The 5-Channel Technique by Klaus Bernhardt is an especially fast way to positively influence the brain in individuals with psychological issues. It is based on the fact that things perceived through different sensory channels are processed in different areas of the brain. The 5-Channel Technique stimulates these various areas to cooperate with one another. In combination with the 10-Sentence Method, which Klaus Bernhardt introduced in 2017 in his international bestseller How to calm Anxiety: Live a Life Free From Panic in Just a Few Weeks, it is possible to quickly and permanently free anxiety patients from their fears.
The 5-Channel Technique: An Overview of All Topics
This approach works by literally restructuring a brain that has been trained for anxiety and panic, depriving anxiety disorders of their foundation. While breathing exercises, distractions, or tranquilizers typically provide only short-term relief without lasting effects (and can even lead to dependency with prolonged use), the 5-Channel Technique stimulates the brain in a unique way. This leads to the rapid formation of new, stable synaptic connections where lightness and self-confidence are stored instead of fear. The more “positive synapses” the brain develops, the more automatically one responds with calmness in previously anxiety-inducing situations. Furthermore, the feared physical reactions—such as trembling, tingling, dizziness, sweating, a lump in the throat, or pressure in the chest or stomach—gradually subside as the corresponding neurotransmitters are no longer released.
Important Note:
Please do not mistake the 10-Sentence Method and the 5-Channel Technique for a type of medication that you take only while feeling anxious and can stop once you feel better. These techniques are more like adopting a healthy lifestyle, similar to regular exercise or a balanced diet. The positive effects last only as long as you continue practicing them. Therefore, it is advisable to maintain the healthier way of thinking you’ve trained with the 10-Sentence Method. Once you overcome your anxiety, daily 20-minute sessions may no longer be necessary, but “maintenance training” for your regained quality of life—around 15 minutes, three times a week—is definitely worth your time.
How to Apply the 5-Channel Technique Correctly
Spend 20 minutes each day mentally focusing on just one of your ten sentences while concentrating on one of your five sensory channels at a time. As a general guideline, spend about 5 minutes focusing on seeing and hearing, 4 minutes on feeling, and 3 minutes each on smelling and tasting.
In your imagination, visualize, hear, feel, smell, and taste each element separately, as clearly as possible. Many people initially find themselves switching between sensory channels, but don’t worry—this is completely normal and doesn’t disrupt the process. Simply return to the channel you are working on until the set time is reached. Ideally, perform the 10-Sentence Method and the 5-Channel Technique right before going to bed. This way, your REM sleep phases will also contribute to the “reprogramming” of your brain, further accelerating the success.
This type of mental training may feel unfamiliar at first and requires practice, but most anxiety patients can integrate this highly effective exercise into their daily lives in less than a week. Here’s a concrete example of how the process works. Let’s use the following sentence:
“I live in a happy relationship and feel joy every day that I get to spend my life with such a loving and mindful partner.”
Important Note:
If you’re sure that this statement will never apply to your current partner, use this exercise with an imagined person you haven’t yet met. According to Rule 5 of the 10-Sentence Method, visualizing someone specific would make this goal feel unattainable. This exercise is about focusing on the qualities of an ideal partner, not a specific individual.
To make this exercise simple and effective, choose a specific situation that would definitely be part of a perfect relationship for you. This could be a lovely Sunday breakfast together, a walk in the woods, a romantic evening, or a movie night followed by dinner at your favorite restaurant. Over the coming weeks, you can decide different situations for your exercises, as long as they align with the concept of a happy relationship. Just be sure to express everything positively. For instance, while you might believe that healthy conflict resolution is important, even the word “conflict” can have negative connotations and should be avoided. Besides, most people need more happy moments together, not more practice in conflict resolution.
Example: Going to the Movies
Let’s use the example of going to the movies with a partner to explain how to optimally separate the sensory channels. However, before we dive into that, here’s an important reminder: Some of you may be thinking, “But I haven’t been able to go to the movies for a long time because of my anxiety.”
Recognize that the only reason you currently can’t go to the movies is because your brain has already planned for you to feel anxious or even have a panic attack there. It produces images of you sitting in a crowded theater, panicking, and feeling unable to leave quickly enough. It imagines scenes where others look at you judgmentally as you push through the rows to get out. You might even “hear” the irritated comments of other moviegoers in your mind.
Understand this: Right now, your brain finds it a thousand times easier to recall all of these negative images and inner dialogues than to produce even one positive thought. But this will soon change—that’s exactly what the 10-Sentence Method and the 5-Channel Technique are for. The goal isn’t to force yourself to go to the movies despite your fear, but to teach your brain, in the safe environment of your home, to produce positive thoughts instead of negative ones.
Even though it might seem unimaginable right now, if you practice the following exercise consistently for a few weeks, you’ll soon be able to enjoy activities that currently seem impossible. It doesn’t even matter if you don’t fully believe in a quick success yet; you will experience it more and more as you commit to the following training.
First Steps with the 5-Channel Technique
Find a quiet place, make yourself comfortable, and mentally go through your five sensory channels one by one. If possible, do not write this exercise down; instead, do it purely in your mind, as the goal is to train a new way of thinking. If you struggle to focus at first, you can use a pen and paper, but the exercise should eventually be done more mentally than written.
To properly use the 10-Sentence Method with the 5-Channel Technique, imagine going to a nice theater with a loved one, focusing first only on the visual channel, on what you see. Take your time—this is not about speed, but about immersing yourself deeply in each channel.
It’s also fine if this ideal person doesn’t exist in your life yet. Simply imagine the qualities this person would need to have for you to fall madly in love with them.
Let’s get started! Here are a few ideas of what you could see in your imagination:
- The movie posters outside the theater for the film you’ve chosen
- A beautiful, inviting concession stand in the theater lobby
- Your dream partner purchasing the tickets
- The snacks and drinks you’ll take into the theater
- The comfortable seats and the large screen showing funny commercials
- Your partner’s hand gently stroking yours
- The amazing movie you picked
- The moment when the lights come on, and you can see on the faces of other patrons that they enjoyed the movie as much as you did
- Your partner lovingly asking where you’d like to go for dinner
- Your favorite restaurant, where the waiter greets you warmly as a regular
Once you’ve consciously visualized all the pleasant images related to this situation, switch to the auditory channel—what you hear during this perfect movie night followed by dinner with a loved one.
Next, move on to feeling, then to smelling, and finally to tasting.
The last two sensory channels, smell and taste, tap into very old areas of the brain and are especially powerful in reprogramming, so don’t give up too quickly here. Additionally, about 98% of all fears are produced primarily in one of the first three channels (seeing, hearing, and feeling). Therefore, both smelling and tasting are usually free of old anxiety patterns and are highly effective from the start in contributing to the positive reprogramming of your brain.
The 5-Channel Technique: An Example of a Movie Outing
Here’s a concrete example of how to perform this exercise mentally. Please adapt the details to suit your personal preferences. If you don’t like soda, substitute it with the drink you would most enjoy in that situation. It could be water, beer, champagne, or coffee. The idea is to mentally plan and connect behaviors that describe how fantastic your life can be—not behaviors driven by fear, which you’ve already mastered perfectly. If, for example, you love drinking coffee but currently avoid it due to anxiety, now is the perfect time to start enjoying it mentally again. It’s important not just to recite these details to yourself but to fully immerse in the experience with as much intensity as possible in your mind.
SEEING: I see the movie theater, the large screen with commercials playing, people with drinks and popcorn, my own popcorn and my ice-cold soda, my partner eagerly waiting for the movie to start, their hand gently reaching for mine and stroking it, their beautiful smile, the movie beginning, and my favorite actor on screen…
HEARING: I hear the dialogues in the movie, the music, the laughter of the audience, the quiet rustling of my popcorn bag, the soft creak of the chair as I shift, my companion whispering a funny comment, my inner thoughts about how happy I am to have such an amazing person by my side, the crunch of popcorn as I chew…
FEELING: I feel the comfortable movie theater seat, the pleasant warmth in the room, my partner’s gentle hand, the cool soda bottle in my hand, the crispy popcorn in my mouth, the excitement as the movie starts, the feeling of freedom because I can do everything I want again, and a sense of refreshment with every sip of my cold drink. Later, I feel the cool, pleasant evening air as I happily leave the theater, excited for my favorite meal at the restaurant, and the liberating feeling of being able to do everything I enjoy once again.
SMELLING: I smell the theater, my companion’s perfume, the fresh popcorn, my soda, and later the food at the restaurant, the dessert, perhaps a glass of wine or espresso afterward (choose what suits you best).
TASTING: I taste the popcorn, the soda, a tender kiss from my partner, the delicious meal at the restaurant, and all the side dishes and drinks…
You may already feel how powerful this different way of thinking is just by reading these few lines. The more details you mentally include in your scenarios, the faster you’ll regain a light and happy life. This exercise builds connections in your brain at a speed that surpasses regular thinking by 10,000 times. While the sentence “I’m spending a nice evening at the movies with my love” creates just a handful of synapses, separating the channels activates five different brain regions separately. As you switch from one channel to another, these regions must exchange information, as what you’ve seen now needs to be heard, felt, smelled, or tasted. This forces your neurons to fire together repeatedly, which leads to the formation of new synaptic connections.
If you find 20 details for seeing, another 20 for hearing and feeling, maybe 10 for smelling, and 5 for tasting, your brain cannot help but form 20 x 20 x 20 x 10 x 5 synaptic connections.
Have you done the math? By thoroughly doing this exercise, you can form up to 400,000 synapses in 20 minutes, all of which are linked to the idea of enjoying regular movie outings with someone who truly suits you.
After practicing the 10-Sentence Method and the 5-Channel Technique for a few days, you’ll notice it’s not always easy to stay within the designated channel. For example, when focusing on smell, the fresh scent of mowed grass might pop into your mind if your sentence is: “I love going for walks alone.” In that case, your brain will automatically add the image of the freshly mowed lawn and your neighbor waving with the lawnmower in the visual channel, while the sound of the mower is retrieved in the auditory channel, creating new connections.
It’s perfectly fine to jump between channels now and then, as this only creates more positive connections in your brain. The key is to return to the current channel and continue identifying things you’ll soon experience once you’ve overcome your anxiety for good.
When working on taste, it makes sense from the start to incorporate situations where food and drink are involved in the seeing channel. For instance, if you plan to return to a job that makes you happy, you might include a pleasant lunch break with new colleagues in your exercise. That’s why we added a visit to your favorite restaurant in the movie outing example—it’s the easiest place to think positively about smell and taste, isn’t it?
Some people might initially struggle with implementing these techniques, but don’t let that discourage you. You’re learning a completely new way to use your brain. Like anything new, practice makes perfect.
If you still need help or feel uncertain about some aspects or suspect that your anxiety might have organic causes that your doctor hasn’t recognized, we recommend our online online therapy, How to Calm Anxiety. It’s designed as if you were having seven one-on-one sessions with Klaus Bernhardt himself. In the course, you’ll learn everything about the true causes of anxiety disorders, commonly overlooked factors, and how to tackle specific anxieties like agoraphobia, generalized anxiety disorder, social phobia, hypochondria, panic attacks, or emetophobia, ensuring the 10-Sentence Method and the 5-Channel Technique work optimally for you.
Now, we wish you much joy and quick success in working with the 10-Sentence Method and the 5-Channel Technique!
Note for Psychotherapists, Psychiatrists, and Alternative Practitioners for Psychotherapy:
Dear colleagues, the 10-Sentence Method and the 5-Channel Technique are just two of the many helpful tools that we have developed, tested, and refined over the years at the Institute for Modern Psychotherapy. If you are interested in helping people with anxiety, depression, or compulsions even more quickly and effectively, consider exploring our 5-day advanced training: The Bernhardt Method in Therapeutic Practice. If needed, we can also connect you with one of the over 300 therapists who have completed this training and have since reported significantly higher success rates with their patients.
Troy A.
Tampa, Florida