When you feel overwhelmed, taking in your surroundings is likely to be the last thing on your mind. But doing so might just help you to regain a sense of control.
When you experience episodes of turbulent mental health, it can feel as though there’s no end to the advice that people want to give you, not all of it helpful. I’ve worked through my fair share of brain-soothing techniques that I’ve found to be next to useless. But I always come back to this one.
I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder in my early 20s and was introduced to this practice by a colleague of my Dad’s, but I came across it again this week shared by the mindfulness and meditation app Calm.
How to do the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique
After a deep inhale and exhale, count five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can feel, two things you can smell and one thing you can taste. Calm goes into more detail in its guide to 5-4-3-2-1 grounding.
Why I like this method
It takes seconds
When I’m on the verge of a panic attack, my thoughts are going at what feels like a million miles an hour. When I’m in this position, I want to do something equally as fast to reverse it, so to speak. I can run through this mindfulness exercise quickly, usually in less than a minute, counting things on my fingers as I tick them off.
It’s really simple
It’s as easy as five, four, three, two, one. When I’m feeling anxious, I find it hard to think straight and find myself struggling to do anything complex: even basic breathing exercises are sometimes beyond me. Thankfully, this technique is easy to remember and, because most people have at least five fingers, easy to count off even if you can’t focus on anything.
It reconnects you with your body and surroundings
The exercise requires you to look around and engage your five senses. Panic attacks and anxiety can disconnect you from your surroundings and lock you in your head.
There are a host of physical symptoms that come with panic attacks, such as dry mouth, tunnel vision and the hike in adrenaline in your system causes your digestive system to slow down or freeze, which is why conditions like irritable bowel syndrome are so intimately connected with mental health conditions like anxiety.
Checking in with your body reminds you that you are, in fact, a human being, not a ball of nervous energy, and that you exist in a space with lots of other things that you can look at, touch and experience. If you forget these things in your panic, it can help to ground you and bring you back into your body.
Understanding your physical symptoms and being aware of them can help remove some of their bite too.
It’s distracting
I think the main reason this technique works so well for me is because it stops my anxiety in its tracks. It’s difficult to think about two things at once, and shifting my focus to my body and the sensations I’m experiencing draws my thoughts away from the spiraling anxious thoughts and gives me the mental space I need to interrupt them.
Challenging anxious thoughts and asking “is that really true?” can be incredibly helpful, but often you need to take a step back to be able to do that. The time it takes to count down from five and notice your senses is usually enough for me to be able to do so.
