Grounding Techniques

Looking for a quick way to come back into your body when you feel anxious? Jim demonstrates grounding techniques that use sight, sound, touch and scent, such as naming five things you can see or hear and feeling a rough texture under your hand, and then leads a short visualization of roots reaching down into the earth. He explains that these tools take the edge off rather than bring you to a fully calm place, and are a way to build skills for working with anxiety. This content is educational and is not a substitute for one to one professional care.

Transcript

I'm going to run through something now called grounding. It's a great little sort of tool to have in your toolbox, So to speak. It's something you use a lot for trauma, But it's certainly helpful for anxiety. And you may have heard about it. It's fairly straightforward. So we've got different kinds of grounding. We've got grounding that you could be using sight, You could be using sound, You could be using scent, Even tactile touch is an option. So I'm just going to go through it kind of quickly, Give you a demonstration. It's very simple. Basically, If someone was to feel anxious and triggered, They could look around the room and five things that are blue. Sometimes people will, You know, Name what's five things you can hear. What's, You know, Five things you can smell. And that one's a bit trickier if you're like in an office or something like that. And I like, When I have people in the office, Usually there's sofas there with a rough texture on it. So I like the tactile. So I get them to kind of rub the the arm of the sofa, Which for me personally, If I'm needing to ground myself, I prefer that to the others. It just seems to really impact me at a deeper level. Brings me right into my body. Very aware of, Especially if the surface is kind of rough, Very aware of that. So and that's what you're doing. You're bringing yourself out of your trigger into your body. So Now it's, As I said, It's not going to bring you down to a very kind of, You know, Calm place, But it'll help just take the edge off. So the one that I like that you can try that is a bit more involved is to kind of, It's somewhere in between something like this and maybe meditation, Is to kind of sit, And I kind of put my hands on my chest and close my eyes, Take a deep breath, Hold it, Exhale, And just imagine that you have I hope all the roots running down through the bottom of your feet right into the deep into the earth just imagine you have this all these roots that are just connecting deep into the earth and just imagine that and sometimes I take it a step farther and I say you know taking all that the negativity and tension and everything that's sort of bottled up inside of you and just have it have it sort of just expel itself down into the earth and get it away from you and you kind of can sort of feel a release as that happens So, Then you take another deep breath. Hold. Exhale and then That's another option, And I feel quite grounded right now. So that's a little more involved, But those are all very helpful. I want you to have some skills to use when you're having to work on the anxiety, And when you're getting a handle on what it feels like to kind of get comfortable with being anxious, And how can I sort of start to approach things I would normally avoid, But now do it with more some strategies with some tools to help me. So give those a try.