Aah, the wonderful, effervescent feelings of the morning shower. Yet, is it as sensational as it can be? Far from it. To make one of life’s great pleasures even more pleasurable, add healing touch, sound, color, scents and movement to your shower. Doing so will calm and energize you, enabling you to better handle a stressful day.
MAXIMIZE SKIN SENSATIONS
Before you turn on the water spout, first exfoliate your skin. Use a vegetable fiber brush, using circular and long strokes towards your navel. Brush for three to five minutes before taking your shower. This will slough off dead skin cells, stimulate acupressure points, activate lymphatic drainage, and keep your skin soft and healthy.
After brushing, step into the shower stall and turn on the water spout. Adjust the temperature to your liking. And though most people prefer a hot shower, warm showers are less harsh for your skin.
Stand under the shower head, close your eyes and feel the water pellets pounding your skin, waking you up and putting you in touch with your body. The thumping, pulsing, beating pellets provide calming deep pressure touch, making you feel alive and energized. Our most pleasurable sense, touch releases serotonin, the feel good hormone; dopamine, the pleasure seeking get happy hormone; and oxytocin, the bonding hormone. Together, these neurotransmitters balance your nervous system so you feel a calm alertness that prepares you for the day ahead.
Feel your shower as a “baptism” — as not only the way to start a new day but a new life. Picture the water washing away your worries and woes. See those unwanted dark feelings and thoughts going down the drain. And in truth negativity is being washed away. Taking a shower fills the air with negative ions. Negative ions are created in nature by water, air, and sunlight as it impacts the Earth’s inherent radiation. That blanket of good feeling that falls over your body at the ocean’s edge, near a waterfall or after a storm comes from the saturation of negative ions. When you take a shower, the stream of hot water and steam also produces negative ions. That’s part of why you feel so refreshed and awake after.
To feel even more refreshed, wash your skin with a terrycloth washcloth or loufah brush. Add a pebble shower floor to massage the 5,000 nerve endings on the bottom of each foot. Scooped up from beaches, the pebble tile is organic, carbon neutral, beautiful, and friendly to the environment. Standing on the pebbles will not only massage your feet but, if you get pebbles that were not treated or sealed with chemicals you will get in touch with the earth’s healing frequencies, the same as if you were walking in sand.
Before getting out of your shower, turn the dial to cold and douse yourself in a quick cold rinse to increase circulation and invigorate mood. The longer you can tolerate the cold water, the greater the benefits. To understand how innervating this is, try a shower with and without a cold water rinse and compare the difference.
INHALE GOOD VIBES
Amplify your pleasure by adding the scent of invigorating essential oils to your shower experience. Essential oils go from the nose straight to the limbic emotional brain and contain healing frequencies that alleviate anxiety, stress, and depression. They also boost learning, focus, concentration and memory. To wake you up in the morning, inhale deeply the smell of peppermint, lemon or eucalyptus. To wind down at the end of the day, inhale lavender or jasmine or whatever scent you resonate with.
Several ways exist to add essential oils.
- During your shower, drop 2-3 drops of your favorite essential oil on the floor in front of your feet.
- Hang a bunch of fresh eucalyptus in the corner of your bathroom on the shower curtain rod away from the water spray. The heat and steam will release the fragrance of the herb’s essential oils and decrease stress as well as congestion. Enjoy the scent for a few weeks as you take a hot shower.
- For a night shower, add night blooming jasmine vine to your curtain rod as jasmine releases its fragrance after dusk.
- Shower with natural soap, shampoo and conditioners made with essential oils.
- Mist your towels with a drop or two of essential oil. Being wrapped in a cloud of lavender or rose after taking a relaxing and refreshing shower will top off the scintillating sensory experience.
SOUND OFF
As the warm water pellets your body, belt your heart out. Choose any song that gets you grooving as songs that arouse you generate dopamine.
Chant emphasizing vowel sounds – EEEEEEEE, AAAAAYYYY, OOOOOO (as in go), OOOHHHH (as in goo), AAAHHHH. Doing so boosts serotonin and releases endorphins, the brain’s morphine inducing a trance like state.
COLOR YOUR MOOD
To energize you, install a shower head with colored LED lights for a colorful rainfall, at once mesmerizing and relaxing.
STRETCH
As you exercise your vocal chords, stretch your body. Fully stretch one arm up and then the other as if trying to touch the sky. Stretching will increase circulation and the better the blood circulates the healthier a body is. Circulation also helps with pain.
But stretching doesn’t have the power to balance your nervous system. If you really want to start out your day feeling balanced and settled, get a heavy dose of vestibular input (your balance sense) and proprioception (your sense of body awareness from input into your joints and muscles). These two womb sensations (think rocking, swaying, and compression) along with deep pressure touch are the quickest way to get into that just right place where you feel neither bored nor overloaded but calmly alert. They do so by balancing your neurotransmitters and regulating your autonomic nervous system so the higher brain can work without getting waylaid by unsettling bodily tension and stress.
One way to get a quick dose of vestibular, proprioceptive and tactile input in the shower is to do a half down dog into the wall.
Here’s how to do it.
Face the wall in the shower away from the water spray. Stand about 3 or 4 feet away with your feet hip width apart or wider. Place your hands on the wall, arms straight out from your shoulders with your index fingers pointing straight up at 12 o’clock. Your torso should be parallel to the ground with your legs straight and your spine maintaining natural curves. Press through the base of the index finger and the thumb, your arms strongly pushing into the wall while creating an upward lift from your knees to your hips. The harder you push into the wall, the more heavily you engage your muscles and the proprioceptors located in your wrists, elbows, shoulders and hip joints. The more proprioceptive input into your joints and muscles, the more grounded you will feel. The more grounded you feel, the more centered you are. The more centered you are, the better you feel and the more productive you are in your work, the kinder you are to yourself and others, and the more you appreciate the beauty and bounty in your life. At the same time, tilting your head forward and down creates a surge of vestibular input, while pushing into the wall and into the ground creates deep pressure touch, adding to the powerful organizing effect of this pose.
If this pose is too difficult, move closer to the wall and move your hands up the wall so your arms straighten. If you don’t feel a stretch, step further back from the wall and move your hands lower.
The stretch is intense so only stay in it initially for 10-15 seconds breathing deeply and slowly. Gradually increase the time as the pose becomes more comfortable.
To get out of the stretch, gradually walk forward toward the wall until your legs are straight.
CREATE ATMOSPHERE
Bring nature into your shower. Nature returns us to our roots, making us feel calmer, more relaxed, and grounded. Add oxygen by placing in your bathroom humidity-loving, low light requiring plants like bamboo or Peace Lily.
Let the sun pour in if you have a window. If not, light up your bathroom with bright full spectrum light. Full spectrum light emits the full range of the sun’s healing colors, energizing you. Fluorescent lights in contrast drain you.
STAY PURE
Don’t put chemicals into your body. Use a shower filter to remove sulfur and chlorine and other harmful chemicals. Use only soap, gel, shampoo and conditioner with natural, preferably organic ingredients. Only soap your armpits and private parts. The rest of your body not only does not need soaping but doing so strips your body of healthy oils. Clean with toxic free bathroom cleaners. Your shower cannot be a healing sensational experience if it’s a toxic one.
Sharon Heller, PhD is a developmental psychologist who specializes in books on holistic solutions for anxiety, panic and sensory processing disorder (SPD). She is the author of several popular psychology books including “Uptight & Off Center: How sensory processing disorder throws adults off balance & how to create stability” (Symmetry, 2013), “Anxiety: Hidden Causes, Why your anxiety may not be ‘all in your head’ but from something physical” (Symmetry, 2011) and “Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight, What to do if you are sensory defensive in an overstimulating world” (HarperCollins, 2002). She can be contacted via email at [email protected] and via her website, www.sharonheller.net.
