Protecting And Preserving Your Senses
Cover Photo By Pexel
As we grow-up, we start to realize that we need to preserve and protect our bodies so that they can continue to work for us as we age. We all know the importance of maintaining a proper diet and regular exercise for our physical health, and practicing mindfulness and meditation can benefit our mental health. Still, very few of us think to look after our senses.
We each have five senses - sight, touch, sound, smell, and taste, and as we age, these senses can begin to deteriorate. Here’s how to protect and preserve your five senses so that you can continue to have an exciting future.
Sight
As we age, our eyesight can deteriorate, and the likelihood of us developing age-related diseases such as macular degeneration begins to increase. To preserve our vision and stave off age-related sight disorders, it is vital to look after our eyes from a young age.
Book regular appointments with your optometrist to monitor your vision and catch anything untoward as early as possible.
Protect your eyes from blue light by wearing screen glasses or changing your computer display to a warmer tone.
Rest your eyes when working on the computer by allowing them to focus on a faraway object for 20 seconds every 20 minutes.
Wear sunglasses on bright days, and don’t look into bright light sources that can damage your eyes’ nerves.
Ensure to get at least 8 hours of sleep a night so that your eyes can rest, repair, and re-energize.
Wear eye protection whenever you use power tools or handle anything that could break off and get into your eye.
Touch
Losing your sense of touch is called tactile anesthesia and can be prevented by maintaining a healthy diet. Some of the things that you can do to avoid tactile anesthesia include:
Stop smoking cigarettes.
Protect your skin from sun damage by wearing SPF and seeking shade during the hottest parts of the day.
Eat a diet rich in B-12 vitamins, which are good for your skin.
Wrapping up your skin to protect it from the cold in winter; otherwise, you could experience nerve damage and frostbite.
Moisturize your skin with vitamin-E to keep it healthy and to fight free-radicals.
Sound
Like our eyesight, our hearing can also often deteriorate as we age and so it is important to do all that we can while we are younger to ensure that we preserve our hearing for our future - otherwise, we could end up with a hearing aid. Some of the things that you can do to protect your hearing include:
Limiting your exposure to loud noises such as gunshots, power machines, engines, music, or sirens.
Wearing appropriate ear protection when operating loud machinery or while driving motorcycles.
Never cleaning your ears with q-tips but instead having ear-wax removed by a professional.
Turning down the volume when listening to music on your headphones and setting a volume limit on your phone.
Wearing ear-covers when swimming underwater to reduce the chance of contracting an ear infection.
Smell
It’s common to lose some of your sense of smell as you get older, but nasal infections or nasal polyps can expedite this. To protect your sense of smell, you should always be careful when blowing your nose if you have a cold and clean inside your nose using a saline salt-water solution to flush out any bacteria that could cause a sinus infection. To cleanse your nose, all you need to do is:
Boil a pint of water to sterilize it and then let it cool completely.
Add a teaspoon of baking soda and a teaspoon of salt to the water and stir to dissolve.
Wash your hands so that they are clean and then stand over a sink.
Bring some of the saline solution to your face using your hand and sniff it up into your nose, one nostril at a time.
Allow the water to run back out of your nose and repeat a few times.
Taste
Lastly, we come to taste. It is natural to lose some of your taste buds as you age, but as with the other four senses, there are things that you can do to help prevent unnecessary damage. To preserve your sense of taste you should;
Stop smoking as this has been proven to kill-off your taste buds.
Ensure that you are getting enough zinc and vitamin-B1.
Eat a healthy diet filled with lots of fruit and vegetables.
Maintain good oral hygiene by brushing, flossing, and rinsing your teeth and mouth twice a day.
