Simple Grounding Mental Health Exercise

Stress / Anxiety / Turmoil

With the upcoming holidays in mind I wanted to share with you one of the mental exercises I give to my inmates to help with keeping their emotions in check.  It's a quick and dirty start to helping gain control over your feelings of being overwhelmed and anxious.  

I've had very good feedback with it from those that have given it a fair try.  The best part is that this mental exercise can be used anywhere, at any time, for as many times as you need and the steps are easy to remember!

Used properly this exercise can help you to focus on the now and find some peace from everyday stressors.

Self care and reflection is an important daily ritual you should be doing... well, on the daily!!

To start out, do the exercise exactly as noted below:

Find and Name (in your head or out loud, however you feel the most comfortable) the following things whenever you are feeling overwhelmed, anxious or out of control:

➧5 things you see

➧4 things you feel

➧3 things you hear

➧2 things you smell

➧1 thing you taste

Once you've done this mental exercise a few times and you feel like you've gotten a handle on it, start adding in some additional pieces to increase your focus and hone in on your inner peace like it's exampled below:

➧5 things you see AND their colors/shape

➧4 things you feel AND their texture

➧3 things you hear AND what direction the noise is coming from

➧2 things you smell AND the object it is being produced by

➧1 thing you taste AND what made it taste that way

And so on and so forth.  If you have the time you can keep expanding on the descriptions as you go through each step.

I'd love to hear how your experience was with this exercise!! Drop me a comment and let me know!

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