Why do you need to ground yourself?
What is grounding, and what does it mean?
Grounding never works for me? I’m probably doing it wrong!
I’m not sure when I’m supposed to do it.
My chest was so tight from anxiety when I tried to do the breathing exercise I couldn’t breathe out. So I stopped.
Sound familiar?
These are all things I have heard from my clients when it comes to talking about grounding techniques.
With so much information available it can be confusing. So often we’re told to ground ourselves, without been given all the information behind the techniques, which leaves you with unanswered questions.
When do I use them? How do I do it? Why does it help?
This can leave you feeling like you’re doing ‘grounding’ wrong.
You are left to fill in the gaps, because you have only been given a small amount of information from the experts.
Frustrating right?
And yet, in another attempt trying to take care of yourself, it feels like you’re failing again!
That’s unfair! So let’s look at the whole picture.
Why do counsellors promote grounding techniques?
It helps you to re-focus and connect your whole self back to the here-and-now. It helps you to come back into the present moment.
It helps you to re-orient ourselves.
When you are knowingly or unknowingly triggered, you may experience your heart rate increasing, you may feel wobbly, dizzy, or unsteady sensations in your legs, knees or body. Everything, or everyone around you can start to feel overwhelming. You may feel stressed, anxious, fearful or panicked. If this is happening to you frequently, then finding a grounding technique that works for you may be helpful in calming you and reconnecting back to your rational, more regulated sense of self.
When you begin to experience a sense of intense anxiety or feel dissociated from your environment, that is when a grounding or breathing exercise is useful for you.
It is also useful to have found one you like and one that you have practiced before you experience intense feelings.
Why? Because if you’ve practised it already your body and mind know what to do.
Why it’s helpful to use grounding techniques when you feel WITHDRAWN.
It is a horrible sensation, when you feel unsafe in your own body and mind. This can cause you to become withdrawn, you pull away from the world and disengage from it. Maybe you hide away under the bed covers, or sit alone in a room where no one can find you.
Wanting to withdraw, like a tortoise back into your shell, or shut down like a computer is a normal response to overwhelm. It’s also a normal trauma response to anything that triggers you. It’s also a stress response as you approach burnout too. Wanting to pull away from people and the world is when grounding can be helpful for you.
It doesn’t make the problem disappear, but it helps you to take care of yourself in that moment. How? Because it stops you spiralling down into a withdrawn dark pit. It pulls you up and out enough to bring you back to a sense of control or calm in yourself. It frees you a bit of mindful space to enable you to move or ask for support or feel safety and connection within your body and mind. It gives yourself chance to connect with your rational self, so you can feel a little but more able to cope.
Being able to ground yourself will become a helpful tool to feel that little bit safer once again. The more you practice them, the more you will be able to move through your world feeling able to tolerate the difficult moments and enjoy more peaceful moments of connection to yourself.
Is it helpful to use grounding techniques when I feel like my thoughts are racing away from me and my head and thoughts begin to spiral?
This can occur daily, all up in your head. “Top down”. Your fears about the world, about other people and their perceptions of you, your own perceptions of yourself, all the “What if’s” can lead us towards high anxiety and a panic attack at worse.
When you notice this beginning, it’s another opportunity to use a grounding technique. Why? Because it stops us in our racing tracks, we can focus. Yes the fears and the big bad world still exist. But what we are trying to do is stop that massive stress hormone dump that adds to more feelings of being unsettled and out of control. The more we can stop it, ground and come back into the moment (which is what grounding is) then we can help our body to calm down. The more we practice it, the more we feel calm and the more it will help us to reconnect with ourselves and hopefully our rational voice can be heard again.
