Sort your senses

Sharpen up with some sensory exercises that will benefit you in the long run and ensure you feel on top of your game

Stripe skirt £56.00, warehouse. co.uk Yellow knitted top £125, karenmillen. com Stripe dress £24.99, handm.com ANY parent desperately trying to calm a wailing child would think their screams would wake the dead. But apparently not.

In fact, a baby crying doesn’t even feature in the top 10 noises most likely to wake up a man. So is it time to sharpen both your senses?

Here’s how to get – and keep – the famous five in fighting form, with health benefits way beyond your relationship. HEARING While you can’t actually improve your hearing, you can improve the way you listen, said Jan de Vries, author of The Five Senses: How to Improve Taste, Smell, Touch, Sight and Hearing (£8, Mainstream Publishing).

Shut your eyes to cut out the other sensory input competing for your attention and pick out one instrument playing in your favourite song.

“By depriving yourself of sight, you’re training your ears to provide more information and your brain to understand it better,” de Vries said.

And when that car alarm starts, just smile. “This tenses the muscles in your inner ear which softens damaging low-frequency noise by as much as 20 decibels,” de Vries said. So no matter how painful the singing is at your child’s school concert, at least you’ll look like you’re enjoying it. TOUCH Your body’s biggest organ deserves some TLC, so next time you’re scraping ice off your windscreen, wear gloves. “Even occasional exposure to intense cold can damage nerve endings and cause blood flow to be directed away from the area, leading to a loss of sensation,” said Harley Street dermatologist Dr Christopher Rowland-Payne.

Try boosting oxygen flow to the nerves in the sensitive upper dermis layer of the skin with foods high in vitamin B12 and the nutrient niacin, which is richest in liver and kidney, Cambridge University researchers advise. Any excuse for a pie deserves cherishing. TASTE There’s a reason why you are often given cheese if tasting wine. It dulls your senses by coating your mouth in a thin layer of fat, so any plonk tastes wonderful.

“To really taste all the flavours in foods, you need to clean your taste buds by swilling water round your mouth for a few seconds between courses,” de Vries said.

And try chewing for a full three seconds with each mouthful so all the salty, bitter, sweet and sour components get the chance to hit the receptors on your tongue.

Lastly, give your 10,000-plus taste buds a weekly spring clean by scrubbing your tongue for 60 seconds after doing your teeth. “Your tongue also becomes coated with plaque and other residues, and this uncovers them,” de Vries added. SMELL To really hone your conk, you need to perfect your sniffing technique, said perfumer Harry Fremont, who has used his sense of smell to produce some of the best-selling Estee Lauder and Ralph Lauren fragrances.

He added: “Smelling very deeply forces too much air over your nasal passages. Instead, take several smaller sniffs which help you detect the subtler notes of an aroma better.”

And try putting words to whatever you’re smelling, advises Dr Peter Brennan, an expert in smell and behaviour at the University of Cambridge. “Actively smell strong odours such as coffees or eucalyptus and come up with three adjectives to describe them,” Brennan said.

This boosts the connection between your brain and olfactory – or smelling – system, he explained. SIGHT The general rule is to use-it-or-lose-it – but not when it comes to your eyes. In fact overusing them can be a big problem.

“Overly fatiguing certain eye muscles without breaks can weaken them, so you can’t focus as quickly or as well,” Andrew Lotery, professor of ophthalmology at Southampton University, said.

So if you spend hours staring at a computer screen, protect your vision by sticking a page of newsprint 8-10ft away. Interrupt your work every 30 minutes or so by bringing the headlines into focus, then look back at your screen. Do it five times.

And protect your eyes from pollution and the effects of UV light with artificial tears, advised Dr Lotery (£15.49, chemistdirect.co.uk).

“Used daily, they reduce your risk of cataracts by up to 60 per cent by combatting damaging free radicals with an extra defensive layer,” he said. Alternatively, just watch re-runs of Watership Down.