Introduction to Grounding Activities

What is Grounding?

• Being grounded means:
  • Being in your body
  • Feeling your emotions
  • Being aware of your present moment experience
  • Feeling responsible for your safety and well-being

Importance of Grounding

• Therapeutic approach for:
  • Managing anxiety
  • Managing flashbacks
  • Managing PTSD symptoms
  • Improving mental health
• Strengthens parasympathetic response:
  • Body's natural ability to return to calm
  • Counteracts fight, flight, or freeze response

Understanding Anxiety and Depression

• PTSD and anxiety disorders are disordered because:
  • Feeling in danger when actually safe
  • Fight, flight, freeze response triggered unnecessarily
• Anxiety: Worries about the future
• Depression: Discouragement about the past
• Solution: Increase present moment awareness
  • Create safe and secure present environment
  • Grounding helps activate a safe feeling in the brain

Physiological Benefits of Grounding

• Helps work through emotions and memories healthily
• Natural ability to resolve trauma when calm
• Fight, flight, freeze response hinders emotional processing
• Practice grounding to trigger calming response

Bottom-Up Approach

• Body to brain, instead of brain to itself
• Most effective because we can't think ourselves calm
  • Brain's animalistic response to perceived threats
• Fight, flight, freeze response increases heart rate and breathing
• Access calm through body, not thoughts
  • Use of the five senses

Role of Breathing in Grounding

• Breathing is both automatic and controllable
• Helps trigger limbic system change for physiological calm
• Connect body to self-control and safe context of present moment

Tracking Progress with Grounding

• Check-in before and after exercises
  • Scale anxiety from 0 to 10 before and after
  • Increased present moment awareness is a victory
• Notice small victories leading to large gains

Questions to Assess Grounding Effects

• What do you notice in your body?
• What do you notice with your breath?
• What's happening with your feelings?
• What's happening with your heart?
• What's happening with your thoughts?

Practicing Grounding Activities

• Start in a quiet, peaceful, and calm environment
• Practice daily for a few weeks
  • Makes grounding habitual and instinctual
• Gradually use skills in more difficult situations
• Train to calm body down with thought or word

Conclusion

• Upcoming grounding videos
• Practice regularly
• Like, comment, and subscribe
• Take care!