Chaos to Calm: 6 Grounding Practices to Release Agitation and Anxiety
Use your primary sense perception to find a cocoon of safety and serenity in the present moment.
In the middle of your day, something triggers you and suddenly you are on edge: you feel the cortisol pumping through your veins and adrenaline is at an all-time high.
You are jittery and jumpy and your heart is banging against your ribcage. What’s more, you cannot catch your breath, and your thoughts are racing at 100 miles an hour.
It’s dizzying.
Reality and rationality feel like a galaxy away.
If any of this sounds familiar, then you understand how deeply unsettling the overwhelm and agitation from the swirling hurricane of anxiety, panic attacks, PTSD flashbacks, emotional overwhelm and the floaty feeling of dissociation can be.
You understand that feeling of your world spinning out of control as your surroundings begin to transform into an unsafe and hostile jungle.
After my mother died in 2018, it seemed like the pathway to anxiety and panic had been paved and opened for business. In the first few years, I was constantly hijacked by panic attacks and later anxiety. It was as though her death had transformed my resilience to a vaccine whose protective effects had worn out.
Everyday stressors easily took me out like a cyclone swirling through the Northern Hemisphere. In those moments, I was in the tight grip of a fight-flight-freeze response, and it felt impossible to catch my thoughts and quiet the blood that was squealing in my veins.
Stress is part of life
Everyday life is inherently taxing with stressors bombarding you from every direction: corporate jobs with deadlines, school presentations, complicated interpersonal relationships with current and ex-lovers and family members, which will easily cause you to spiral.
When you add in tragedies like trauma from the death of a loved one, divorce, abuse, childhood wounds with triggers in the environment that cause anxiety attacks, panic attacks, PTSD, you have all the ingredients for the perfect cyclone.
It pulls you into its grips in a lightning flash, discombobulating and scattering your sense of self and sanity into the four corners of the earth. At this point, your sympathetic nervous system is activated and secretes a cocktail of stress hormones into your bloodstream that causes all the physiological changes you experience.
Your amygdala, the part of your brain that detects and processes fear is on overdrive and hijacks your prefrontal context which is in charge of rational functioning.
You find yourself trapped in a hypervigilant, overwhelmed high anxiety state and spiral out of control as your fears become magnified — completely unreachable by the present moment and your rational mind.
What is grounding?
Grounding is a simple practice that pulls you out of the storm by calling forth the calming effects of the parasympathetic nervous system which switches off the fight-flight-freeze response.
It creates space from big emotions by snapping you back into your body — into the present moment and away from your mind that is beating you up for something that happened in the past or rehearsing an ominous future.
In addition, it calms down the amygdala and calls forth the prefrontal cortex allowing you to see things more clearly.
In my desperation, I tried the plethora of grounding techniques scattered throughout the internet to find some reprieve from the almost weekly attacks, but most of them did nothing for me.
I later came to realize that not all grounding practices are right for you.
Primary Senses
We engage with the world using our senses and you may not know this, but we each have 2–3 primary senses which we rely more heavily on to interpret the world around us, and it is grounding practices that cater to these senses that will help us find stability.
Many people tout meditation, visualization, and breathwork as the end-all remedy for coping with anxiety and stress but these techniques might not work for you.
You might be like me and need a grounding practice that is more physical like running or sensory oriented like listening to music or toning. Everyone responds to sensory input a little differently and so it will be important that you find a grounding practice that gels with your ways of perceiving.
Over the years, I have experimented with many grounding practices and in this article, I will share the top six practices focused on different senses which will quickly calm your body, center your mind, and anchor your awareness in the present moment where you will always find a cocoon of safety.
The 6 Grounding Practices
Below are six grounding practices that you can try when you feel revved up to call forth the relaxing and calming aspects of the parasympathetic nervous system.
I have included the different senses which are targeted in the different practices. Experiment with them and see what works best for you.
Practice 1: Resourcing using the 3–3–3 rule
Primary Senses: Sight, Touch, Hearing
The 3–3–3 rule uses your senses to help you refocus on what is happening in the present moment where you have the possibility of finding peace from the chaos.
It consists of looking around you whenever you feel overwhelmed and noticing things in your environment.
- Sight: Scan your environment and name three things you see around you.
- Touch: Name three things you can feel e.g., your feet on the ground, your clothes against your skin, your hair on your neck.
- Hearing: Name three things you can hear in your environment e.g., the clock ticking, your breath, the heater humming.
Time: 1–5 minutes.
Practice 2: Repetitive Rhythmic Movement
Primary Senses: Touch, Vestibular (movement/balance), Proprioception (body awareness)
Anxiety is often a symptom of a freeze response in the fight-flight-freeze dynamic which engenders a feeling of helplessness and an inability to respond.
Movement serves as an antidote to the ‘freeze state’ and creates space for the flow of stuck energy. It gives your body a chance to hit the reset button.
Try the different rhythmic movement practices below which regulate the lower more primitive region of the brain (the brainstem) and reset the nervous system, bringing your mind and body into homeostasis.
- Yoga — try performing cat/cow poses, sun salutations, or sitting down crossed-legged, place your hands on your thighs and rotate your body and hips in the clockwise direction.
- Do 10 jumping jacks, pushups, or burpees.
- When you cross your arms, it gives you the sense of being cocooned and mimics the feeling of being nestled in the womb. Pair this with a rocking back and forth movement and slow deep breathing.
- Place your awareness on the bottom of your feet as you press down through the soles of your feet and stomp from left to right. Your feet are your foundation and are the only area of the body that has direct contact with the ground as you stand and walk.
Time: 1 to 11 minutes.
Practice 3: Temperature Change
Primary Sense: Touch
Research shows that immersing your body or parts of your body in cold water also helps to ground and center you by reducing cortisol concentrations in the bloodstream. It also elevates your mood by triggering the release of dopamine.
Experiment with the different practices and pick one that works for you.
- Run cold water down your arms (elbows to hands) for 30 seconds.
- Place your feet in the bathtub or shower and run cold water over them.
- Splash your face with cold water or place an ice pack over your eyes for 30 seconds.
- Submerge your face in a bowl of cold water for 30 seconds. This induces the dive response and causes the activation of your parasympathetic nervous system associated with relaxation. This one is particularly helpful with panic attacks.
Time: 30s to 1 minute.
Practice 4: Rhythmic breathing (3–3–3 Pattern)
Primary Senses: Touch, Interoception (internal bodily states)
Breathwork is a powerful way to ground and calm down the sympathetic nervous system and yogis have been doing this for years.
Here is a simple 3–3–3 breathwork pattern that is more accessible during periods of overwhelm than the popular 4–7–8 method which tends to make me more anxious when I try to hold my breath for 7 seconds.
- Find a comfortable sitting position and place your right hand just above your pubic bone and your left hand on the base of your ribcage.
- Close your eyes and slowly inhale through your nose for a count of three, hold your breath for a count of 3 and then exhale for a count of three.
- You can add in the different senses in the following way:
Visuals — with each inhale, imagine golden light circulating through your system (breathe of compassion).
Auditory — Instead of breathing in the 3–3–3 pattern, listen to this grounding playlist while you breathe. The key is to observe the breath instead of forcing it with your mind. Make sure you are breathing into your belly versus into your chest.
Time: 1 minute to 11 minutes.
Practice 5: Rhythmic Vibrations (Sound)
Primary Senses: Hearing, Touch, Interoception
The vagus nerve is touted as the body's reset button and has shown promise in treating anxiety and PTSD. As a result of it passing through the vocal cords and inner ear, humming, toning, and chanting mantras create the necessary rhythmic vibration to generate a calming influence on the nervous system.
- Vocal Toning: Vocal toning is a natural form of expression and you can try toning different sounds ranging from groans, grunts, cries, or open vowels of the alphabet.
- Humming: Hum any songs you like and just notice the sensations in the back of your throat, head, and your chest. It’s ok to be off-key.
- Mantras: Mantras have proven the most effective for me and you can use the OM mantra letting it sound like AH-UH-MM. The sound ‘OM’ is sacred in Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism and is said to be the sound of the universe. If you have mala beads, you can incorporate touch, by chanting as you roll your fingers over each of the 108 beads.
Time: 1 minute to 11 minutes.
This is a brief list of rhythmic practices based on sound, tone, and vibration that you can practice anytime you feel hyperactivated. You can also listen to nature sounds, alpha frequencies, and classical music.
A quick google search will help you find a ton of resources on the internet.
Practice 6: Aromatherapy
Primary Sense: Smell
If you are sensitive to smell, also known as olfaction, then scents exert powerful influences on your moods, and using essential oils to ground might be very effective.
- Sniff an undiluted essential oil of your choice e.g. lavender, patchouli, sandalwood, eucalyptus, frankincense, and myrrh which are known to be very grounding.
- Fill a small spray bottle with spring water, add a few drops of essential oil, shake, and mist yourself.
Time: 30 seconds — 2 minutes.
Rehearse Your Grounding Ritual
Grounding practices are effective when you feel flooded and overwhelmed, but it can help to practice them when you are calm and composed. It is like doing a fire drill before the actual fire.
Remember that it might take some experimenting to figure out the grounding practice that works for you. Don’t be shy in substitution different senses in the different practices.
Try performing your grounding practices daily to center yourself.
You are Safe in your body
Stress and stimuli that trigger agitation and overwhelm are inevitable aspects of our lives, but we don’t have to be victims of these states.
No matter how agitated, anxious, or out of control you feel, it’s important to know that you can change your arousal system and calm yourself by grounding yourself using a practice that is true to your way of perceiving and engaging with the world.
When you ground, you give yourself permission to rewrite your story with anxiety and stress.
In addition, you honor the present moment: the helplessness associated with feeling overwhelmed and anxious while taking responsibility for your current experience by empowering yourself to weather these difficult and painful moments.
The next time you feel that wave of panic or anxiety building, remember that you only need a moment to hum a tune, feel your feet on the ground or breathe deeply, and be reminded that you were born with the reliable and ever-present instruments to calm yourself.
To tell your body that it is ok to turn off the alarms because you are safe.
