How To Ground?

Ways to ground could be: (What is grounding?)

1- Mental grounding: It can involve a lot of techniques that can help manage overwhelming feeling and intense anxiety. It helps people regain mental focus from an often intensely emotional state. It involves:

• Saying safety statements like “I am safe right now, I am in present not in the past.”
• Using imagination and imaging yourself being away from painful situation to being in a better place
• Using humor to improve your mood or repeating your favorite saying or favorite song

2- Physical grounding: Again it involves a number of techniques. Some of the techniques that I like to use are:

• Running cool or warm water on your hands
• Touching objects around you and notice the texture, color, material, weight
• Dipping your heels into the floors literally grounding them and remind yourself that you connected to the ground
• Focusing on your breathing and repeat a pleasant word to yourself on each inhale
• Carrying a small object like a rock, ring, piece of cloth that you can touch whenever you feel triggered

3- Soothing grounding: Some examples:

• Saying statements as if you were talking to a small child like “Don’t worry dear, it will be OK.”
• Thinking of your favorite color, animal, season, food, time of the day or TV show
• Remembering the words to an inspiring song, quotation or poems hat make you feel better
• Picturing people you care about
• Remembering a safe place and focus on everything about the place
• Saying coping statements like “I can handle this and the feeling will pass.”
• Thinking of things you’re looking forward for the next week

What if grounding doesn’t work?

Practice, practice and practice. Try grounding for a long time and repeat, repeat, repeat. Try to notice whether you’re better at physical or mental grounding and create your own methods of grounding.

LAMSA’s note: Thank you Dr Ashraf for your collaboration.