Everyone feels anxious sometimes and our anxiety can benefit us when it helps us to pay attention to something that is important or threatening our safety. Anxiety disorders occur when a person feels such intense or frequent anxiety that it interferes with their ability to enjoy a good life. Anxiety disorders are among some of the most common mental health conditions people experience in the United States.
There are highly effective therapies and medications that can help people with anxiety to manage their symptoms, but grounding exercises are another way people can cope with anxious feelings. At Palms Behavioral Health in Harlingen, Texas, we believe in giving our clients a wide range of options to manage their mental health.
What Are Grounding Techniques?
A grounding exercise is a technique that a person uses to ground themselves in the present moment, steer their attention toward something other than their anxiety, or decrease the intensity of their symptoms. By controlling the parts of their brain and body, the person can disengage their brain from the response that is triggering their anxious feelings. Grounding exercises don’t replace therapy or medication for managing anxiety disorders, but they can add to the tools that a person has available to handle the disorder.
Benefits of Grounding Exercises
Any strategy a person uses to manage their mental health has different benefits. Some of the benefits of ground techniques include:
- Minimal risk. At worst, a specific grounding technique might not work for you or might make you feel silly.
- Useful to any aged person. Children, teenagers, adults, and older people can all learn grounding techniques and use them to manage their mental health.
- Works well with other strategies. You can use grounding techniques alongside medications and therapy, to enhance the impact of all three interventions.
- Portable. You can do grounding exercises anywhere, whether you’re feeling anxious at work, in your car, at your place of worship, or at your child’s sports event.
- Beneficial for co-occurring disorders. While anxiety is the main diagnosis people think of with grounding exercises, it can also help manage PTSD, sleep disturbances, chronic physical pain, and more.
Examples of Grounding Techniques
There are many different strategies people can use to ground themselves if they are feeling anxious. Even in busy locations, these techniques can be used without disturbing other people or drawing attention to yourself:
- Make a list. It doesn’t matter what the list contains. Types of dogs, cities of the world, vegetables, or whatever else you can think of can become a list. Think of as many items as you can, that fall into that category. Repeat two or three times, until you feel calmer.
- Take slow, deep breaths to decrease your heart rate.
- Focus on a single sense. Eat something with a strong flavor, smell some essential oils, or touch some cold ice, and give your full attention to the sensations related to that sense in that moment.
- Walk yourself through a process that is so familiar, that you can do it entirely from memory. This might be preparing a favorite recipe, playing a song on a musical instrument, fixing a household item, or anything else that has several steps that you can visualize in your mind, from start to finish.
- Describe every detail of an object that is near you. What color is it? What shape? How large? What is its texture? How does it smell? What purpose does it serve? What materials does it contain? Who does it belong to?
- Find the rainbow – look around and find items that correspond to each color of the rainbow. Start with red and work your way to violet. It’s okay to skip colors if you cannot find something of a particular shade.
- Listen to music – turn on some tunes and focus on just the music or just the instruments. Listen again and this time, listen for the other part of the music.
How to Find More Grounding Techniques
You can find more grounding exercises online by using terms like “ground techniques”, “anxiety” and “panic attacks”, which are other common situations where people utilize grounding techniques. Sometimes there are even videos that demonstrate how to do them or that give you music that you can use to help pace your breathing. It is best to practice these techniques when you aren’t feeling anxious so that you can master them sufficiently to do them when you are struggling.
Other Techniques to Manage Anxiety
In addition to medications, therapy, and grounding techniques, you can also do the following to reduce your anxiety symptoms:
- Limit caffeine intake
- Avoid alcohol
- Choose physical exercise that is more moderate, rather than intense
At Palms Behavioral Health, we want our clients to have a wide range of coping strategies that they can use to manage their mental health so that they can choose the methods that work best for them.
