- Grounding skills are the “reset” button for our brain
- Many of us avoid our feelings because they are too overwhelming for us to handle
- When feelings are too much they can overload us (fill us to the brim and consume us), or numb us (leaving us with nothingness, tired, unable to focus)
- When we can effectively use grounding skills we know how to bring ourselves back from those moments
- Having this ability to bring ourselves back makes our emotions much less scary – because we know we can always hit “reset” if needed.
- These can be done ANYTIME, including when you are around other people and they don’t ever have to know you’re doing it. They can take as little as 20-60 seconds.
- For grounding skills to work it is ESSENTIAL that you 1) Engage your senses 2) Engage your whole self (which means no thinking about the thing that’s going on while doing it!) and 3) are mindful of keeping yourself and others safe
- Nearly every time I introduce these to a client they roll their eyes at me and ask me if I’m kidding. I am not kidding. This really works. Try it and see for yourself.
- The skill I have seen that is most effective is counting a particular classification of objects in a room (i.e. how many circular objects do you see, how many green items are in the room, how many places where you could set something down)
- I consider grounding skills to be essential prerequisites for intensive psychotherapy. For us to face our painful emotions we need to have the skills (and to confidence) to come back from them.
- There are thousands of grounding skills. Learn more in today’s post.
Grounding skills are essential “bail out tools” for the mind. These are the life raft, oxygen mask, parachute of the brain – essential for helping us “come back to the ground” when our internal world is more intense than we know how to handle (when we are outside our window of tolerance.
These are skills we want to keep in our back pocket at all times, and I encourage my clients to use them in low stress scenarios before relying on them in high stress scenarios so that they get used to what it feels like to “bring themselves back online”.
There are thousands of grounding skills, and you can even make them up can work as long as they meets some basic criteria: 1. Engages your senses 2. You commit yourself with ALL your attention and capacity at that moment 3. Does not have the potential to cause harm to you or others 4. is done at a time when your safety is not threatened. If your physical safety is threatened you need to get to a safe place first. Grounding can help you find emotional safety.
Despite being simple (almost laughably simple) these exercises are often powerful IF we follow the criteria listed above. I find the biggest pitfall is not following criteria 2 – it is essential that we not multi-task and think about something else, we have to bring our brain back to exercise again and again if it veers away. It will be natural for it to veer away, just keep coming back to the task. I also find it helps to keep it simple – if counting works for you (it’s my favorite), rely on counting, and keep counting different types of things in the space around you until the intensity has dissipated.
Grounding exercises work because they engage a different part of our brain AWAY from our emotional center (which is overloaded prior to grounding). These exercises also force us to come back to the present, which is often not as threatening as our internal world.
Examples of other grounding exercises in the comments, you can also search the internet for lists of these.
Notes:
- Grounding Exercise: Visual. Counting a particular classification of objects in a room: How many circular objects do you see, how many green items are in the room, how many metallic items, how many places where you could set something down, how many soft items, how many hard items. The list goes on and on. This one is excellent for doing discreetly.
- Grounding Exercise: Touch based: While in place, scan through your body and notice every part of your body that is touching something other than air. Notice how it all feels on your skin. Notice the pressure of where your weight is, the feeling of fabric on your skin etc. Experiment with pressing into what you are touching. Count how many different items your body is in contact with. This one is excellent for doing discreetly. This grounding skill might be challenging for someone struggling with body image concerns.
- Grounding exercise: Touch, smell, sight, sound. Shower with fragrant (and different than usual) scented cleansing products. Notice the temperature difference between the water and your body. Showers can be very powerful, but this is obviously not one you can do in place.
- Grounding exercise: Smell. Put on a lotion or perfume. Smell it and see if you can pick out the different scents in it. How many can you identify. This can be done discreetly, but does require keeping something scented with you which might be a barrier for some.
- Grounding Exercise: Taste and touch If you have a liquid with you put it in your mouth and hold it before swallowing (be mindful of not doing something that causes pain – aka – make sure it’s not too hot!). Notice the temperature change. Notice any tastes. See if you can classify them.
- Grounding exercise: Hold an ice cube. This one is awesome because it is very hard to think about anything else while you are holding an ice cube. What I don’t like about it is that it a) requires you have access to ice b) requires you move from where you are – which you may not feel motivated to do in the throes of emotion and c) leaves you wet which can be annoying and something that deters you from doing it. I like to think about this one as one to try when you’ve tried some internal ones as those aren’t working as well as you’d like
- Grounding exercise: If you search the internet you’ll find this one: identify 5 things you see, 4 things you feel, 3 things you hear, 2 things you smell and 1 thing you taste. This is great because it really engages all your sense and is very powerful at bringing you back because of how much focus it requires of your brain. What I don’t like about it is that it might be hard to remember in the moment, and it might be frustrating if you can’t smell or hear anything at the moment.
- All of this sound totally ridiculous? Check out why we need Distress Tolerance skills.
- See more about how to gradually incorporate a skill in my post on How Change Happens.
- Are you finding you need to ground often? I’d encourage you to consider one on one therapy to help.