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Are We Overstimulating Our Senses? What Ayurveda Says About the Five Senses

Think about how you started your day today.   Did you reach for your phone the moment you woke up? Did you listen to music while getting ready, check your messages while having breakfast, and spend the rest of the morning looking at one screen or another?   By the time the day is over, you’ve probably seen hundreds of images, heard countless sounds, tasted different things, touched dozens of objects and taken in more information than you can remember.   We don’t usually think twice about any of this. Our senses are constantly working, and we’ve become so accustomed to stimulation that silence or doing absolutely nothing can sometimes feel uncomfortable.   But have you ever wondered whether the way we use our senses has anything to do with our health?   Interestingly, Ayurveda explored this question through a concept called Asatmya Indriyartha Samyoga.   It refers to how the way we interact and perceive things with our sense organs affects our overall health. It also discusses what happens when we use them too little or in the wrong way.   Let’s understand this.   What is Asatmya Indriyartha Samyoga?   The term is made up of four words: Asatmya: Unsuitable or incompatible Indriya: Sense organs Artha: Objects or subjects of perception Samyoga: Contact or association   Together, Asatmya Indriyartha Samyoga refers to an unsuitable or improper interaction between our sense organs and their respective objects.   In Charaka Samhita, Acharya Charaka discusses this in the eleventh chapter of Sutrasthana, where he identifies it as one of the three fundamental causes of disease.   But what makes this concept particularly interesting is that it is divided into three forms:   Atiyoga: Excessive use Ayoga: Insufficient or lack of use Mithyayoga: Improper use   Let’s look at what each of these means.   Atiyoga: When we use our senses excessively   Atiyoga refers to excessive use of our sense organs.   And honestly, this is something we can relate to quite easily today.   Think about your eyes.   Most of us spend a considerable part of our day looking at screens. We move from our laptops to our phones, from our phones to televisions, and sometimes back to our laptops again.   It is clearly an example of Atiyoga of the eyes.   Similarly, listening to excessively loud sounds and repeatedly exposing the sense of smell to very strong odours are described as forms of excessive sensory use.   The idea is that even something our senses are naturally meant to experience can become unsuitable when the exposure is excessive.   It isn’t necessarily about avoiding these experiences altogether. It is about recognising that our senses also have limits.   Ayoga: When we don’t use our senses enough   Now, this is something we don’t usually think about.   Ayoga refers to insufficient use or the complete absence of appropriate engagement with the sense organs.   For instance, Charaka describes not seeing anything at all as an example of Ayoga of the sense of vision. Similarly, not hearing or smelling anything represents insufficient engagement with those respective senses.   Think about how different our experiences would be if we completely stopped engaging with the world around us.   We need our senses to interact with our surroundings, recognise things, experience our environment and respond to what is happening around us.   So the discussion isn’t simply about reducing sensory stimulation.   It is about maintaining an appropriate relationship with the things our senses are meant to experience.   Mithyayoga: When we use our senses improperly   This is perhaps the most interesting of the three.   Mithyayoga refers to the improper or unsuitable use of the sense organs.   It isn’t necessarily about using them too much or too little. It is about the nature of the experience itself.   For the eyes, looking at objects that are excessively close or far away, or repeatedly exposing oneself to disturbing and frightening sights, are discussed as improper sensory experiences.   For hearing, listening to harsh, frightening or unpleasant sounds is described as Mithyayoga.   Similarly, exposure to unpleasant or harmful smells is discussed under the improper use of the sense of smell.   When you look at these examples, you realise that Ayurveda wasn’t only concerned with how much sensory stimulation we experience. It also considered what kind of stimulation we expose ourselves to.   What about taste and touch?   Of course, Ayurveda doesn’t stop with sight, sound and smell.   It also discusses the senses of taste and touch.   Food isn’t just something we consume to satisfy hunger. Taste is one of the ways we experience it. And Ayurveda considers the relationship between taste, food and the individual an important part of understanding nourishment.   Then comes touch.   Charaka discusses excessive exposure to extremely hot or cold sensations as Atiyoga, while inappropriate contact with objects or environments is considered Mithyayoga.   So, when you look at all five senses together, the underlying idea becomes clearer.   Ayurveda considers not just what we experience through our senses, but also the frequency, intensity and nature of that experience.   Why does this matter today?   We live in a world where constant stimulation has become completely normal.   There is always something to watch, something to listen to, something to read or something to respond to.   Even when we are eating, travelling or simply sitting alone, we often look for something to occupy our attention.   Think about the last time you sat in a room without music, television or your phone. Did you feel comfortable, or did you immediately feel the need to reach for something?   We rarely give ourselves the opportunity to experience our surroundings without constantly adding something to them.   Are we constantly exposing our eyes to intense stimulation? Do we ever give ourselves a break from noise? Are we mindful of the sounds, sights and experiences we allow into our… Continue reading Are We Overstimulating Our Senses? What Ayurveda Says About the Five Senses

Ayurveda Named the Reason We Keep Doing Things We Know Are Bad For Us

Have you ever eaten an extra serving despite being full?   Have you ever stayed up scrolling through your phone and lost track of time?   Have you ever decided to be a little lazy and skip your workout?   Admit it, we’ve all at least done any one of these once in our lives.   And here’s the thing, none of us do this because we don’t know better. We know exactly what we’re doing. We just do it anyway.   Ayurveda had a word for this, thousands of years before behavioural science made a whole field out of it. It’s called Pragyaparadha.   And according to Ayurveda, this one idea sits behind almost every disease we end up bringing on ourselves.   The word comes from two Sanskrit roots. Pragya, meaning wisdom or intellect. Aparadha, meaning offence or crime. Put the two together and Pragyaparadha literally means an offence against wisdom.   Not a lack of wisdom but an offence against it.   That difference matters a lot. Ayurveda wasn’t talking about ignorance here, it was talking about something far more familiar and honestly, a little harder to admit to. Knowing exactly what’s good for you, and choosing the opposite anyway.   Ayurvedic texts describe Pragyaparadha as actions of the body, mind or speech, done despite knowing better. Eating something you already know doesn’t suit you. Brushing off clear signs that you’re exhausted. Saying something in anger that you know you’ll regret the second it leaves your mouth. None of this needs ignorance. It just needs one moment where awareness loses to impulse.   Ayurveda believed that this pattern, repeated enough times, becomes one of the root causes of disease itself.   This is a very different starting point from how most of us think about getting sick.   When something goes wrong with our health, we usually look outward first. We look for the virus, the deficiency, the bad gene, the environmental trigger, the food we ate, or sometimes, simply, bad luck. And of course, these things matter.   Ayurveda never claimed that everything that happens to the body is a consequence of personal choices. But it also asked us to look somewhere else, somewhere most of us are much less comfortable looking: at the small, repeated choices we make against our own better judgement.   Because sometimes, we already know.   We know we are tired, but we stay up anyway. We know we are full, but we take another serving because it tastes good. We know that certain foods leave us feeling terrible, yet somehow, they keep finding their way back onto our plates. We know we need to move, rest, slow down, or stop stressing about something, and still find ourselves doing the exact opposite.   We think subconsciously that stayiny up one late night is not going to affect our health, one indulgent meal is not going to make us sick. But we forget that we keep repeating these things quietly, so much so that you’ll realise it stopped becoming a choice and started becoming a pattern.   The doshas getting disturbed again and again by the same habits. The body constantly having to compensate for the same disruptions. Small imbalances being ignored because they are still small enough to live with. Until, eventually, the body cannot keep correcting itself quite as easily as it once did, and disease gets the room it needs to take hold.   And honestly, this sounds a lot like something we are already talking about today.   There is an entire area of behavioural science concerned with the distance between what we know and what we actually do. It is often described as the knowledge-behaviour gap, and you do not need a psychology degree to recognise it in your own life.   We are not exactly short on information.   And yet, somehow, knowing all of this does not guarantee that we will act on it.   We can have all the information in the world and still find ourselves repeating the same habits we promised ourselves we were going to change.   And this is where I think the concept gets particularly interesting, because Pragyaparadha is not really about not knowing better. It is about knowing better and then, for whatever reason, choosing otherwise.   There is something almost painfully human about that.   And here is what I particularly like about the Ayurvedic approach to this. It does not seem interested in turning that observation into another reason for us to feel terrible about ourselves.   There is already enough guilt attached to health. Every day, we are given another reason to feel like we are failing at taking care of ourselves.   Pragyaparadha gives us a slightly different way of looking at the problem. Instead of asking, What is wrong with me that I keep doing this?, perhaps the more useful question is, Why did I act against what I already knew?   That question takes us somewhere much more interesting.   Ayurveda places importance on cultivating Sattva, a state associated with clarity, steadiness and a balanced mind. The answer, therefore, was not simply to keep collecting more knowledge. It was to develop the mental clarity required to actually live according to the knowledge you already have.   Because there is a huge difference between knowing something and being able to act on it.   And this is also why practices like Dinacharya, the Ayurvedic approach to daily routine, make more sense when viewed through this lens. They were not simply a collection of rituals designed to give you another checklist to complete every morning. At their best, routines create regularity, and regularity gives you the opportunity to notice yourself.   You start noticing when you are actually hungry instead of eating because the clock says it is lunchtime. You notice when your sleep is beginning to deteriorate. You notice when your digestion feels different, when your energy is lower than usual, when… Continue reading Ayurveda Named the Reason We Keep Doing Things We Know Are Bad For Us