Grounding techniques are things that you can do when the world around you seems unreal, if you feel disconnected from yourself or are overwhelmed and distressed. Grounding techniques are especially useful for people who experience dissociation (the brain’s way of coping with high stress, where you switch off from reality and your surroundings temporarily). Dissociation can be worrying if you don’t know what it is, and this can further fuel the situation, but it is a normal and understandable reaction to stress. Dissociation is a common coping strategy that often occurs during childhood (think day dreaming) where life challenges might have meant that you felt out of control. It is a common automatic survival strategy where you might have experienced trauma. When it lingers on, long after the stress or threat has gone, it can become troublesome for some people. Finding ways to snap out of dissociation is useful because there are times you need to focus, plus it’s good to gradually build your tolerance of strong emotions (as opposed to zoning out or switching off).
You might have also heard of the term anchoring, where you are firmly rooted during the emotional storm until it passes. The key to these techniques is to find something simple that is engaging enough but not taxing. This is because during times of high stress, our primitive fight or flight brain is online focussing on our survival. The thinking brain goes off line temporarily to allow us to act on instinct more quickly. Therefore, any grounding activity that you do needs to be basic. So whilst reading the list below, you might initially think, “But that’s not going to achieve anything or make any difference”, believe me they do. They are not supposed to be long term solutions, instead they help to ride the wave or snap back to the present. Finding the right one for you in the right moment is important too. This becomes easier over time. Another way to make the technique successful, is to use the senses. This is because the part of the brain that remains online – the amygdala- is the area of the brain that processes sensory information, sight, smell, sound, touch, taste. This means that we can harness this brain capacity during moments of high stress or dissociation to calm and ground ourselves using the senses. Here are a few things to try that have proved to be popular with people I have worked with although there are many more suggestions online and you might be able to add your own….
1. Use sight and labelling. Bring your awareness to your immediate surroundings, so if I’m sitting in my living room I start to my left, bookshelf, mirror, fire, baskets, chair, tv, door, moving round the room steadily and go clockwise labelling everything that’s there. This is a simple task but one that requires just enough concentration to hold my attention whilst bringing me back to my present surroundings. This is especially useful when you feel you might have lost yourself or feel disconnected from your surroundings. It reorients you in time and place and can help snap out of a flashback where you might feel as if you’ve journeyed back in time.
3. Peel an orange and notice the sharp citrus smell and taste, or bite a chilli
2. Splash your face with water
4. 5 things exercise (or 5,4,3,2,1)
Name five things I see, four things I hear, ssshh quietly listen, three things I can touch, two things I smell (fabric conditioner, perfume, tea coffee in your hand) and finally take one deep breath.
5. Move – if you feel frozen move- stand up, jump on the spot, shake out your hands, stretch, feel the ground beneath your feet and notice your connection to it.
6. Pick up or touch items near you – what colour is it? What texture? Shape? Good keep describing
7. Do some times tables! Numbers can help ground you even if you’re not a maths person . Or start at 100 and keep subtracting 7.
8. Play the alphabet game – pick a category and off you go … America, Belgium, Canada, Denmark ….
9. Look at yourself in the mirror and state your name, date of birth, age, the date and the weather. Anything that orients you to the here and now. Again this can really help where there has been trauma if you feel you’ve gone back to feeling like a child.
10. Sit with your pet. Stroking your cat or dog helps to release stress by releasing oxcytocin – the calming hormone. Holding or touching something soft can be similarly soothing.
11. Some people prefer to hold an object or use a fiddle object to ground and calm them. Meaningful things like a small stone or locket that belonged to someone you love can be soothing.
It can be a nice idea to make your own grounding box and put things in that could help you when you need it. For example nice smells, meaningful objects, pictures, words, puzzles, textured materials like a blanket etc.
These techniques will be better the sooner you use them so don’t wait to get really bad. The more you bring your awareness to your triggers over time, the easier it will get to intervene. Experiment with what works best for you and keep practicing. As you start to calm down, focus on your soothing rhythm breathing (see separate post).
Well done for noticing and trying to bring yourself back.
Image by Achim Scholty from Pixabay
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