Grounding

Your brain does a lot of very important things. It helps you move, breathe, and think. It helps you make your morning coffee, send emails, and know how to get yourself to and from work. It makes sure your organs are doing their jobs like digesting your food and pumping your blood throughout your body without you having think about it. Pretty incredible when you think about it, right?

Your brain’s number one job, however, is to keep you safe from danger. That means that as soon as it gets a signal (or what it THINKS is a signal) that something could hurt you, it goes into high gear preparing you to fight, run, freeze, or escape in some way. I call this “bodyguard mode.” This is really helpful most of the time. The problem is that sometimes our brains think we are in danger when we actually are not. We might simply have a THOUGHT that makes us feel scared, worried, angry, or just uncomfortable in some way, and our brain goes into bodyguard mode before we even realize it.

Our brains are really powerful, and it can be hard to stop these reactions once they have been set in motion. There is one set of techniques that tends to work when nothing else does—they are called GROUNDING techniques. Grounding techniques remind our brains of what is happening RIGHT NOW—that we are breathing, standing, sitting, smelling, tasting, hearing, etc. When our brains realize what is true in this moment, it switches out of bodyguard mode, and we can think clearly again.

The trick to being able to use these techniques when you start to feel your brain going into bodyguard mode is to practice them when you are feeling calm. That way, they become like a reflex—something you can just do without a lot of thinking or effort. This 10-minute yoga sequence is a great way to practice your grounding skills. Why don't you give it a go?