8 Basic Grounding Techniques to Help You Keep Your Cool
Most of us are familiar with the feeling: You’re getting ready to tackle that next big task on your to-do list when suddenly your heart starts pounding, you start feeling clammy and tense, and everything suddenly feels kind of cloudy and far away.
The symptoms can be different for each person, but nearly everyone has experienced intense anxiety or panic attacks at some point in their life.
Whether you are somebody who struggles with anxiety or panic attacks, or someone who has just been feeling overwhelmed and disconnected lately, “grounding” can be a valuable tool for keeping our stressors and emotions from “running away” with us.
What is grounding?
When we’re faced with these intense feelings, our body and mind have a natural reaction to distance us from the situation as a defense mechanism. This leads many people to feel disoriented or disconnected from reality in those moments, and more connected to those fears and anxieties that are taking over.
Grounding techniques are a way to help us regain that connection to our environment and pull ourselves back to the here and now.
At their core, grounding techniques force you to engage with your surroundings using your different senses. By putting our attention on the physical environment around us, we can start to “lift the fog” and help regain control of our thoughts and emotions.
Physical vs mental
Grounding is an intentional step and takes effort and practice to do. It also takes some trial and error to find the techniques that work best for us. Most people respond better to some techniques and worse to others.
One of the ways we can categorize grounding techniques is by differentiating between “physical” and “mental.” Often people will respond better to one or the other depending on personal preferences, the nature of their anxiety, or the situation they find themselves in.
Here are 8 techniques for you to try, split between these two categories. Next time you’re feeling overwhelmed, panicked, or anxious, try one (or two, or three)! Work your way through the list and you’ll start to find what techniques work best for you.
Physical grounding techniques
“5,4,3,2,1" is a classic, and for good reason! Using all your senses, look around and name 5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear, 3 things you can touch, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste (hopefully you brushed your teeth that morning!).
Isometrics. Find a part of your body (face, hands, toes etc.) and tense it up, then release. We naturally do this when anxious, but the idea here is to do it with intent! Notice the tension when you scrunch up, and then notice the feeling of release when you let go. (Try this technique with your face in front of a mirror and you may find laughter relieving a bit of the tension as well!)
Find something interesting to touch. Look around yourself for an interesting texture to feel: A nice leather couch, the denim of your jeans, the ridged grip on your remote, etc. Focus on how it feels under your fingers. Run your fingers across it in different ways and see if it feels different.
Pay attention to the breath in your body. Don’t try to control it! Just turn your attention to it. Feel how the air moves in and out. Pay attention to what parts of your body move when you breathe. Notice how fast or slowly you’re breathing.
Mental grounding techniques
Listen to some music. Pull up your music service of choice and play a song you like. What kind of instruments do you hear? Is the song playing slowly or fast? How many voices can you hear singing? What are the lyrics about?
Pick a color or shape. Look around your environment and count as many things of that color/shape around you
Pick a category (furniture, vegetables, dogs, actors, etc.). List as many different things in that category as you can think of.
Look around your space and find things that tell you when and where you are. For example: Out my window I can see a bare apple tree and a cloudy sky, so it must be winter; on my wall I have a poster that says “May the force be with you” that is in English because I’m in the US; looking down on my desk I can see my Pixel 3 XL phone (man, I’m due for an upgrade) so I know it must be after 2018; etc.
Rinse, repeat
It’s important to note that there is no “magic spell” that will make your anxiety or panic instantly disappear. If you try one of the above techniques, and are still feeling overwhelmed, try it again! Pick a new shape in your environment to find, or try isometrics with a different body part, etc. Sometimes it takes a few tries before your body is willing to follow along with your shift in focus. If it’s really not working, try a different technique! Like we said above, you’ll find that some techniques will be more effective for you than others.
Remember, the goal of grounding is to get you connected back to the here and now. You likely will still feel some anxiety. Sometimes you will find yourself doing more grounding a little while later to help maintain. The goal is to give yourself a more grounded perspective as you move forward, and help keep your anxiety and emotions in check so they don’t spiral out of control.
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Look out for future blog posts with more techniques to try!
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Warmly,
Kylyn and Marie