Five Minute tips for better mental health- Grounding

23 May

I’m not much good at writing blogs, but great ideas come across my desk every day, so for the time being, I am going to send a quick blog out when I think it will be helpful.

Grounding

Here’s some extremely basic neuroscience. When the emotion centre in your brain (the amygdala) gets excited, its like a fire alarm. It goes off loudly and insistently whether the cause is a devastating house fire or burnt toast. And when it does, your frontal lobe loses function. Thinking clearly, problem solving, reasoning, logical thought, even speech, becomes difficult. That’s why we find it hard to think when we are anxious. Thats why we sometimes react in uncharacteristic or unhelpful ways in a crisis - eg, freeze, flee, fight.

Grounding brings back our clear thought enough to reason or solve the problem. The graphics below are simple and clear grounding activities. I suggest you print them and put them somewhere you can easily see them in an emotional crisis. It brings you back into the here and now, right in this moment, and back into your body.