What is grounding?

But first, a little bit about this thing we call “mindfulness”

There’s no shortage of material online now about tools like mindfulness and meditation. Mindfulness-based practice is so popular that it occupies it's own category on directories like Zencare and Psychology Today, while a cursory search for “guided imagery” on YouTube will yield tens of thousands of results. But while we can be excited about the benefits of these practices, we also have to admit that they don’t work for everyone. It’s equally important to remember that many of these “tools” are actually sacred practices from other cultures, and the colonialist urge to turn everything into a “technique”— separate from its original context, must be resisted at all times.

Separately, many mental health advocates have pointed out that the techniques promoted by one-size-fits-all approaches often have the exact opposite of their intended effect for people who have experienced trauma or those who exist on the Autism Spectrum. By and large, while there is excellent mindfulness practice out there, the overall movement in popular culture tends to center what it considers the “typical” brain, and struggles to adapt to those who find quiet, well, disquieting. All of us have different sensory needs and we all come from different lives and contexts.

In social work school, we were asked to close our eyes during a reading that was supposed to make us all feel calm and in the instructor’s words, “fully present”. A minute or two into the exercise, I opened my eyes when I wasn’t supposed to, and I was startled to realize that several students had their eyes wide open in alarm. These students never closed their eyes during these exercises, and no one ever asked why.

For some people, the least comforting thing you can do is close your eyes. This is especially true for people who have lived through interpersonal violence. Sitting in silence may be comforting for many, but it is torturous for others. The critical mistake we can make as therapists is to imagine that we know what other people need without knowing why they need it. Establishing a grounding practice is about a partnership between therapist and client to find what works specifically for them.

[ I would be surprised if you made it to this page without first finding information about deep breathing. And while deep breathing is an essential tool that many of us should practice, it alone may not meet your brain’s grounding needs, even if it can do wonderful things for your body. For more about the complicated world of deep breathing read this. ]

But grounding isn’t only about relaxing. There’s an incredibly simple exercise that we do with children when they’re having a trauma response that can serve as a basis for building your own grounding practice. Although it is adapted from mindfulness practice, it is less about finding tranquility and more about jumpstarting cognition.

Go through each sense, ranging from the easiest to identify to the hardest. It’s called 5-4-3-2-1 because for the first category, you will identify five things you can see around the room. The next sensation is touch: find 4 things you can touch and name what they are. Repeat this with 3 sounds, 2 smells and 1 taste.

As simple as the above exercise sounds, what it does for our brains can be somewhat magical. By guiding our brains to focus on specific sensory input, we’re reconnecting to our senses and our bodies.

While this exercise is not necessarily as helpful for adults as it is for children, the basic premise is simple: find what parts of your brain are disconnected from the rest of you and bring them back. Gaining control over sensory information tends to have a calming effect on most people.

There are a variety of reasons for this. Our brains are naturally wired to try and attune to sounds. In order to hear distinct sounds, as opposed to say the cacaphony of a construction site, you need to quiet your body. This may sound impossible in an agitated state, but the mere action of trying to identity specific sounds can lead naturally to a temporary quieting of the body. This is why crisis intervention protocols like Therapeutic Crisis Intervention (TCI) emphasize using a quiet voice when others are yelling. We often can’t help but still ourselves to be able to hear better. In the absence of a threat, this starts the process of engaging the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is the part of our brain most responsible for rational decision making. As discussed, the PFC takes a back seat when we’re experiencing stress or fear, so the first step in regaining our natural abilities involves getting this online.

—

I have always been plagued with vivid dreams. At times, these can cycle into night terrors, and I can wake up having trouble speaking. A couple of years into clinical practice, I started playing with the above exercise for myself, figuring it couldn’t hurt. But routine can work against us, fully-formed brains memorize details like this, and I don’t want to just engage the memory, I want to engage my senses to orient to the here and now. Remember what I said about the language center of our brain? The more stress hormones in our bloodsteam at the moment, the harder it can be to form words. For this reason, I started listing not only objects, but describing them. “Clock” became “that Doctor Who Clock from Etsy I bought a couple of months ago. It’s made of wood and has a AA battery taped to the back.”

While the first few tries may be a little rough, by the third item I list, I can start to recall stories and give richer descriptions. This tells me that not only are my language centers back online, but that my memory retrieval is back and in tact. By the end of a short list of 6 or 7 items around the room, I can feel myself full awake. It may help to do this progressively: while the first thing I name I may only describe perfunctorily, by the end I try and tell a more detailed story.

Remember how earlier we talked about assessing your body? Grounding is more than just what you think or say, it can be necessary to provide yourself with sensory input as well. If and when you find yourself overwhelmed you lose track of your body, you may want to pick something that provides a calming sensation.

A word of caution: While many people use essential oils, aromatherapy can be a double-edged sword. Our olfactory sense is one of our strongest triggers for specific memories. Since memory is constantly being retrieved and re-encoded by the brain, this means that it’s possible you may begin to associate this smell with the feeling you’re having during an attack. Over time, this means that it may have the reverse effect, and that smell may make you uneasy. For this reason, and a couple others, avoid smells that can’t be discarded.

Depending on our personal histories, bodily contact may also be quite helpful, but this is dependent on your own history. Know that trauma can often make otherwise pleasant interactions feel painful, and it can be hard to predict this. You know your body best. Make sure to discuss this with people who might be around you if you need this. It may be that you need a tight hug or a weighted blanket. Sensory input is being increasingly focused on in trauma work, especially with the advent of the SMART model, which combines the best of the worlds of trauma psychology and occupational therapy to create a unique approach that gives people the sensory input they need in hard moments. If you find that you’re extremely sensitive to certain sensations, or that you need something particular, like the feeling of a tight or heavy blanket, it may be worth talking to an occupational therapist.

Alarmy is an alarm clock that requires people to do selected tasks in order to fully turn off the alarm. My partner uses the arithmetic function, and once a day I’ll look over to see her sleepily adding numbers together. It’s worth thinking about why this works. When you sleep, the logic part of your brain tends to shut off. This is one of the reasons that you can have a dream that puts you in a strange place that somehow, you still know intuitively is your elementary school. As someone once tried to explain it to me “you know, that thing where something is but it isn’t in dreams".

Aside from making it harder to snooze your alarm while you’re still sleeping, doing simple math problems is a way of jump-starting the parts of the brain associated with logic (in this case, the parietal lobe). The parietal lobe is right behind the frontal lobe, and does the bulk of all numeric processing. Like waking up from a dream, some people find that they need to access their logic centers first before grounding themselves, and one way to do this is with simple problems that make your brain work a little. It takes us out of our “emotional” brain and puts us into a logic-dominant space that’s easier to rationalize and make sense of. The distraction from whatever was happening in your mind previously helps you refocus, after which you’re likely going to want to do a little bit of re-orienting yourself to your surroundings so you don’t stay stuck in your head.