How do you ground yourself when your emotions swirl you into an upregulated state?
I’ve just hung up the phone after making a call I’ve been putting off for quite some time. It’s to my ex-partner—someone who means a great deal to me and with whom I have unresolved issues. We ended our relationship without a sense of closure, and even after three years of being apart, I’m still feeling an incompletion. So I knew I needed to speak with him.
But my fear! And my trepidation! So nervous!!
It took me a solid hour to work myself up to making the call. And as I did so, I paid close attention to the many different sensations inside my body that were signalling my emotional state.
Cold feet.
Cold hands.
POUNDING heart!
Shallow breathing.
Sweaty underarms.
And a strange floaty sensation in my head, scattering my thoughts like dandelion seeds. Not dizziness, exactly, but just a sense of being spaced out.
When the call connected, it went to voicemail. Which was fine—I had anticipated that. So I left a short message, said I would call back in the near future, and hung up.
And the event was over.
Yet my body didn’t feel like it was over. I was left with this dramatic, spinning chaos inside me. All these strong emotions hurtling around inside this container, like fireflies bonking around inside a jar.
It reminded me of the importance of grounding myself.
There are a lot of things you can do to press the RESET button for your limbic system when emotions run high. All grounding means is bringing yourself back to a state of harmony with your essence—that part of you that’s always calm, observant, and able to handle any situation that arises. The true core of who you really are.
What strategies have you found useful for grounding yourself?
For me, I find that writing in my journal calms me down and helps me sort out what’s going on inside. Even if I only write about what happened and don’t “figure anything out”, I still benefit from the grounding act of journaling.
Another way to ground yourself is literally to go to the ground, lying on your back or on your side. I love doing this at the beach, but parks and back yards work just fine too. This kind of grounding is particularly powerful when you can get a direct connection with the Earth. After ten or fifteen minutes of my body being in contact with the ground, I find a lot of my negative, nervous, buzzy energy has been replaced with a sense of calm. It's like the Earth can just draw it out of me.
Doing some yoga or stretching is another way to “go to ground”.
You can ground yourself with some deep breaths. Loosen that band around your tummy—the invisible belt—and drop your breath down into that space behind your belly button. Do that for a minute or two and your body will reset itself. It’s wild.
Simply being in nature is another great way to ground yourself. If you can get outside for a walk or even just to sit on a rock or a log, do so.
You can also use gentle body movements to ground yourself when extreme emotions arise. Wiggling your fingers and toes, rolling your shoulders gently or rocking your hips can all refocus your attention into your body, which allows a startled brain to regroup.
You can also root yourself, with your feet in a strong and steady stance on the floor, knees bent, like how you learned back in your volleyball days. I love how yoga instructor Adriene Mishler talks about pressing down into “all four corners of the feet”. It improves my balance the moment she says it, because my attention goes straight to my feet to see how they can make even more contact with the ground.
Rooting and wiggling are two of Katie Hendricks’s Fear Melters™. You can learn more about them here.
What doesn’t work is distracting yourself when emotions pop up. This is also called “stuffing it down”—locking your feelings away so that you don’t have to deal with them.
Jumping on your phone to watch a video or scroll your social feeds is a classic distraction move. People do this all the time, because it feels like it works. But all this does is leave your brain steeping in the wash of neurochemicals brought on by the big emotions. If a dozen birds empty their bowels all over your windshield on their way by, you go wash it off, right? You don’t drive around with bird shit on your car for the rest of the week.
Over time, distracting and stuffing makes your mental health worse. Eventually, it makes your body sick.
Grounding lets you move yourself back to a state of essence and flow.
Just by writing this article, I’ve managed to warm my fingers and toes back up. My heart has slowed to its normal pace, I just made myself laugh with the car wash analogy, and my breathing is back to normal.
Grounding complete.🤘
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