I'd like to do a quick introduction into grounding activities
Being grounded means that you are in your body, you're feeling your emotions
and you're aware of your present moment experience. It also means that you're
feeling responsible for your safety and well-being. Grounding is an important
therapeutic approach for managing anxiety, flashbacks, symptoms of post
traumatic stress disorder and for improving your mental health.
Grounding strengthens your parasympathetic response this is your
body's natural ability to return to calm. This parasympathetic response
counteracts the fight, flight or freeze response. PTSD and other anxiety
disorders are disordered in their essence because you're feeling like
you're in danger when you're actually safe. So your body's having this danger
response this fight flight freeze response when you're present moment
experience is actually safe and that's one reason why they are disordered. Anxiety
is often about worries about the future- what might happen. And depression is
often about discouragement about the past. And both of these can be
counteracted with an increase in our ability to be here in the present moment.
Most of the time our present moment is a safe and secure environment if it's not
we need to leave so we need to create a safe and secure environment in our
present moment. But grounding activities help us activate that safe feeling in
our brain by reminding ourselves that here in the present moment we are safe.
When we're grounded and calm were able to work through emotions and memories in
a healthy way. Our body has a natural ability to resolve trauma or to work
through emotions, but when we're panicked or in our fight flight freeze danger
response our brain shuts down those abilities because it thinks that our
survival is at stake. We can train ourselves to trigger this calming
response by practicing grounding activities. It's important to practice
these exercises over and over again so that they become habitual and we can
draw on them in moments of stress or anxiety.
Many of the grounding activities that I'm going to teach you use your body as
a way to create that sense of calm so these are physiological grounding skills.
This is called a bottom-up approach bottom-up meaning we go from the body
to the brain instead of from the brain to itself and this makes sense because
most of us aren't able to think ourselves calm. Like if you're stressed
out and you say "Don't be anxious! Don't be anxious!" that like never works we can
never actually tell ourselves to calm down by just forcing it from the top
down. That's partly because our brain, when it feels threatened, it reacts at a
very animalistic level it's using this deep part of our brain in the limbic
system and the brainstem to react impulsively or instinctively to danger.
So this makes a lot of sense this is a really functional reaction. So if a tiger
jumps out at you you're not going to be using your thinking part of your brain
to be like "Hmm I wonder what I should do with this?" your body's gonna naturally
and instinctively gonna run away. So it's gonna have this physiological reaction
this fight flight freeze response. It turns up your heart rate and it turns up
your breathing rate. Since we can't access those deeper survival parts of
our brain with our thoughts the best way to access that calm is through our body.
So this is called a bottom-up approach to grounding. Our five senses anchor us
to our body and our surroundings. Using this bottom-up approach is a much more
effective way to treat anxiety and stress than trying to simply change how
we think. And by creating that physiological calm we're able to lay the
foundation for future cognitive work. Many of these activities focus on our
breathing and that's because our breathing is something that happens both
automatically and we have some degree of control over so that can help trigger
that change in the limbic system that we need to create that physiological calm.
Grounding exercises help connect us to our body and help us reassert that sense
of self control and they reorient us to the safe context that we're actually in
in the present moment. One of the ways that we gain confidence
in our ability to use these grounding exercises is by doing a check-in before
and after the exercise and one way to do that is to do a quick scale. So before
you do a grounding exercise scale your anxiety on a scale from zero to ten and
then do your grounding activity and then just check in with yourself again
afterwards and put yourself again on the scale from zero to ten. Now it's not
necessary for you to decrease your anxiety every time. Sometimes a grounding
activity is just about increasing your awareness and your contact with the
present moment. But if you do these consistently you will notice a gradual
pattern of decreasing your anxiety little by little. We need to be able to
notice these small victories because they can add up to large gains over time.
Another way you can look at the effects of these grounding activities is to ask
yourself these questions before and after: What are you noticing in your body?
What are you noticing with your breath? What's happening with your feelings?
What's happening with your heart? and What's happening with your thoughts?
During these grounding activities if at any point you need to take a break
that's okay you can just pause the activity and then come back to it later.
When you're initially learning these grounding exercises the best way to
practice is when you're in a place that's quiet peaceful and calm. Don't
wait until you're stressed out or in a chaotic environment to try them. And
again it's important to practice these activities every day for a few weeks
before trying to practice them in a stressful environment. The more you
practice them the more habitual and instinctual they'll become and you can
actually train yourself to calm your body down with just a thought or a word.
As you get better and better at grounding you'll increase your
confidence and ability to create that physiological calm even when you're in a
stressful situation and you can gradually use your skills in more and
more difficult situations to maintain that sense of calm that we all need to
feel safe and happy. Over the next couple of months I'm making a bunch of
grounding videos I hope they're helpful for you. Take time to practice them and
please like, comment and subscribe. Thanks for watching and take care!