Ground Yourself: Techniques to Calm Your Anxious Mind and Body
- Seth "Skye" Savoie, PsyD
- Sep 18, 2025
- 6 min read
Learn techniques to ground yourself and also how therapy can be helpful for anxiety and stress.
Does it sometimes feel like your thoughts are all standing in line, shouting to be first while your body joins in with a pounding heart and sweaty palms?
That's where grounding techniques come in.
Grounding is all about pulling yourself back into the present moment when your thoughts or emotions are overly activated. It's like hitting the mental "refresh" button so you can feel calmer, safer, and more in control. To understand how it works, you must first understand what it means to be activated.
What's Happening in Your Body When You're Stressed or Anxious
When you feel stressed, anxious, angry, or overwhelmed, your brain thinks there's danger even if the danger is just an important email you need to write or an uncomfortable conversation you're wanting to avoid.
Your amygdala (your brain's alarm system) hits the panic button, and your body jumps into fight-flight-or-freeze mode:
Heart rate spikes
Breathing gets faster
Muscle tension in your shoulders, chest, and other body parts.
Your mind also goes into survival mode making it difficult to concentrate or focus.
When your brain senses a threat, it floods your body with stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol to prepare you for survival, which is very useful for us as a species. For example, we don't need to think twice if we are crossing a street and see a car coming. Our brain and body will automatically detect the danger to allow us to FREEZE. Likewise, if a scary animal confronts us, we are able to automatically get our blood pumping and muscles tense, ready to fight or flee.
Anxiety: Why It Feels So Overwhelming
While this innate ability to is useful for survival, it's not so useful for moments where we are engaging in non-dangerous or non-life-threatening activities. Unfortunately, for people who struggle with anxiety, their alarm system kicks in during everyday situations like giving a presentation in class, making an important phone call, or even just by thinking about something stressful that might or could happen. That unnecessary activation can feel exhausting because the body is staying on high alert for danger in situations that aren't actually so dangerous. It can also lead to a vicious cycle overtime, where the person begins to worry about the symptoms (e.g., muscle tension, heart rate increase) themselves, which triggers even more fight-or-flight activation.
This over-active response to everyday situations can lead to a daily story that is not ideal.
What Are Grounding Techniques?
Grounding techniques are simple mental or physical exercises that bring your attention back to the present moment.
It's a way of calming or relaxing your mind and body when your alarm system is being activated.
The best part is you can practice these exercises anywhere.
5 Easy Grounding Techniques To Try
Deep, Even Breathing
Because our alarm systems trigger our breathing to become too quick and shallow, or in some cases, causes us to hold our breath - evening out your breathing can be a good place to start. Therapists don't just say "take a deep breath" for fun. Rather, breathing is a natural way of activating your calming system and by focusing on your breath you can slow things down to help your heart rate settle.
Try Box Breathing:
Breathe in for 4, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4.
Try using your finger to create an actual invisible box on a surface like a desk. Tracing each side of the box as you breathe in, hold, exhale, and hold again.
Repeat a few times.
Why it works: It interrupts anxious thoughts by focusing your attention on your breath. The breathing itself activates your calming system.
Practice: Close your eyes and practice these breathing techniques right now. Pairing it with relaxing sounds or music like the one below can also be helpful. See how you feel before and after.
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The 5-4-3-2-1 Method
Try using your senses and your surroundings to find:
5 things you can see (e.g., different colors, items)
4 things you can feel (e.g., furniture, items on your desk, literally touch the ground)
3 things you can hear (e.g., humming of the A/C, background noise)
2 things you can smell (e.g., perfume being worn, coffee)
1 thing you can taste (e.g., a sip of water, a bite of snack)
Why it works: It allows you to interrupt anxious thoughts by giving your worried mind something to focus on in the present moment.
Temperature Change
Hold something cold, drink ice water, get some fresh air, or splash cold water on your face.
Why it works: If your alarm system increases your body temperature, then creating a sudden temperature shift by cooling your body signals to your brain that something new is happening.
Narrate Your Surroundings
This is one of my favorites! Pretend you're narrating a documentary about your current situation. "If you look closely, you can see a human being sitting in a chair, surrounded by books and office supplies." Add more details and get creative, like writing a story of your surroundings.
Why it works: Focusing on the narrative of the situation can disrupt racing thoughts and anchors you to the present moment, here-and-now, allowing you to focus on what is actually going on.
Move or Relax Your Body
Stretch your arms, wiggle your fingers/toes, tense and release your muscles, squeeze your arms or hug yourself tightly.
Why it works: When our alarm system is activated, it often disconnects us from our bodies because our attention is focused on misinterpreted danger. By engaging with your body, it allows you to reconnect and bring yourself back into it, to feel safe.
How Therapy Can Help
Practicing coping skills like grounding techniques can be a helpful step in the right direction to having a story with less moments of anxiety or overwhelm. However, if you feel like your brain is living on high alert, therapy can give you professional support to learn ways to feel more calm.
Here's what that might look like:
Understanding Your Triggers: A therapist can help you figure out what situations set off your fight-or-flight response, so it feels less random and scary.
Learning Tools to Calm Your Body: Not all tools work for everyone. A therapist can help you learn grounding, breathing techniques, and relaxation strategies that meet your unique needs for slowing you body's alarm system down.
Challenging Anxious Thoughts: Because how you perceive situations can influence your response to those situations, a therapist can help you spot unhelpful thought patterns and help you replace them with thoughts that actually support you and your goals.
Work Through Fears: Therapy gives you a supportive space to identify your fears, gain a different perspective, and build coping skills that break the cycle of anxiety.
Long-Term Growth: Instead of feeling like you have to "just get over it" or "just deal with it," therapy can help you build habits that reduce stress over time, not just in the moment. These habits will help you create the ideal story you want and deserve.
Take-Home Message
Grounding techniques and exercises aren't magical by any means. However, these techniques are our natural way of engaging our calming system which is helpful if you struggle with chronic stress, worry, panic, or anxiety.
Think of these techniques as the emergency brake for your brain. Pressing the breaks won't get rid of all of life's stressor, but it will help slow things down enough for you to suffer less and think more clearly.
When figuring it out on your own is too overwhelming or you would like to work towards long-term growth with a neutral and professional perspective, a therapist can help.
My belief (which you will see in my posts many times I'm sure), is that suffering is a part of the human experience. However, there are tools and supports out there to find ways to suffer no more than we already have to.
Take care of yourself,
Dr. Savoie
About Dr. Savoie
Dr. Seth "Skye" Savoie is a therapist and licensed clinical psychologist who provides mental health treatment to adults in both Michigan and Texas. He's passionate about helping people find emotional wellness.
To learn more about his approach or schedule a free 30-minute consultation, reach out or schedule online:
