip any possible sixth sense as my understanding of it may be lame at best.
You may have read that an unexpected, but frequent complaint about COVID-19 is the loss of smell and taste. As of yet, it’s difficult to know the long-term duration of any effects from the disease. But the virus is not the only attack on our senses. As we age, subtle changes (and losses) to our senses can zap our joy and perhaps serve as early signals of health risks.
There are no guarantees that we will keep the quality of our physical senses intact. Still, there are ways to protect – perhaps even enhance – what we have left. Much of the advice given by health care providers typically work merely as a cover-up. Here too. But other tips are preventative and augmenting to our abilities.
SIGHT
As we age, the lens in our eyes can stiffen and eye muscle fibers weaken. For instance, from younger years, our risk triples for cataracts. Almost all of us know someone, or have ourselves, sought treatment for cataracts. Further both glaucoma and macular degeneration increase after age 45. Most of us can clearly see (pun intended) how important our vision is to life’s activities, independence and safety.
Tips for Eye Health
- Keep light bright when reading, writing or occupied with paperwork.
- Avoid dry eye. Moisturizing eyes can decrease blurry vision and ease irritation. It can help driving at night or when reading.
- Sufficient sleep keeps eyes more lubricated.
- Exercise helps blood flow to the eyes.
- Products like OCuSoft Scrubs (not really used for what I would call ‘scrubbing’) help remove irritants and can reduce the small tag-like skin pieces on eye lids. [OCuSoft has a new foam which I think is more cost effective than the pads, and creates a lot less waste.]
- Research the cause and possible need for cataract surgery if vision is impaired by blurriness; the same is true if you start to experience difficulty with nighttime driving and seeing glares around headlights. [Revisit Blind as a Bat No More from guest writer Lorraine Vail on Aging with Pizzazz.] Some needing corrective lenses may consider research on non-essential refractive surgery.
[Refer back to my interview with California researcher, Barbara North, in “A Magic Elixir for Everlasting Life? 3 Warning Tips” about evaluating research claims for anything in this article.] - From a previous post, “Optometrist suggests people don’t wear enough eye protection when doing yard work or projects with wood and especially metal, where flying flakes are likely, and dangerous. Failure to take this safety step accounts for many of his emergency visits.” (Taken from Potpourri of Opinions & Suggestions from Health Care Professionals.)
- Bates pinhole glasses are used as a holistic approach to supposedly improve certain vision issues: short-sightedness (myopia), astigmatism, long-sightedness (hyperopia), and old-age blur (presbyopia). The theory is that the Bates Method therapy re-educates the eyes and brain to naturally improve vision. Seeing.org says that the pinhole glasses are a useful tool for Vision Education, but not a panacea. I have owned a pair of these glasses for decades. One point that perhaps needs to be emphasized for any level of success is commitment; not as easy as it sounds.
- Exercise eye muscles a few times a day. Without moving the head, look up to the right, then Left; look down to the right, then to the left; and then do circles going in one direction and finally the opposite direction.
Listening to the daily news can be a good reminder
to do your eye-rolling exercises.
HEARING
It’s unfortunately normal that hearing often deteriorates as we age. Currently, it’s believed that the tiny hair-cells in the ears (the ones that signal sound to your brain), do not regenerate. Thus prevention is vital for you to protect whatever hearing you have remaining.
Tips for Hearing Health
- Does it go without saying to remind us about loud noise? Avoid power tools, motorcycles, loud indoor (or outdoor) concerts, or earphones blasting your favorite music. They all cause deterioration. It is best to start this behavior early in life, but assuming you have something left to protect, any change in conduct may help to stop further loss.
- Wear earplugs or noise-reducing earphones if near loud sounds.
[I use them in movie theatres, which I hope to do again one day when isolation is less strict.] - Consider earphones that limit volume control (this is a common feature in earphones designed for children). I listen to audio books regularly but I try to keep the volume as low as I can without straining to hear.
- Avoid playing the TV at high volume by instead using Closed Caption. [After a while you don’t notice it.]
- Maintain arteries that supply (ear) hair cells in good shape, by keeping weight, blood pressure and blood sugar levels down.
- According to current advice, getting hearing aids while hearing is not severely impaired will help maintain more natural hearing. (Perhaps, in part, this reduces the tendency to crank up TV volume or expose oneself to loud environments, but that notion might be fake news.)
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SMELL
This “oldest” of senses is controlled by nerve endings high up in the nose. Smell can be underestimated and unappreciated. Smell (according to Harold McGee in ‘Nose Drive’) is a more dominant sense in enjoying the flavor of our food than is even taste, due to more complex components. Smell is strongly connected to old memories and emotions; those sentiments can be lost if the sense of smell is diminished. More important is the jeopardy to health as smell is also vital to detect bad food, smoke or gas leaks.
Tips for Savoring Sense of Smell
- Avoid getting your face (and nose) too close to chemicals or cleaning products and their fumes.
- Take care with certain cold /flu remedies with nasal application; some have been linked to loss of smell. Before using one, do a bit of research.
- Keep wine/beer/spirits to one per day.
- Exercise (again, as above) tends to reduce the loss of smell.
- “Smell Training” was new to me. This includes the act of gentle smelling of common aromas. The directions include taking a minute or two each day to smell known items such as rosemary, lemon, eucalyptus, rose, cinnamon or clove. The report is that up to 40% of people who use this training can increase their ability to identify and detect odor (important for detecting smoke or the smell added into natural gas).
- Don’t wait to visit an otolaryngologist if you have questions about changes in your ability to smell.
TASTE
Regeneration of taste bud cells can slow as we age, hence tastes may not be as dramatic (and enjoyable) as they once were.
Tips for Taste
- Avoid alcohol-based mouthwash.
- Watch for reactions to prescription drugs (or even OTC ones like those for allergies). They can cause dry mouth. Switching drugs or using a “mouth moisturizer” may help.
- Using small amounts of sugar or sea salt on foods may boost the taste, but overdoing it is obviously a cover-up of the problem. Complex natural flavors are considered a positive way to bring back a noticeable zing to your food. Examples are using more onions, garlic, dried fruits/ vegetables/ mushrooms, flavored vinegars, vegetable pastes (like tomato) or strong cheese – all which will add to your perception of taste.
- This is simply a personal theory, but I would add that we need to take extra time with food or drink to savor nuances of flavor in every bite and sip.
TOUCH
The sense of touch provides more safety than one might first think. Sensors for touch in the skin, muscles and joints provide you information about pain, heat, cold or position in space. Pain and temperatures may be obvious safety signals, but poor awareness of our position in space can affect balance, and make one feel (or act) unsteady.
Tips for Touch
- Hug more. In times of isolation, this has an exceptional advantage perhaps more than ever before. Hugging a partner or pod-friend, kissing grandkids or even petting the cat and dog stimulate touch senses. An extra bonus is the stress-relief and mental health boost the actions bring.
- Wear clothes which hug the body some, even if you cover the inner clothing piece with an outer layer. This need not be the tightness of Spanks, just slight pressure.
- Plan a regular massage. As a substitute, use a massage chair or portable shiatzu device (the latter very inexpensive these days).
- Savor the skin-tingling feeling of a hot shower, bath or sauna.
- Exercise or move. The more our receptors are stimulated by our functioning in space, the more active and efficient they will be.
FINAL THOUGHT
Sensing a common theme?
Our senses provide benefits to both our physical and mental health, full-stop. Activities of daily living are served well in some degree by each of these fabulous-five. They make life easier when they are in good shape, and all too often are appreciated only after they have deteriorated. [Missing water in the well, and all that.] When you give it a bit of thought, it may well be worth the extra little efforts. Our senses bring us great pleasure and enjoyment of life.
I suspect we all know a great deal of this; after all, it’s mostly common sense.
—
Picture credit: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
