Our senses help us to understand and navigate the world. While each holds an important survival-based premise, we have also learned to use each of our senses to endow ourselves with a sense of pleasure. This is why maintaining good senses is extremely important. Not only do they allow us to live a safe and healthy life, but they can help us to live a full life too! Let’s take a look at a few of our senses, their purposes, and how to maintain them!

Eyes

Let’s start with a sense that we actively use from the moment we open our eyes in the morning to the moment that we close our eyes at night - our sense of sight. Now, having good eyesight is extremely important when it comes to maintaining a good quality of life. Of course, hundreds of thousands of people with poor quality eyesight, or who are completely blind, lead full lives on a daily basis. However, if you can avoid deterioration of your eyesight, you should try your best to, as having poor eyesight or no eyesight can make life a lot more difficult. Now, a first step on your journey to good eyesight could be to carry out eye exercise. Not many people have heard of the concept of eye exercises and will ask do eye exercises work? In short, the answer is yes. There are muscles within your eyes, and exercising these can help to improve your eye movement. Next, make sure to book in an appointment with your optician. When you visit the optician’s, a professional optometrist will be able to conduct a full eye examination, taking a look at the overall health of your eye from front to back, ensuring you can carry out certain visual exercising, and to determine whether you need prescription lenses for long sightedness or short sightedness.

Ears

Next, let’s focus on a sense that is in action around the clock. You can’t turn your sense of hearing off and it helps you to live your day to day life without limitations. Of course, we use our hearing to talk to one another and listen to music, meaning that it can improve our lives in terms of simple and widely understood communication and musical enjoyment. But hearing is also extremely important when it comes to personal safety. If you hear a loud noise, your attention will automatically be drawn to its source. You can hear sounds such as oncoming traffic, people beeping their horn if you are in the way of a vehicle, or shouts for help from others who you can then attend to. Generally speaking, we tend to associate hearing difficulties with the elderly. This is understandable, as over time the small hairs inside our ears that help us to hear things can flatten, causing us to be a little harder of hearing. However, it’s important to remember that your auditory health can be affected at any age. If you are experiencing difficulties in hearing, contact an audiologist. They will be able to conduct different tests to determine your quality of hearing and identify any signs and causes of auditory deterioration.

Mouth

Next, one of life’s pleasures - taste. Of course, taste serves a completely practical function. If we taste bad food or place something in our mouth that has an unpleasant taste to it, chances are that we are going to spit it out and move on to something else. This holds evolutionary value for humans as a species, as it helps to prevent situations where we eat unripe, moldy, or poisonous foods. However, in modern times, when we are relatively well aware of what’s good for us and what’s not, we can embrace taste for its own sake, indulging in foods that taste delicious to us. If your sense of taste becomes impaired, it’s important to contact a doctor as soon as possible. The causes of a lack of taste can range from mild illnesses such as the common cold to serious medical conditions, so it’s always best to identify the cause sooner rather than later.

Nose

Let’s finish off with your sense of smell. Now, this is perhaps one of the least focused on of our senses. Why? Well, we tend to downplay the importance of smell in our lives. Sure, sight can help you to maneuver your way through day to day life, and being able to hear well can alert you to others’ presence and danger. Our sense of smell also tends to be a lot less acute than the sense of smell of other animals. However, we can still detect around 10,000 different scents, and a good sense of smell can play a significant role in our overall sense of wellbeing too! Being able to smell different scents can alert you to danger. Say you can smell that there is a gas leak, a fire, or that some food is rotten. You can then take action, removing yourself from the scene of a gas light, calling for help tackling a fire, or not eating the rotten food. Smell can also affect our general enjoyment of life’s finer things. It affects how we taste food - you have probably noticed that the food that you eat becomes flavorless when you have a blocked nose due to a cold or other illness. We also tend to invest in all sorts of products purely based on their smell, such as perfume, soap, and cleaning products. If you have noticed that your sense of smell is deteriorating, contact a relevant medical professional. They will be able to tell whether you are on route to anosmia (or a complete loss of the sense of smell), identify the cause, and attempt to tackle the issue at hand.

These, of course, aren’t all of the senses that we have. We have our sense of touch too! But that’s an extremely complex sense and would require a complete article of its own. Hopefully the above information has helped you to understand why your senses are so important, and who to reach out to should you experience any problems with your own!