Grounding for Felt Safety
When we are faced with overwhelming feelings, it can be very dysregulating, disorienting, and disheartening. In those moments, it helps get some immediate relief. Grounding practices help us do just that.
Grounding can help calm our minds and create space for us to think and move through our day more intentionally. Here is a list of practices to experiment with. Until you’ve dialed in what set of practices work really well for you, trying these out is a lot of initial experimentation. We are all scientists exploring our brain’s responses to different stimuli. In therapy, I often facilitate this process as we discuss results and dial in a set of personalized tools.
If you don’t already have a felt sense of what works well for you, it’s worth taking some time to glance over this list and first try what resonates with you the most. What jumps off the page?
As you practice some of these, simply notice whatever sensations you experience. Let that guide you through these practices. Respect yourself and stop at any point if you feel more overwhelmed or dysregulated. There’s always an important reason for that sensation and it’s worth pausing to revisit that negative experience with a licensed mental health practitioner.
Body-based Grounding Practices:
Breathing Exercises are one of the easiest and most accessible ways to immediately find some relief in your mind from anxious and trauma-related thoughts and feelings and pull your body out of a sympathetic nervous response and into a calm and engaged state of awareness. Box breathing, single nostril breathing, lion’s breath, etc. are all specific techniques, but the simple foundation for all these is to breathe in through the nose quicker and out through the mouth slower.
Adjusting your posture is another very easy, simple practice you can do at any moment to regulate your nervous system and feel some relief. Simply pull your head and shoulders back, your hips in, and imagine you’re being pulled up by a string from head to toe so that your head, shoulders, hips, and feet all line up along an imaginary vertical axis.
The Progressive Relaxation Technique can help ground you in your body by squeezing and releasing different muscle groups while breathing deeply
Practicing a Vagus Nerve Ear Massage can help activate your autonomic nervous system, which in turn can help calm and regulate your body when you notice yourself going into a anxious fight/flight response or shutting down into a freeze response.
The Emotional Freedom Technique is yet another grounding tool to center you in your body and slow your mind down to the pace of your body.
Give yourself a hug (here’s a tutorial on how to give yourself the butterfly hug) or ask someone you trust for a hug.
Listen to music (experiment with different tempos and frequencies as these can affect your nervous system in different ways)
Wrapping yourself up in a cozy blanket, cardigan, or coat puts some added weight and pressure on your body, which in turn can feel very calming and soothing for some.
Take a nap to reset your mind and body.
Taking a mindful shower or bath (meaning when you focus your attention on each and every physical sensation you feel in the shower/bath) can help relax you after an anxious/stressful moment. This could be a great thing to try especially if you struggle with falling or staying asleep, as it can really hep relax your body and mind for sleep.
Practicing Restorative Yoga Poses and postures can help bring some longer lasting relief and calm to your whole body, especially in the areas of tension in your body. Restorative Yoga focuses on breathing into a posture for 2-3 minutes per pose and has been shown to raise HRV (heart Rate Variability) especially, which activates the vagus nerve and soothes the sympathetic nervous system. If not in the moment of feeling anxious, this can be a great daily or weekly practice to incorporate into your self care plan.
Mind-based Grounding Practices:
Practice a 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding Practice to calm down through your environment rather than your mind or body if both connecting with your body or going inwards to your mind’s imagination are more activating rather than calming. Notice 5 things around you that you see, 4 you hear, 3 you can feel, 2 you can smell, and 1 you can taste.
Try practicing a Safe-Place Visualization if connecting with your body is more activating rather than relaxing. This is where you refocus your attention away from the anxiety or overwhelming experience and onto a safe place you visualize in your mind’s eye. Take a few deep breaths, close your eyes, and then imagine a place where you feel completely safe. It can be real or fantasy. Once you’ve identified a place, then begin to map out all the various sensations you can imagine feeling in this safe place; what do you see, hear, feel, taste, and smell? Spend a few minutes on each of the five senses, paying attention to how each one feels as you imagine them. Close out the visualization and come back to the present moment.
Practicing Meditation (i.e. as found on Hallow, Headspace, or Calm) is a great way to hone your skill of centering yourself by refocusing your attention. You can practice a mindful meditation or it could be anything really that practices focusing your attention. You could experiment with meditating before/during/after an anxious or stressful moment, or when you wake up or before falling asleep. Notice any differences in what helps more or less.
Mindfully walk outside in the sun for 5 minutes, noticing with all your 5 senses all you experience from your surroundings.
Journaling about your thoughts, feelings, experiences, body sensations, memories, hopes, plans, and dreams have all been shown to be beneficial for not only mentally emoting, expressing, and reprocessing one’s inner life, but has also been shown to help calm our bodies down through the use of our minds. I’ve attached a guided journaling prompt that is geared towards walking yourself through an experiential exercise of an inner part of yourself. There are lots of ways to journal and there is no single or correct way to journal. At the same time, there are definitely helpful structures/guides/outlines for journaling which you can google search at length.
…
So lots of things to try.
Take them in turn and try one thing that jumps out at you.
Then come back to this list again and again as needed.
(You might even save a version of this list in multiple places on your devices, or create your own list that contains only what’s helpful and interesting to you)
Take good care today.
- Kolbe
