How Overusing Your Senses Can Trigger Imbalance, According to Ayurveda

But because all our perceptions, as well as our thoughts and feelings, are biochemical events as well as experiences in consciousness, improper use of the senses can create imbalance or damage in the body and result in illness. Overuse of the senses strains and stresses our nervous system. To use a simple example, repeated exposure to bright light hurts the retina and strains the optic nerve, which triggers pitta, and sooner or later a person’s eyesight will be affected or neuritis-like symptoms will arise. If we listen to loud music or hear loud sounds, the eardrum and the rest of our hearing apparatus are hurt and weakened; if it occurs often, the person can become deaf.

Loud sounds also affect systemic vata dosha, giving rise to vata symptoms such as arthritis or degenerative changes in the bones. Lying in the sun strains the sense of touch, aggravates pitta, and may lead to skin cancer. Misuse of the senses means using them in a wrong way, such as trying to read very small letters, or looking through a microscope or telescope (which creates a strain on the eyes), or reading while lying down (which changes the angle of focus and builds up stress on the muscles of the eyeball), which will eventually result in pitta or vata disorders. Eating a large quantity of wrong food, such as hot, spicy, stimulating food containing cayenne pepper, is a misuse of the taste organ.

Listening to loud sounds over the telephone, and long phone conversations, both aggravate vata. Exposing the senses to wrong inputs, such as watching violent movies on television, is also a misuse of the senses. Underuse of the senses means not perceiving with total attention, ignoring what we perceive, or not making full use of our wonderful sensory equipment. This can lead, for example, to accidents.

SAD (seasonal affective disorder) is a form of depression that affects people who don’t get enough sunlight during the winter—a kind of underuse of the sense of sight. “Cabin fever,” the discomfort and restlessness born of staying indoors for a long time, is at least partly the result of sensory deprivation. Prolonged fasting—underuse of the sense of taste—aggravates vata. “KNOWING BETTER” Very often we get sick because we disregard our own knowledge or wisdom.

Understanding our prakruti, our psychobiological constitution, is self-knowledge; understanding how certain foods, for instance, can disturb the balance of our mind-body system and lead to illness, while other food is balancing and strengthening for us, is knowledge we can use to remain healthy. And yet often we follow the impulses of the moment and choose foods that will cause us problems. If a person who knows that her constitution is largely pitta decides to eat hot spicy food for lunch and then spends the rest of the summer afternoon working in the garden, she is disregarding her intelligence and understanding and asking for trouble. As individuals, we are all part of the Cosmic Consciousness, the universal intelligence that so beautifully organizes all of nature.